The TV Western is enjoying something of a renaissance,
with series such as 'Yellowstone,' 'Godless' and 'Westworld' making hay in
big-sky country.
The Washington Post
By: Scott Tobias
[Evan Rachel Wood in the Season 2 finale of
"Westworld."]
In the new Paramount Network series “Yellowstone,” the
Dutton family owns the largest contiguous ranch in the United States, a swath
of Montana wild that’s comparable in size to Rhode Island.
They monitor their territory on horseback and in
helicopters. They wear cowboy hats and business suits. They seek justice
through court orders and by the pistols they keep holstered around their
waists. In the pilot episode, they carve up a mountainside with sticks of
dynamite to stop a developer from accessing a river coursing through their
property. As John Dutton, the patriarch of the family, Kevin Costner embodies
an American contradiction: You can take the frontiersman out of the Old West,
but you can’t take the Old West out of the frontiersman.
Created by Taylor Sheridan, “Yellowstone” is the latest
play on the Western from a screenwriter and director who specializes in
21st-century twists on the genre. His scripts for “Sicario,” “Hell or High
Water” and “Wind River,” the latter of which he also directed, are all about
lawmen and outlaws squaring off in an unsettled expanse, whether they’re
cartels infiltrating the Mexican border, bank robbers peeling through West
Texas or government agents seeking a killer on an Indian reservation. A Texas
native who resides in Wyoming after a 15-year stay in Los Angeles, Sheridan is
uniquely attuned to how Western values seep into present, especially in the
prairies he’s called home.
[Kevin Costner plays the patriarch of a Montana ranch
family in “Yellowstone.”]
While the Western, traditional or otherwise, has been
left for dead by Hollywood movie studios, neo-Westerns such as “Yellowstone”
are finding a home on television, which can better accommodate a niche genre
than risk-averse blockbusters. No matter whether these shows are set in the
past, such as the Netflix limited series “Godless,” or the future, such as the
HBO mind-bender “Westworld,” Western themes of identity, enterprise, power and
violence are made newly relevant, shot through with the gun-toting brio that
once enthralled audiences in the genre’s heyday.
“The overarching conflicts that Westerns have explored
since the ’30s still exist today in those regions,” Sheridan said. “You still
have massive land developers doing everything they can to buy out ranches and
develop them. You still have the consequences of settlement in that region to
Native Americans. You have issues with government and oversight, and an influx
of people into an area that continually change it. You have a small population
that’s trying very hard to resist change. All of those themes exist today, and
they’re worthy of exploration.”
The divisions within the Dutton family might recall the
prime-time soap opera of “Dallas,” but Sheridan wants “Yellowstone” – whose
June 20 premiere earned a stellar 4.8 million viewers, counting DVR, in its
first three days – to reflect a culture and a mind-set that city dwellers have
trouble fathoming. He insists the show is apolitical, but it’s insightful about
life outside the reach of government, where neighbors rely on each other to
solve problems – and, occasionally, settle explosive disputes. For the Duttons,
that means defending their territory and administering justice, because no one
else is around to do it.
“There was a writer named Gretel Ehrlich who said that
once you own land, you stop walking it and you start patrolling it,” Sheridan
said. “There’s a real truth to that. You can see how it can change some people
for the better and some for the worst. The question is, ‘Do I look at myself as
the steward of (the land) or am I the king of it?’ ”
Although Westerns are known to operate with the moral
simplicity of Black Hats and White Hats, the current wave of TV neo-Westerns
works in shades of gray. Both Sheridan and “Godless” writer Scott Frank cite
Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” as a touchstone for their shows, which are short
on unambiguous heroes.
Merritt Wever, center, in the Netflix series “Godless.”
“Sometimes a person has to go back to the worst of
themselves in order to do a good thing,” Frank said. and ‘Unforgiven’ is a
classic example of that. Even the best of us are conflicted and tormented, and
the Western is a natural vehicle for that.”
“Godless” was originally conceived as a feature film in
2004, but even a genre wizard of Frank’s caliber, with scripts such as “Get
Shorty,” “Out of Sight” and “Minority Report” to his credit, couldn’t get it
financed. Frank was told the Western “didn’t travel,” which means it doesn’t
play well in the overseas market, and it wasn’t until his producer, Steven
Soderbergh, started experimenting in television, with the HBO biopic “Beyond
the Candelabra” and the Cinemax series “The Knick,” that he was encouraged to
expand the concept into a 71/2-hour series for Netflix.
With elements plucked from standards such as “Rio Bravo”
and “Once Upon a Time in the West,” “Godless” embraces the tropes of both a
rollicking ’50s Western and the darkly philosophical anti-Westerns of the late
’60s and early ’70s, but with the feminist twist of an 1880s mining town run
entirely by women widowed by a silver-mine collapse. After meeting so much
resistance to his original movie script, Frank was surprised by how quickly the
miniseries got the green light.
“What’s happening with Netflix and the other streaming
services,” Frank said, “is that they’re swallowing up a lot of genres that have
been forgotten by movies – not just the Western, but any genre for adults. The
movies are largely real estate now for superheroes or really broad comedies and
action extravaganzas.”
Jonathan Nolan, who co-created “Westworld” with his wife,
Lisa Joy, puts it more bluntly. “The Western is a moribund genre,” he said.
“It’s one of those things like we’re seeing now with comic book movies: They’ve
come and they will go at some point, in terms of (their) all-conquering
popularity. In the ’40s and ’50s, in a movie theater or (on) TV, you were as
often as not going to find a Western.”
In reimagining Michael Crichton’s 1973 sci-fi
shoot-’em-up about an Old West theme park populated by malfunctioning robot
“hosts” – a precursor of sorts to Crichton’s “Jurassic Park” – Nolan and Joy
engage in the dark fantasy of wealthy guests in a lawless playground of sex and
violence. But their focus on the hosts and their uncannily humanlike qualities
bring the show to a point in Season 2 where they’re trying to find their own
stake in an unsettled and perilous world, like synthetic pioneers.
For Nolan, the show has been a natural opportunity to
examine the Western from the inside out. Westerns “are filled with
transgression and sin and betrayal, because that’s what we like to watch. It’s
a common thread of all of our stories. And the question is why. Why is there so
much commonality in the stories that we tell? What do they say about us? What
do they say about the human condition, that we like these stories so much?”
Although some recent Western-themed films – such as “Hell
or High Water” and this year’s “The Rider,” about a rodeo cowboy coping with a
career-threatening injury – have opened to critical acclaim, television has the
sprawl to give these questions some serious consideration, and the flexibility
to revive a genre that hasn’t been commercially viable at the multiplexes for
years. And its timelessness is borne out by shows that take place in the 1880s,
the present day and some point in the distant future where android cowboys are
indistinguishable from true grit.
The Western is dead. Long live the Western.
No comments:
Post a Comment