Yellowstone, Leave Bella Hadid Out of This
Spoilers below.
When I woke this morning with a vague but irrepressible knot of apprehension in my gut, I should have predicted the source would be Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan. This implacable dread has become a pattern as of late: With each ensuing Sunday night episode, Yellowstone—formerly one of my favorite series—has become increasingly insistent on elevating Sheridan to the status of a bizarre and vengeful Cowboy God, the sort of male-power fantasy so reductive in its approach to actual cowboys that it imitates sacrilege more than worship. But when supermodel Bella Hadid appeared onscreen midway through season 5, episode 13, “Give the World Away,” I knew Sheridan had officially lost the plot.
Now, to be clear, I don’t intend to insult Hadid. She’s a fine actress and a bona fide cowgirl, especially now that she’s moved to Texas to live alongside her cowboy boyfriend Adan Banuelos. Both Hadid and Banuelos have minor speaking roles in the latest episode of Yellowstone, but only Hadid has the particular pleasure of playing Sadie, girlfriend of Travis Wheatley, portrayed by Sheridan himself. To spell that out clearly: Sheridan, creator of Yellowstone, cast one of the most famous supermodels of the modern era to guest-star as his girlfriend while her real-life boyfriend sat in the same room and watched. I’m sure both Hadid and Banuelos signed on happily and willingly! I’m sure they were paid well! Nevertheless, I’d prefer Hadid be kept far, far away from whatever well of self-indulgence Sheridan seems eager to tumble down.
Hadid’s Sadie first appears onscreen when Kelly Reilly’s Beth Dutton arrives at Travis’s front door. Sadie answers, curious if Beth is “the masseuse” they’ve been waiting on. (Ugh.) Next, she leads Beth to a smoke-filled room where Travis is neglecting work to play strip poker with a table of half-naked women. (Please, make it stop.) Finally, the group heads to Travis’s arena, where he shows off his horse-training skills as Beth and Sadie watch from the sidelines. “He is probably the most arrogant man that I have ever met in my entire life,” Beth says. “Condescending. Misogynistic. At least 25 years older than you. Can you please explain the appeal?” To which Sadie replies, “You ever seen him ride before?” And after enough slow-motion shots of Sheridan doing just that, Beth acquiesces: “Okay, I get it.”
I find this particular bit of meta-commentary fascinating. Sheridan has made the choice to cast himself as a “condescending” and “misogynistic” character and then to call out these attributes in his own script. That could be considered an intelligent meta-criticism, or at least a flicker of self-awareness, if it weren’t for the line he writes immediately after. “You ever seen him ride before?” implies that Sadie couldn’t care less about the character’s condescension or his misogyny, and, in fact, no one should—because look at this specimen of raw male power! Cowboys like Travis are the exception to the rule of weak, coddled American men, and should be treated as such.
The problem is, every toxically masculine man in America thinks he’s the same sort of exception. Sheridan certainly seems to think that of himself. Case in point: The Yellowstone creator had the gall to write a “Give the World Away” scene in which Beth—written as the most self-determined female character on Yellowstone—tells Travis not once but thrice that she “needs” him. He then makes her play a game of strip poker to win his help with an auction at the Dutton Ranch. When she loses and begins to undress, he tells her he’s “just fucking with [her].” Travis’s arrogance is repeatedly read as a joke, but when the creator of the so-called Taylor Sheridan Universe is the one playing him, it’s hard not to consider that “joke” too on-the-nose to be believed.
Later in the episode, Beth asks her husband, Rip (Cole Hauser), how he could possibly bear to be friends with Travis, that “smug prick.” Rip launches into an unnecessarily long monologue about how he and Travis once got into a bar fight over a girl, and an injured Travis fought off a group of railroad workers to retrieve Rip’s cowboy hat for him. “I mean, shit, Beth, how many friends you got like that?” Rip asks his wife. “Just you,” she replies with a smile. I’ll spare you the many, many paragraphs I could write about that line of dialogue, particularly what it implies about Sheridan’s thoughts on female friendships and heterosexual marriage. Just know I could write them.
Even before Hadid’s cameo and Beth’s depressing character arc, Sheridan seemed hell-bent on turning a once-powerful story about the decline of the American West into a vehicle for selling branded merchandise, showing off his own abs, and inflicting maximum narrative revenge against Kevin Costner’s John Dutton III, after the actor unceremoniously exited the show earlier this season. Beth, once a favorite character of mine, seems all but lost amidst these machinations. There’s still time for Hadid’s Sadie to escape that fate, but with Yellowstone’s clock ticking down, she’d best get out while she can.