{"id":9665,"date":"2018-07-03T21:27:02","date_gmt":"2018-07-04T01:27:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=9665"},"modified":"2019-01-12T14:45:52","modified_gmt":"2019-01-12T19:45:52","slug":"taylor-sheridan-is-the-worst-a-womans-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/taylor-sheridan-is-the-worst-a-womans-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Sheridan Is the Worst: A Woman’s Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you search the depths of Film Twitter, you\u2019ll discover something about me: I hate everything written by Taylor Sheridan. His films \u2014 Hell or High Water<\/i>, Wind River<\/i>, Sicario<\/i>, and Sicario: Day of the Soldado<\/i> \u2014 hearken back to classic cinema, particularly the Western, so it\u2019s disappointing but not surprising that, like most Westerns of the studio era, women are little more than sex objects or nagging shrews meant to cement the goals of the male lead. <\/span><\/p>\n

Hell or High Water<\/i> is Sheridan\u2019s aesthetic at its most manageable and mainstream. It\u2019s also the film that completely removes a feminine presence by focusing on male leads specifically. The story of two brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) engaging in bank heists to save their family homestead couldn\u2019t be more of a modern-day Western if John Wayne strode into frame. Toby and Tanner Howards are salt-of-the-earth people who could have struck it rich with oil money if the crooked bank hadn\u2019t fleeced them. (Sheridan\u2019s distaste of bureaucracy is another staple of his work.) The audience empathizes with Tanner and Toby. The dusty small towns are bought out by corporate bigwigs. The flashy casinos filled with prostitutes contrast with the grubby home where Toby\u2019s son and ex-wife live. <\/span><\/p>\n

When two waitress characters show up, they\u2019re Sheridan\u2019s ideal women: flamboyant, colorful, and insignificant. Jenny Ann (Katy Mixon) refuses to turn over the money she received from Toby because it\u2019s going to her children. Then she\u2019s never seen again \u2014 she exists only to bolster the goodness of Toby\u2019s mission. The other waitress (Margaret Bowman), who asks \u201cWhat don\u2019t you want?\u201d at the steakhouse, provides comic relief by commenting on feminine stereotypes. Sheridan can only be positive by removing ladies from his world entirely. <\/span><\/p>\n

In three of his four screenwriting efforts women are presented as inept and unable to handle jobs in a man\u2019s world. Elizabeth Olsen\u2019s Jane Banner in Wind River<\/i> is a prime example. An FBI agent pulled from Las Vegas on a technicality and dropped into the cold landscape of Wyoming to solve a murder, Jane is undermined at every turn while reminding the audience she\u2019s not good enough to be there in the first place. She shuts down mansplaining from a coroner at the beginning of the film, but this seems like Sheridan asking for a cookie because he understands the term. This confidence is undermined the rest of the movie, which Sheridan directed as well as wrote. Jane is objectified \u2014 the audiences gets a shot of her thong and backside \u2014 while reminding everyone how pointless she is: She can\u2019t dress for inclement weather, doesn\u2019t know anything about the town she\u2019s in, and is only able to shoot someone by accident due to her face being maced. When the film hits its climax Jane is almost immediately shot and nearly dies due to her inability to aim and fire. She is saved by (and thus owes her life to) the true hero of the movie, Jeremy Renner\u2019s Lambert. <\/span><\/p>\n

The same critique applies to Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), the female lead of Sheridan\u2019s screenwriting debut, Sicario<\/i>. Kate stumbles onto a massive drug den by accident and is given an opportunity to work on an off-the-books mission with federal operative Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and mercenary Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro). Kate spends lengthy stretches of the narrative literally silent, as if the script doesn\u2019t have words worth putting in her mouth. When she gets an opportunity to speak it\u2019s to ask questions that are routinely cast aside as unnecessary or pointless by her male colleagues \u2014 the price of having a woman on staff. When she refuses to listen to Matt, she is punished and almost killed by a man she picks up in a bar. Matt\u2019s reaction is to remind Kate that he told her to obey his orders. <\/span><\/p>\n

The threat of violence, usually associated with sex, acts as a warning to Sheridan\u2019s women, reminding them to stay in their spheres. Kate\u2019s attack in Sicario<\/i> isn\u2019t an explicit rape, but the violence following a sexual encounter so closely, combined with the positioning and framing of the couple, makes the comparison clear. Women, listen to men and don\u2019t engage in casual sex,<\/i> the film says. Kate\u2019s inability to be useful in her job means she\u2019s forced to be grateful to Alejandro for following her, breaking into her house, and saving her. Kate actually feels bad for deciding to have sex.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rape is also a central theme in Wind River,<\/i> to the point that an ending paragraph cites it as the reason for the movie\u2019s existence. Kate is a conduit to introduce Alejandro in Sicario<\/i>, turning the feature (and its subsequent sequel) into a movie about Alejandro\u2019s grief and vengeance. Wind River<\/i> does something similar with the murder of indigenous teenager Natalie (Kelsey Asbille). The teen\u2019s death is the catalyst for the film, but like most of Sheridan\u2019s women she spends the majority of the runtime voiceless and off-camera until a third-act flashback where she\u2019s introduced as a rebellious teen sleeping with a much older man. The flashback has the same message as Sicario<\/i>: sex is bad, ladies. Sheridan\u2019s camera focuses on Natalie\u2019s face as she is raped, the violation clear. But Sheridan wants to raise Natalie as a hero because she ran barefoot for several miles in the snow. It doesn\u2019t matter that she still died because she had such a strong will to live \u2014 another moment meant to get Sheridan a pat on the head. It\u2019s worth pointing out that Natalie\u2019s role as the sexy \u201cforeign\u201d girl is mimicked in the 16-year-old drug kingpin\u2019s daughter in Sicario: Day of the Soldado<\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n

Like many a false feminist ally, Sheridan\u2019s films imply a \u201cwoke\u201d sensibility. He includes women and minorities in his features, but only to exploit them or mistreat them. The audience is seemingly told they should be happy these characters exist at all, or aren\u2019t played by white men. The old Westerns are still revered, but audiences understand they\u2019re products of their time. Sheridan doesn\u2019t subscribe to this belief. His films are fantasies for straight white men living in Middle America, reminding them of the \u201cbygone\u201d era where white men saved the day and women were beautiful, silent, and sexually compliant. <\/span><\/p>\n

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If you search the depths of Film Twitter, you\u2019ll discover something about me: I hate everything written by Taylor Sheridan. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":467,"featured_media":9666,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1400],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-on-the-marquee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/467"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}