It's Not the Story's Fault You Thought You Were Still on the Ranch

Lonesome Dove is a story about the lust for adventure, a force so powerful it can rip you from the arms of comfort and chuck you into the jaws of death. Daredevils everywhere will relate to Gus and Woodrow. They are men who can’t stand to sit still. Nobody makes them leave Lonesome Dove. They leave because they’re bored. Thus, their subsequent wounds are self-inflicted. These guys aren’t naive. They’re not young soldiers harboring idealized notions of war. They know blood, and they know battle, and they know terror and they know anguish. They don’t leave Lonesome Dove despite these things; they leave because of them. The danger is the point. Gus and Woodrow risk grief and pain so that when death does inevitably come for them, they can greet it feeling like they’ve lived.

The vanity of grand romance

When you decide you’re in love with someone, when you fixate on somebody in that way, what you’ve inadvertently done is made them a major character in the story you’re writing about yourself. And what you’ve also done is decided, subconsciously, that the only way your story can have a happy ending is if you and the object of your affection get together at the end of it. You’ve seen this attitude toward love affirmed a thousand times in romances, romantic comedies, and romantic epics. What Lonesome Dove does is less common. The series takes that grand romantic arc that is so familiar and reveals a side of it—or an iteration of it—that is delusional, conceited, and vainglorious. Which is to say, sometimes you cross a thousand miles of prairie in order to reunite with the love of your life only to find that they’re writing a story of their own, and you’re not in it.

It’s not the story’s fault you thought you were still on the ranch

Mark Manson defines emotion, and I’m paraphrasing here, as the product of a misalignment between our expectations and reality. We expect one thing to happen, but then something else happens, and we feel a way about it. That way might be good or bad. When life is better than we expect, we might experience happiness. When life is worse than we expect, we might experience sadness. And depending on the extent to which our expectations are violated, we might feel those emotions to a greater or lesser degree. When life isn’t just better but way better than we expect, maybe we experience not just happiness but elation. Likewise, when life isn’t just worse but way worse than we expect, maybe we experience not just sadness but devastation. If we follow that train of thought, we can come up with a working definition of the emotion we’re here to talk about, which is shock. In the same way that we might define devastation as “sadness, but more so,” we might define shock as “surprise, but more so.”

Let’s imagine for a moment that you’re browsing the shelves in a video rental store (let’s also imagine for a moment that video rental stores still exist) and you come across a copy of Avengers: Endgame. Only this copy of Endgame doesn’t look quite right. The costumes look a little off, some of the actors are different, and the description on the back doesn’t match the movie you remember. And since you can pretty readily tell that it’s not a porno, you rightly conclude that it’s a version of Endgame from an alternate universe. Naturally you’re curious, so you take it home and pop it in your VCR player and you sit down to watch. And for the first few scenes the movie feels pretty much like you’d expect. Again, some of the actors and costumes are different, but the production value is there, it’s no knockoff, and by and large it feels like a Marvel movie should feel. It’s light, it’s fun, it’s melodramatic. There’s danger, but that danger is accompanied by, in the back of your mind, an essential understanding that everything’s going to turn out okay.

And then comes a scene where Captain America has to face down one of Thanos’s henchman. They’re going head-to-head, and for a while it seems like a pretty even match, and you’re not sure if Captain America’s going to win but you’re pretty sure (again, because of that essential understanding) that he’s at least going to come out of this relatively unscathed. But then something happens that you don’t expect. The henchman pulls a knife from his boot and plunges it into Captain America’s stomach. He twists the blade and wrenches it upward, then yanks it out and Captain America’s guts spill all over the floor. Cap falls to his knees, screaming in agony. Tears spill down his face as he tries in vain to stuff his own entrails back into his body. He screams for an agonizingly long time, perhaps minutes, until finally the henchman steps forward and finishes the job, and that’s the end of Captain America.

How would you react to that? Everybody’s different, so maybe some of you would be horrified, maybe some of you would find it comical, but I imagine that everybody, to one degree or another, would be pretty taken aback. And the reason you’d be taken aback is that you weren’t expecting that kind of behavior from a Marvel movie. If you were watching a different movie or show, say, Game of Thrones, it’d be a different story. The scene would still be upsetting, but you wouldn’t be taken aback. Because you do expect that kind of behavior from Game of Thrones. That’s that world. But it’s not Marvel. So by disemboweling Captain America, the alternate version of Endgame shattered your understanding of the world you thought you were in. That’s how stories shock you: by introducing you to a world that seems to be governed by certain rules, and then doing something that seems to violate those rules.

Now, the tricky thing about shock is that if you’re already expecting a certain kind of behavior from a story, then the story can’t shock you with it. But if you aren’t expecting such behavior, and then the story behaves that way, you’ll feel like you’ve been cheated. You’ll feel like you’ve been lied to. So how does a story strike that balance? By laying the groundwork. If a story that shocks you is doing its job right, the shocking thing that it does doesn’t actually violate its established rules. If a story is doing its job right, it’s been telling you exactly what it is the whole time.

Chris Cooper in Lonesome Dove plays July Johnson, a goodhearted but somewhat irresolute sheriff who’s strong-armed by a woman into tracking down her husband’s killer. And July’s wife (played by Glenne Headly) makes him take their young son Bryan along so she can run off back to the guy she really wants to be married to. That feels a bit convoluted but it’s not important. What’s important is that July takes his kid into the wilderness to track down a murderer, and unfortunately for them, their path crosses with that of Blue Duck, a vicious bandit and the villain of the series. I don’t recall the exact scenario, I think July and Bryan find some of Blue Duck’s victims or something, but anyway July tells Bryan to stay back while he goes down the hill to check for survivors. And so he goes down the hill, and while he’s down there Blue Duck emerges from the bushes and kills Bryan. He kills the little boy. With a knife.

I was shocked. And more than shocked, I was upset. I was upset because I felt betrayed. And I felt betrayed because I didn’t think this was a world where kids got murdered. I felt like the story had cheated.

Whenever I feel this way about a story, there are generally two possibilities: Either the story fucked up, or I did. Lonesome Dove is a miniseries based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. I’m a person who is somewhat less accomplished than that. It seemed prudent to give the series the benefit of the doubt. Anyway I liked the show, I knew it was something of quality, so I sat down to figure out if maybe I’d missed something. It didn’t take long to realize that the story hadn’t cheated me at all. I just hadn’t been paying attention.

Part of the brilliance of Lonesome Dove lies in the subtlety with which it introduces violence. We begin the story, as I said before, in the arms of comfort. Lonesome Dove is a peaceful place. A bit boring maybe, and a little sad, but it’s home. It’s a safe place. But then we leave home, and it isn’t long before danger rears its head. At first it’s a fun kind of danger. It’s stealing horses from rancher-tyrants and it’s watching Glenne Headly watch men murder each other over her. It might not always be pleasant, especially that last example, but it’s the kind of danger and violence that fits with the world we’ve been introduced to. It’s the kind of thing we expect, so much so that we’d actually be disappointed if it wasn’t there. And then, at end of the first episode, Lonesome Dove delivers its first real blow. Sean, an Irish immigrant who falls in with the heroes early on, has the misfortune to walk his horse through a river infested by water moccasins (that’s another name for cottonmouth snakes). It’s a shocking scene in itself, but it’s still fair play. It’s the most horrific scene we’ve witnessed, but it’s not so far outside the scope of what we’ve come to expect that we feel cheated.

You see what the show’s doing. Each act of violence is grislier than the last. In one scene Gus comes under fire from Blue Duck’s men on an open plain and stabs his own horse to death so he can use it as cover. In another, an enslaved woman named Janey breaks the knees of her captor with a frying pan. By the end of the second episode, when Blue Duck kills Bryan, we’re well within the type of world where kids get stabbed to death.

And yet, Bryan’s death shocked me. And yet, I felt betrayed. And yet, if I felt that way, it was only because I’d become complacent. I’d unwittingly failed to take Lonesome Dove seriously, even though it had never once hidden its face from me, but revealed itself at a measured pace. It did its job, and it did it well. It’s not the story’s fault I thought we were still on the ranch.