I used August, as is the law, to catch up on series I didn’t get to watch during class, falling in 1883, the first prequel (oh what a horror of words, forgive me) of Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone . Based on the parent series, Sheridan himself authored two backstories that expand and explain the cruel and seminal world of the Dutton family. 1883 tells how the early Dutton came to Montana. There are ten episodes, which should be kept short, but I have two left, and like little kids, I keep asking Uncle Taylor how long it will be before we get to the ranch.
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There are many reasons why this caravan journey is taking so long, but the main reason is that I could not shed my disbelief. If both Sergio Leone and the masters of the so-called Twilight Western taught us anything, it’s that the Wild West was, above all, dirty. In contrast to John Wayne’s scruffy jeans and shiny spurs, a historical realism had filled the stories with dirt, mud, rotten teeth, untrimmed beards, and tons of dust. But 1883 puts the western back in the pretty corner of its early years: it stars a blonde woman who could win the Pantene hair contest and has an affair with a young cowboy whose teeth were just being fixed at Manhattan’s top dental clinic. Every time he smiles, he reveals his presence to the Indians in the desert.
Sheridan has reinvigorated the western as a hugely popular genre, riding the wave of nationalist nostalgia sweeping the world. He’s stripped away all the existentialist, intellectual, dense and symbolic residue that had accumulated since the Peckinpah films and sells it in a kitsch and soap opera version, like one of those seedless watermelons of today. An ideal outing for kitschy and conscientious viewers.
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