Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Sam Elliott
A sad case of terminal cowboy on the brain
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I guess when you play enough super-macho cowboy types, you start believing that’s who you are. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with Sam Elliott.
But it might be even deeper than that. This 77-year-old Hollywood tough guy went on Marc Maron’s Podcast the other day and was asked what he thought about Jane Campion’s Oscar Nominated Neo-Western “The Power of the Dog”.
“You want to talk about that piece of shit?” asked the aging tough guy. And then he went on to share his feelings of anger and dismay that Campion’s story is “full of homosexual allusion” with “everybody running around with no shirts on and chaps”.
White men want everyone to believe that big John Wayne-looking guys just ended up with dominion over all the land and everything in it by divine decree, or something.
His complaint, far as I can decipher it, is that the movie doesn’t capture the ‘true’ west, but ‘gays it up’ into something untrue, and too goddamn woke. “What does this woman (Campion) from New Zealand know about the American West? And why did she shoot the movie in New Zealand and call it Montana and say, ‘This is the way it was’? That rubbed me the wrong way, pal.”
Evidently so.
Elliott went on to say that cattle ranching in the “real” American West was all about family, and family values. He takes great offense at anyone painting a picture of “real” cattle ranching culture that depicts anything but being hard-working, having strong family bonds, and upholding the true courageous, intrepid spirit of the American Cowboy. You know, the one who went out into the wild frontier and hacked out a living with blood, sweat and tears. That one. You’ve heard it all your lives.
It’s the same old bullshit myth that white men have fought tooth and nail to keep alive for hundreds of years. The same myth that excludes the 20 to 25% of cowboys in the American West that were Black. The myth that conveniently excludes the butchery and thievery that went into the “taming” of the western frontier. White men want everyone to believe…
