The Land of Fear and Awe

“Everything is bigger in Texas,” the saying goes. The land, dreams, nightmares, successes, failures–all of this exemplifies the spheres of the American Dream. This dream is beautiful and unique but incredibly fragile. Still, the ambition, the chase, and the conquest of the land are as American as you can get. In a world of digitized atomization, anti-American ideology, and attacks on masculinity, most Americans yearn for stories that reflect some semblance of strength and determination.

Taylor Sheridan’s new series, Landman, is a welcome aesthetic expression of the human experience, standing in stark contrast to the putrid waters of dull and joyless ideology. Based on a podcast titled Boomtown, hosted by Christian Wallace, Landman escorts the audience through the world of oil men–“billionaire wildcatters and roughnecks,” as they’re introduced in Boomtown. The podcast, which aired from 2019 to 2020, was a serialized narrative of 12 episodes that highlighted various themes of life in the Permian Basin, a region in West Texas roughly the size of Utah. The area has gone through ups and downs of the oil industry, and recently has enjoyed a tremendous boom.

The oil industry in America can be summarized by a phrase “boom or bust,” and Wallace’s interviews reflect that. We hear about the history of the region, the main “characters” who shaped the industry, the frustrating, back-and-forth movement between wasteland and boomtown, billionaires who made it, roughnecks who worked the patch for several generations, stories of triumph and utter failures that not only ended in the death of dreams but of men who lost everything. At one point, Wallace mentions an event in which a man was found slumped in his truck, in the “patch” (as drilling locations are called), dead from suicide, as Aerosmith’s Dream On played on an endless loop. Metaphor, symbolism, and tragedy don’t need to be made up. They are everywhere, as Wallace’s podcast attests.

Sheridan’s telling of the story of the Permian Basin takes a dramatic and sensational turn, but for the most part, it remains true to the originality of Wallace’s Boomtown. A big part of Landman’s excellence and success is casting. Billy Bob Thornton plays Tommy Norris, a landman for oil company M-Tex. Sheridan illustrating the intricacies of the job–a landman negotiates mineral rights, business agreements, and general management of crews. If something goes wrong —and it certainly does —the landman gets the phone call.

Thornton is perfect for the role. In Thorton’s hands, Tommy is a rugged, grizzled, cussing, and generally dyspeptic man but with a sense of humor. He is a recovering alcoholic who drinks Michelob but not hard liquor. He has an ex-wife, Angela (Ali Larter) who came back to his life after getting a divorce from someone else, a daughter, Ainsley (Michelle Randolph) who is giving her father way too many details about her sex life, and a son, Cooper (Jacob Lofland) who accepts a job as a roughneck in the patch.

Not only does Tommy need to deal with his highly dysfunctional family, but he also has lawyers to worry about, and he’s negotiating daily for the owner of the company, Monty Miller (Jon Hamm). Monty’s marriage is stable–he and his wife, Cami (Demi Moore), have great affection and mutual understanding on many levels. Hamm and Moore are brilliant in these roles and bring intensity and gravitas to the show.

Although Tommy’s personal life may be perpetually in tatters, his assessments and judgments about situations and people are always correct. He has a both learned and inherent gift for seeing a larger picture, and how a small, seemingly unimportant event will affect the whole. Tommy’s negotiations are rarely done in the boardroom or at fancy restaurants. The series opens with Tommy being taken hostage by one of the drug cartel’s bosses. The cartel wants to hold on to its territory and distribution of drugs, but the oil rigs are in the way. This isn’t Tommy’s first rodeo, as they say, and he manages to get out alive and negotiates a deal that ends up suiting everyone. Just another day in the life of a landman.

There are big and small dramas playing out, and Tommy is connected to all of them. His life is in tatters most of the time, and his sex and money-starved ex-wife does not help the situation. The superficiality of some situations and relationships is well-balanced, and the show avoids lapsing into prime-time soap opera because the reality of life in the Permian Basin supersedes the petty concerns of shopping, sex, and prenuptial agreements.

In the first episode, three men die in a rig explosion. Tommy’s son, Cooper, has been assigned to this crew and survives. This accident sets in motion many events, including Copper almost being beaten to death because he is intimate with a widow of one of the men who died. The fact that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction is almost an understatement in Landman. There is nothing static about the characters’ experiences, and everyone is in a constant flux of emotions and actions.

Landman is neither a liberal nor conservative show, whatever those labels even mean today. The only language that the folks in Permian Basin speak is that of opportunity and money. However, there is a direct rebuke of leftist social talking points regarding the oil industry.

In one scene, Monty is at a meeting with other men in the oil industry. They are discussing possible merits of sustainable and green energy. One of them states the “greatest potential for growth is in exports,” while another claims that “Energy consumption is a social issue,” and the oil industry needs to acquiesce to the demands of climate change advocates and prove its “commitment to clean energy.”

Monty is quietly but visibly annoyed that he has to listen to this. “We are well diggers,” he says. And that means,

We don’t, nor can we ever control how our product is used and what it is used for….I don’t care what the governor of California says about electric vehicles. I don’t care how many career college students block London traffic or spray-paint a fucking sculpture. I care that the price of oil stays between 76 and 88 dollars a barrel…The world has already convinced itself that you are evil and I am evil for providing them the one fucking thing they interact with every day, and they will not be convinced otherwise.

Is it self-interest only that drives Monty? Perhaps, but should that matter at all? If we accept the reality and importance of the free market, then there should be no concern for any social issues, but certainly not something that is essentially made up by ecoterrorists who are merely interested in chaos and disruption, wholly divorced from any focus on the very issues they are attempting to argue for.

Men like Monty and Tommy are not portrayed as heroes, but neither are they villains. This is one of the important factors of Landman that makes the show authentic. Sheridan is not trying hard to introduce or push some kind of brand of masculinity and America that is long gone and lives in our nostalgic minds of a time we most likely did not even live through.

Instead, we witness a focus on both weak and strong men and an unrelenting push to subdue the land. It’s kill or be killed, and there is no room for a long-term process of justice or business. Lines are blurred, and the law is pushed to the limits. But are men like Tommy truly subduing or taming the land? Or is the land turning them into wild animals?

In one scene, Tommy sees a coyote near his house. He’s not rattled, and the coyote doesn’t appear to be going after anyone. The sound of a shotgun breaks the silence. The coyote is killed by Tommy’s neighbor, who is ranting about how coyotes kill pets. Yet, Tommy finds the entire incident disturbing.

In the final scene of the first season, after being almost killed by a drug cartel, Tommy has no energy to care for anything. He goes into the backyard and gazes toward the vast Texas blue sky. Another coyote makes an appearance, hovering above the dead body of the one that got shot. The coyote is confused, yet present. Where should he go, what should he do? Tommy puffs on his cigarette and says, “You better run, buddy. They kill coyotes around here.” At that moment, Tommy and the coyote are one. The hunter is hunting, but the hunter can just as easily become the hunted. There is no peace for a man like Tommy. He’s not simply a landman. He is a landman.

Willa Cather, the great chronicler of the American landscape, describes the unrelenting indifference of the land: “The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes.” Whether he likes it or not, Tommy belongs to the land, which has devoured and spat him out, giving him success and failure several times. He respects it in some strange way that he cannot even comprehend. He stands before the land in fear, contempt, but most importantly, in an elusive awe.

Emina Melonic writes about culture, film, and books. Her work has been published in American Greatness, Claremont Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Modern Age, and The New Criterion, among others. She’s currently working on a biography of Edward G. Robinson and a book on Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood years.