![]() ![]() On the dark side of the coin, one of Yellowstone's greatest antagonists Malcolm Beck ( Neal McDonough) blatantly sports a light hat throughout his tenure on the show's second season. This is in contrast with someone like Walker ( Ryan Bingham) who is always seen with his trademark white hat (or some other lighter variation) because even though he knows the evil he can do, he still sees himself as generally good. While he once saw himself as the hero of his own story (including the flashbacks where Josh Lucas plays the character), he now sees himself as someone entirely morally compromised, even as he continues to fight for his family and their livelihood. Over time, John's own self-perception has changed. And then there's John, who went from wearing lighter hats at the start of the series to darker ones exclusively by Season 3. military overseas and what he's done for his father's empire–he almost always wears a darker shade of cowboy hat on his head. Other characters such as Kayce are a bit more morally ambiguous, but because of the way that he sees himself–particularly his time in the U.S. Meanwhile, characters like Rip Wheeler ( Cole Hauser) have maintained their dark hat status the whole way through despite their complex character arcs or heroic status in the eyes of viewers. Sure, Kevin Costner's John Dutton wears a lighter hat when we first meet him in "Daybreak," but by the fifth season, he's sporting a darker one in its place. One might expect the Duttons and their allies to all wear light-colored hats while their adversaries wear dark ones, but that isn't exactly the case in Yellowstone. One thing fans of the series will notice right off the bat is that Taylor Sheridan's neo-Western doesn't conform to the same shades of symbolism that its traditional predecessors do. For four and a half seasons now (we're still waiting on the back half of Season 5), Yellowstone has thrilled audiences everywhere with the complexity of the Duttons in charge, and the series has understandably spawned various prequels. Though traditional Westerns may have followed this idea more closely, the genre soon switched things up.Īnother Western story that has been considered exceptionally great by many, even if it feels like nothing more than a prestigious soap opera at times, is Yellowstone. Additionally, many Revisionist Western icons (such as Clint Eastwood) were known for wearing darker hats, and in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Robert Redford's Kid brandished a dark hat while Paul Newman's Butch wore a lighter one. ![]() High Noon was controversial at the time, and not just because of its contrarian use of cowboy hats, but that hasn't stopped it from being considered one of the greatest Westerns of all time. This Western–which came out a year prior to Shane–had Gary Cooper's Marshal Kane, our Western hero, in a black hat while his adversaries wore lighter hats. One such example of a feature that flipped the Western script, in a variety of ways, is High Noon. But while many, perhaps most, Westerns of the traditional era followed this concept to the tall "T," not every iconic production at the time did. This name has been applied to various characters throughout film history, though one of the most bizarre comes from the 2011 action horror flick Priest, where Karl Urban's villainous character is known only as "Black Hat." It's true what they say, no genre can fully escape the Western, and as the genre continues to thrive today, there's bound to be more nods to the cowboy hat symbolism in the near future. In fact, this is where the traditional moniker for a Western villain, "black hat," comes from.
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