“There Is No Heaven to Go to, Because We’re in It Already. We’re in Hell, Too. They Coexist”: Place-Making and the Television Western Series 1883 and Yellowstone

Chris Broodryk; Lelia Bester

doi:10.25159/1753-5387/16150

Authors

Chris Broodryk University of Pretoria https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0760-8663
Lelia Bester University of Pretoria https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9975-669X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/1753-5387/16150

Keywords:

1883, place, space, Yellowstone, Western, becoming

Abstract

This article explores the idea and articulation of place in Taylor Sheridan’s western series 1883 and Yellowstone. Through narrative and genre analysis, we critically compare these two series to demonstrate that genre semantics combine in a particular series-specific syntax to articulate place differently. Our thinking on place and adjacent concepts of trails and knots, inhabiting and occupation, as well as the differentiation between place as object and place as event, is primarily informed by the scholarship of Tim Ingold. We argue that these series’ specific and gendered articulations of place are meaningfully linked to each series’ protagonist, Elsa Dutton and John Dutton respectively. Finally, we suggest that the two series generate an additional western-genre binary that we base on Ingold’s work: occupation (particular to Yellowstone) vs. inhabiting (specifically in 1883). The Yellowstone character Beth Dutton notably reifies this binary. Yellowstone, here framed as post-heydey western, postwestern and post-Western, articulates place as nostalgic and static compared to 1883’s more expansionist and dynamic iteration of place.

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

Author Biographies

Chris Broodryk, University of Pretoria

Chris Broodyk is associate professor in the School of the Arts, University of Pretoria, where he coordinates postgraduate film praxis.

Lelia Bester, University of Pretoria

Lelia Bester is lecturer and Drama programme coordinator of Drama, School of the Arts, University of Pretoria. She is a Certified Lessac Kinesensics Body and Voice Trainer.

References

Altman, Rick. 2012. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” In Film Genre Reader IV, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 27–41. Austin: University of Texas Press. https://doi.org/10.7560/742055-006.

Augé, Marc. 1997. Non-Places: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. New York: Verso.

Berg, Chuck. 2000. “Fade-out in the West: The Western’s Last Stand?” In Film Genre: New Critical Essays, edited by Wheeler W. Dixon, 211–225. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Black, L. 2022. “On ‘Yellowstone,’ and the White Desire to Control the Narrative.” High Country News, April 22, 2022. https://www.hcn.org/issues/54.5/indigenous-affairs-art-on-yellowstone-and-the-white-desire-to-control-the-narrative.

Campbell, Neill. 2013. Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1ddr7x0.

Carter, Matthew. 2014. Myth of the Western: New Perspectives on Hollywood’s Frontier Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748685592.

Casey, Edward S. 1996. “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena.” In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, 13–52. Santa Fe: University of Washington Press.

Chirica, Irina. 2019. “The Concept of Place in the American West.” Lingaculture 1 (1): 46–59. https://doi.org/10.47743/lincu-2019-1-0134.

Cloutier, Jean-Christophe. 2012. “A Country for Old Men: Unforgiven, The Shootist, and the Post-Heyday Western.” Cinema Journal 51 (4): 110–129. https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2012.0074.

Cresswell, Tim. 2008. “Place: Encountering Geography as Philosophy.” Geography 93 (3): 132–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/00167487.2008.12094234.

Dirks, Tim. n.d. “Western Films.” Filmsite. https://www.filmsite.org/westernfilms.html#google_vignette.

González, Jesús Ángel. 2015. “New Frontiers for Post-Western Cinema: Frozen River, Sin Nombre, Winter’s Bone.” Western American Literature 50 (1): 51–76. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24779890. https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2015.0025.

Hopkins, Nick, and John Dixon. 2006. “Space, Place and Identity: Issues for Political Psychology.” Political Psychology 27 (2): 173–185. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2006.00001.x.

Ingold, Tim. 2000. “Evolving Skills.” In Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology, edited by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, 273–297. London: Random House.

Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203961155.

Ingold, Tim. 2008. “Bindings against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life in an Open World.” Environment and Planning: Economy and Space 40 (8): 1796–1810. https://doi.org/10.1068/a40156.

Ingold, Tim. 2011. “Against Space: Place, Movement, Knowledge.” In Boundless Worlds: An Anthropological Approach to Movement, edited by Peter W. Kirby, 29–44. New York: Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781782382157-003.

Ingold, Tim. 2019. “The North Is Everywhere.” In Knowing from the Indigenous North: Sámi Approaches to History, Politics and Belonging, edited by Thomas H. Eriksen, Sanna Valkonen and Jarno Valkonen, 108–120. Oxon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315179834-8.

Kuusela, Hanna. 2024. “Inheriting a Dynasty: Family Succession Dramas and the Moral Economy of Downton Abbey.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 27 (4): 701–719. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494231187475.

Lusted, David. 2003. The Western. Harlow: Pearson/Longman.

Malpas, Jeff. 2015. “A Western Sense of Place: The Case of George Stevens’s Shane.” GeoHumanities 1 (1): 36–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2015.1066659.

Mercuri, Monica. 2023. “‘Yellowstone’ Draws Impressive CBS Debut Numbers amid Show’s Uncertain Future.” Forbes, September 18, 2023. https://www.forbes.com/sites/monicamercuri/2023/09/18/yellowstone-draws-impressive-cbs-debut-numbers-amid-shows-uncertain-future/?sh=4dc307991313.

Pye, Douglas. 2012. “The Western (Genre and Movies).” In Film Genre Reader IV, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 239–254. Austin: University of Texas Press. https://doi.org/10.7560/742055-020.

Rabitsch, Stefan. 2022. “‘When You Look at a Calf, What Do You See?’ Land(ed) Business, Necrotic Entrepreneurialism, and Competing Capitalisms in the Contemporary West of Yellowstone.” Journal of the Austrian Association of American Studies 3 (2): 235–259. https://doi.org/10.47060/jaaas.v3i2.147.

Starr, Harvey. 2013. “On Geopolitics: Spaces and Places.” International Studies Quarterly 57 (3): 433–439. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24017914. https://doi.org/10.1111/isqu.12090.

Stiglegger, Marcus. 2022. “The Inner Frontier: Images of the USA in Recent Western Cinema (2000–2020).” GeoJournal 87 (Suppl 1): 141–150. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-022-10659-8.

Thornham, Sue. 2019. Spaces of Women’s Cinema: Space, Place and Genre in Contemporary Women’s Filmmaking. London: Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781911239185.

Withers, Charles W. J. 2009. “Place and the ‘Spatial Turn’ in Geography and in History.” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (4): 637–658. https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.0.0054.