When movie stars inevitably age, they typically retire to hide their wrinkles and liver spots in private or they are reduced to bit parts as character actors. Kevin Costner was incredibly lucky that, just as he was entering his Twilight Years, along came Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone giving him the starring role in what rapidly became the most popular show on television.

But that wasn’t good enough for Costner. Did he take offense at playing the role of a rugged individualist, right-wing millionaire land baron? Or was he simply jealous of Taylor Sheridan’s entertainment empire building and acclaim?

Reportedly, he wanted less time involvement in Yellowstone to work on his own (rivalrous Western) epic passion project, “Horizon: An American Saga” (2024).

“Horizon” Part 1 showed up a few months ago and proved to be a bloated, expensive, and ineffably pretentious yawner, simultaneously viewing the arrival of white pioneers to settle (and do what with?) the scenic, but waterless and barren, Sonoran desert of Arizona and its impact on the already resident Apaches.

Those settlers are not mining, and God knows what they could possibly grow there, and they are not seen building Phoenix or Tucson, so the viewer tends to imagine these deluded people will soon give up and give it back to the red man anyway, the 19th century market for Saguaro cactus and cholla being somewhat limited.

So Costner deliberately threw away a terrific role, if not “the role of a lifetime,” certainly an absolutely marvelous vehicle for “an aged man.. a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.”

If I were Taylor Sheridan, I believe I’d have had John Dutton fall into an outhouse and drown or possibly meet an unhappy end via the hoofs of a cow he’d developed a crush on.

The untimely departure of Costner undoubtedly threw a major monkey wrench into Yellowstone’s intended Season 5 plotting, but Taylor Sheridan last night proved capable of cowboying up and going on sans Costner.

Yellowstone is no longer the show it was, and it will not go on exactly as previously planned, but it has still got a terrific cast and a number of great characters. I’d bet that it will continue to be a hit. And I’ll also bet that Horizon, Part 2 will be just as pointless, pretentious, as boring as Part 1.

Titus Techera‘s must-read review explains why the television series, now in its third season, makes some serious statements about class warfare and the changing character of the American elite.

Like Hemingway’s marlin, which achieves its greatest leap in its death throes and expires at the top of the arc, [John] Dutton is most impressive in agony. He seems superhuman compared to the new American elites. His handling of urgent problems makes him resemble the president—he is an executive. Meanwhile, egalitarianism has not created equality in America, but only a new elite, impatient, ignorant of the future, blind to necessity—thus, astonishingly able to manipulate the new systems of power, since these elites feel no concern for consequences. The real world, where people are tied to a place, to other people, to their past, and the good they pursue, is replaced by access to the institutions and finances that make the world work, which manipulate people’s lives indirectly, in unaccountable and unpredictable ways. Everyone’s tied into legal demands and their lives are increasingly regulated, but only people who know how to use the law to get what they want get ahead in this new situation. The first post-American elite is coming for the last cowboys. …

The opposite of a man in America is a bourgeois bohemian, to recall David Brooks’s signal contribution to our sociology in Bobos in Paradise (2000). Brooks is a sophist for this class, so he will not tell the ugly truth—but Tom Wolfe did in A Man in Full (1998), and even scooped Brooks. It’s not an accident that he saw clearly: Wolfe was the poet of American Stoicism and understood the threats to manliness.

The people who define elite taste in America are themselves opposed to violence, but not because they are Christian or even moral. It’s because their own rule doesn’t require that they ever take any personal risks—poorer people do that, who live in other parts of town or are completely removed from sight by gentrification. Nowadays, the rich take no responsibility for the poorer or those suffering violence, or even ever shake their hands, which is why our cities are such madhouses. There is no noblesse oblige.

Sheridan wants to show the violence in America to rebuke this bloodless view of things. … we see, through the real estate developer drama, how the new American elite is moving in to remove the last ranchers. This establishes the difference between real men and those who want to rule merely through institutions and finance, as though history had ended and we’re just dividing up luxuries.

RTWT