Ten minutes into Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, an aloof ranch owner sits at the end of a long table in a local restaurant somewhere in Montana in 1925, visibly disgusted by the decor. Someone has placed intricately folded paper flowers in decorative little vases on the tables; a group in evening dress on the adjoining table are jovially singing along to the piano, and there are even napkins. A self-styled cowboy who rarely bathes and takes pride in castrating cattle with his bare hands, Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) is ill at ease among the more rarefied – in his words “sissified” – civilisation around him. As he waits for his food with his ranch hands, Phil’s waiter Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), “a real Nancy boy”, tells him he made the flowers without a hint of shame. The world is changing and Phil doesn’t like it. He misses the time when dinner meant herring at the saloon and a whole lot of alcohol. Like many men drunk on power before and after him, Phil cannot tolerate discomfort, which he interprets as an existential threat. He shouts at the piano player to stop before setting one of Peter’s flowers alight. Next he drops it, its petals wilting, into a water jug.
Phil’s power is maintained by tightly controlling the world around him. He owns the biggest ranch in their Montana Valley and lives in a grand home that demonstrates both impressive wealth and a profound coldness. There are rarely visitors, furnishings are spare, and the only noises are the clink of the spurs on his dirty boots as he paces through the house, each ring sounding like a warning. He is helped by his ranch hands, who laugh along with his jokes, and his reticent brother George (Jesse Plemons) whom Phil calls ‘Fatso’ and chides for being slow. Phil lives in a world of men, of which he is alpha; women, he tells George with hatred in his voice, are only ever after their money. (The only women in Phil’s life are his housekeepers, who quietly keep the operation going in the kitchen downstairs.) But Phil’s order is threatened when George goes to the restaurant to talk to the owner, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow who is also Peter’s mother. George falls in love with her, they marry, and she moves into the brothers’ home. The marriage gives Rose some more material freedoms – George pays for Peter to attend a better school – but she also loses control of her life and her sense of purpose. She gives up the restaurant and, because her son is away at boarding school, she’s left alone in the gloomy house co-owned by the brothers. A psychological war between Phil and Rose ensues, and ramps up months later when Peter comes home from school during summer break.
The Power of the Dog was adapted by Campion from Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name. The story is described as a thriller masquerading as a Western, a psychologically twisting tale in which appearances are not as they seem. Despite (or because of)¹ Phil’s rank man-of-nature aggression, he is well-read and studied classics at Yale, where he graduated with top marks. He is also – as revealed by Campion’s shots of him bathing in his quiet idyll at the lake, longingly caressing a handkerchief that once belonged to his mentor, Bronco Henry – deeply repressed and self-hating. Though we are first introduced to Peter as the target of Phil’s bullying, he soon proves to be wily and unshakeable. Peter comes across an out-of-the-way hut in the forest, close to Phil’s bathing spot, where he discovers Bronco Henry’s homoerotic magazines, and has no qualms using this knowledge to get an upper hand on Phil. Elsewhere, Peter’s tolerance for bloodshed proves higher than initially suggested when he brings a rabbit home, stroking it affectionately. A later shot reveals it cut up on the table, its innards covered in blood. (Animals are used throughout the film to reflect the human drama on the ranch. Phil’s invective to George that he can get a “piece of ass” without a marriage license is followed by a cut to a shot of a dead calf hung up, being stripped for hide, which felt a little obvious. But I liked the scene in which Peter walks through the woods, enduring homophobic taunts and wolf whistles from the ranch hands, before catching sight of something in a tall tree. As he looks up, the whistles become blended with the sound of birdsong. The jeers of the ranch hands fade, overpowered by the sound of the birds, and you get a sense that Peter, in the midst of all this cruelty, has transcended it through willpower alone.)
Pushed into submission by Phil’s bullying, Rose becomes withdrawn and dependent on alcohol, and when Peter comes home she recedes into the background of the larger battle of wills and eroticism between him and Phil. This is a shame, because what we do see of Rose is so revealing. One of the rare glimpses we get of her interiority happens when she is drunkenly reminiscing about her youth to Peter. She remembers the stars her teacher used to give her at school; on Valentine’s Day, she would get lots of cards, which proved that she was a real beauty. The objects that Rose holds onto as signs of her worth – shiny things issued from authority figures, reminders that she was once beautiful and desired – are both supremely important to her sense of self and poor foundations for an unshakeable one. Patriarchy fucks you over twice; first, by the fact of what men do to you, and then by how it pushes you to cleave to the very things that further reinscribe you as an object rather than a subject.
Much has been made of The Power of the Dog as marking the first time that Campion, a veteran documenter of women’s subjectivity, has made a film with a male lead (she previously felt a “natural, but also political, necessity to cleave toward women”, given the relative dearth of stories about them.) Yet as steadied and beautiful Campion’s exploration of the two men’s psyches is, I still wanted to see more of Rose. Perhaps I wanted a different version of the film; but the story of Rose’s deterioration feels immanent to Campion’s portrait of masculinity, not incidental to it. What men like Phil foreclose, after all, is the possibility that the world could be different: that there might be a way of relating to one another not based on domination, fear, and the urge to destroy that which you don’t understand (or, in Phil’s case, things that you do understand, and wish to violently deny.) As seen by the way Peter and Phil’s fraught relationship is at once infused with tenderness and violence, hope and contempt, Campion’s masterful filmmaking could have easily held more in the frame – to show not only the familiar spectacle of men who cannot confront their fragility and thus drain the life of everything around them, but also what is lost when they do. There’s another version of the Power of the Dog in which Rose, upon marrying George, becomes liberated from the care duties that had become central to her sense of self: the economic necessity from running the restaurant, and the domestic labour of looking after her son, and instead of anxiously self-imploding from an anger she cannot otherwise express, is given space to act upon the world. Campion offers us one glorious moment in which Rose, happy and at ease, makes a demand of her own. Shortly after marrying, George and Rose drive across the sprawling Montana Valley. Rose asks to pull over. Standing together against the blue mountains, she leads him through a simple dance, showing him the sort of patience and attention that Phil would never have the strength to do. They embrace. This moment takes place before Rose arrives at the ranch, before Phil’s taunts, before the hidden liquor bottles and the rapidly disintegrating sense of reality. There, in the mountains, you get a glimpse of what could have been. As George tells her, moved to tears, “it’s wonderful to no longer feel alone.”
1 In one of her many magisterial essays on masculinity for n + 1 magazine, “Special Journey to our Bottom Line”, Elizabeth Schambelan traces the links between American college fraternities and the nation’s longstanding history of military conquest. She draws Peggy Reeves Sanday’s book on fraternity culture, Fraternity Gang Rape, which reveals initiation rituals in which pledges are forced to wear diapers, drink milk until they vomit (and lie in it), and are doused with buckets of faeces. “The overwhelming conclusion,” Sanday argues, “must be that these rituals re-produce an abusive social order.” A pledge tells Sanday “We had staggered through hell, and came out to look at the world with the jaded, contemptuous eyes of the combat veteran. Our initiation experiences . . . gave us a secret weapon and invisible armor.”
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Rebecca Liu works at The Guardian and is one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers