Of Pump Jacks & The Male Gaze

Lady Marilyn has developed a keen fascination with oil derrick pump jacks. This all started with our recent trip to Oklahoma, where in some areas they dot the prairies. I get it. There is something weirdly compelling about the relentless dip and rise of these strange mechanical dinosaur-creatures as they lift out the fuel that makes modern society move.

Which brings us to Landman. We jumped in over the weekend and we dig it. A lot.

There are many elements that tend to predispose us to the tale — Billy Bob Thornton, for one, along with a soundtrack that cloverleafs the x-ring of our musical enthusiasms. (A Turnpike Troubadours song in each of the first two episodes, for instance).

But perhaps the best indicator is provided by my favorite review of a Taylor Sheridan piece ever. Take it away, Kelly Lawler:

It checks all the boxes on the Sheridan hitmaker list: Beloved male baby boomer movie star; cowboy hats; blind worship of capitalism and the wealthy; and just enough explosions and bloodshed to make it seem like it’s an action show instead of a soap opera.

The series would be bad enough if it was just dull and insipid, which it is, but it comes with a intensely off-putting bit of male gaze that makes the series read as soft-core porn for old men who want to leer at teenage girls without any repercussions. It verges on outright disgusting, set against a generic setting and plot beats copied from old Yellowstone scripts.

Lawler, writing for USA Today, hates this show. My favorite kinds of reviews are the bad ones that make you know you’re gonna like the thing. Kinda like Pauline Kael reviewing John Milus’ work.

To take Lawler semi-seriously for a moment… she really doesn’t get it. At all. Saying that Sheridan indulges in blind worship of capitalism and the wealthy is well off the mark. Like Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, Sheridan recognizes that maintaining an imperial business demands actions that put man or woman on a steep and slippery moral slope. Sometimes that includes outright crimes; other times, actions that would be crimes if anybody but a connected Big Shot attempted them. When Thornton’s Tommy Norris tells a cartel boss that their businesses are the same thing, you can’t help but recognize a truth: dope or oil, it’s a business that supplies a product that people have become dependent on. And you’d best not interfere with the supply. 

That’s not exactly worship; in fact, you could read it as a much more subtle critique of capitalism than the ham-fisted Evil Capitalist trope that the more “progressive” sorts prefer. (Actually, I wonder if Lawler has actually watched Yellowstone, where the Duttons are constantly fending off the encroachment of developers and venture capitalists in defense of a way of life they themselves recognize as outmoded).

On the other hand, Sheridan does seem to have a strong interest in forcing those who construct their identities around opposition to the infrastructure of the modern world — fossil fuels, or agriculture, or national security state black ops — to recognize that theirs is a luxury position made possible by men and women with steelier spines than theirs. The people who actually make things work. And sometimes making things work ain’t nice and it ain’t pretty.

One of the key things to understand about the Sheridan universe is that he gets us rooting for worn, damaged and traumatized people, torn and frayed by the struggles of life and their own bad choices; people who do some really nasty things, in defense of something of value, against people who are worse because they have no soul. There’s something noble at their core that we respond to.

And that puts the Sheridan hero squarely in the territory of the rough folk — the dreamers and losers — who make up the Frontier Partisans story.

Anyways… on to that dreaded “male gaze.”

We’ll give Lawler’s pearl-clutching over the “male gaze” a little more than the eye-roll it properly elicits. She must not spend much time on Instagram, where about a billion young women post “booty shots” and “thirst traps” in an endless quest for a fleeting second of attention. That’s only partly about pandering to the male gaze (which, once attained, is derided as “creepy,” in a signature Catch-22 of the post-modern world). It’s also about one-upping the female competition. That’s the world Tommy’s daughter Ainsley was born into — and it creates just one more problem that he has to navigate in day-after-day made of nothing but problems. It’s supposed to be uncomfortable — apparently for everybody but Ainsley.

There are some funny moments built around all this, but the likes of Lawler couldn’t possibly allow for that…

Let me just note that several of my very favorite women are lovin’ Landman. Victims of false consciousness, perhaps… Or maybe they just ain’t afraid to get a little of that black oil under their fingernails.

Rant over. If you like Sheridan’s thing, you’ll dig this.

*

If you haven’t read Daniel Yergin’s The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, you simply must. Pulitzer Prize winner. Great book. It was adapted into a multi-part PBS doco:

As Corb Lund sings: When the oil stops, everything stops.

When I was in my 20s, I took a trip down I-5 to San Diego to roadie for a band who had a corporate gig down there. This was during the run-up to the First Gulf War, and one of the band-members trotted out the “no blood for oil” bumpersticker that was a thing at the time. I was young and not particularly measured in my discourse back then. I told him that was pretty rich coming from a guy rolling down the freeway in a gas-pig of a truck to play the oldies at a hotel in San Diego for corporate dudes that flew in from all over the country.

He did not take this well, and a long argument ensued, in which I pointed out that saying “no blood for oil” is like saying “no blood for food.”  Fighting over oil actually makes more sense than a lot of the ideological window-dressing we put on what always boils down to a struggle for land and resources.

Now we’ve got rare earth minerals to fight over, so there’s that.

 

*

Turnpike Troubadours, from Ep. 2:

Headlong for the wall now, honey
Still coming up like a rose
Dead still in the garden, waiting for the reveille
The dawn is yet to dry the dew from off my Sunday clothes
That mean old sun better rise up soon if it’s ever gonna set on me

*