Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog: Gender not Sexuality is Key to Understanding the Film

 Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog, Gender Roles, Sexuality, Film, Psychoanalysis, Psychology

This film is jarring and scary.  Part of what makes it scary is that there is a sense that it is kludged together – that it is not a seamless film that is going to tell us a nice tight narrative – but rather there is something horrific about it, as if we thought we were going to see a Western, but instead we are watching something like the Texas Chainsaw Massacres.  And, btw, this is a Jane Campion movie – what are we doing in Montana with a bunch of men?

In the opening scene, if we can call it that, we have a voiceover of an unseen boy promising that, in the absence of his father, he will protect his mother.  We are then thrown into an odd world.  Two men; brothers, live in the same bedroom in twin beds.  One of them, Phil Burbanck (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a rough and ready cowhand who looks the part – slim and ruggedly handsome.  The other, George (Jesse Plemons – in a part that is strangely reminiscent of the part he played in the creepy film I'm Thinking of Ending Things) is pudgy – his brother calls him fatso – and, as the movie unfolds, George is reticent and we aren’t sure if it is because he has nothing to say or because he is a bit dim-witted.

The two brothers, it turns out, have been running a very successful cattle ranch for 25 years and we join them on their annual driving of the cattle to market (I don’t think this is ever spelled out – it just seems to be something that we should know from having watched Westerns.  It is as if we are somehow more in the know than we should be, and in this I think it is a signal that we are in a dreamscape).  The brothers, their cattle, and the hired hand cowboys show up in a three building town to spend the night.  They trundle into the whorehouse while Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst) the widow inn and eating house owner next door, who has been warned that they are coming, prepares for them by turning her son out of his bedroom so that she can rent it out and preparing to feed this army of men in addition to the usual cadre of folks from around here.  Her son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is making paper flowers, with which she decorates the tables that he will wait on.

When the men are a bit liquored up and excited about the potential of whoring, they come to the boarding house where Phil mercilessly bullies Peter before using one of Peter’s flowers to light his cigarette.  Peter – or Pete as Phil mockingly calls him – is thin, gawky, and, like the flowers that he has made, delicate looking.  In a word he is feminine.  And Phil tears into him, with the boys behind him, treating him as men have treated sissies from time immemorial. 

I was not surprised to learn from an interview that Campion was doing dream work during the making of this movie.  The settings are stark.  The music is discordant.  The interior of the house that Phil and George live in seems much larger than the exterior would suggest it could be.  Peter’s appearance is unsettling – he appears to be a mark and incredibly unaware of that – in a way that is dangerous.  The foundation of everyone’s life in the film seems shaky – perhaps especially Mr. cocksure Phil.  And the plot moves forward with the kinds of gaps in it that are the hallmarks of dreams.

Much to the dismay of Phil, George starts courting the widow Rose.  Phil’s overt objection is that she is just after their money.  We are aware, though, that Phil does not want to lose George – his partner.  George may not be swift – he is certainly taciturn – but he knows how to plow through Phil’s bullying and, in short order, he is married, Pete is packed off to boarding school, and he and Rose are happy.  George is tearful about their happiness and Rose is lovely in her affection for him.  Then they show up at the ranch where Phil makes Rose’s life miserable, especially when George is away.

To this point in the narrative, I have left out perhaps the most important character – Bronco Henry.  Bronco Henry never appears onscreen because he has been dead for 25 years.  Bronco Henry taught ranching to Phil and George and he was a legendary cowboy – especially in Phil’s mind.  Phil has preserved Bronco Henry’s saddle and regularly mentions his feats of derring-do and also his deep store of wisdom.

When school is out, Pete returns to the ranch to find his mother drinking all the time and scared, not just of Pete, but of her own shadow as Phil mercilessly and subtly bullies her – and now Pete.  But Pete discovers something about Phil – and Bronco Henry.  They were lovers – and the ultra-macho Phil is a closeted gay man.  Phil does not know that Pete knows about his sexuality or his experiences of Bronco Henry.  Phil is simply angry that Pete has discovered Phil’s sanctuary, and Phil chases him off calling him a bitch – one of his favorite denunciations of man and beast when he is angry.

Phil has now become a much more interesting character.  We learn that he was Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, when the governor comes for dinner, but he has repudiated that identity and he doesn’t show up on time because he is too “dirty”.  When does he arrive, it is with a mean spirit and the pretense of not being good enough company for civilized people.  He exposes her as fraudulent – and himself as superior – in a clear rejection of the feminine that she represents and that we know he hides within himself.  He is more interesting, but continues to be boorish.  The very picture of toxic masculinity.

An interesting dance ensues.  Phil continues to needle Pete, but he also spends an increasing amount of time courting him, teaching him about ranching and about being a man – handing down wisdom from Bronco Henry to Pete.  We watch, enthralled and concerned (with Rose), as Phil draws Pete into his orbit.  What possible good can come from this alliance?  We fear, as we imagine Rose does, that Pete will, like Rose, be defenseless against Phil’s strength.

So I think this film becomes an important battleground, testing whether our feminine or masculine selves will dominate.  What gives a soul grit – to conger up another film about the west?  Campion seems to be asking whether we are going to remain captive to toxic masculinity which, in this depiction, is fueled by the denial of the feminine within.  In playing the parts, Cumberbatch (Phil) and Dunst (Rose) agreed not to meet on set except in scenes where they were working together.  It was as if (in my mind) Cumberbatch experiencing affection for Dunst would derail him from an ability to portray the hatred of her as representative of the disowned aspects of Phil’s character.  Coming to know the feminine, in other words, would threaten Cumberbatch’s ability to hate it.

Phil’s love for Bronco Henry – something that he highly values and publicly depicts in idealized masculine portraits – unleashes self-hatred.  Our dependency makes us vulnerable – in Phil’s case, to being left by George (and having been left by Bronco Henry with his death).  That he needs others (other than the gone and therefore capable of being perfect Bronco Henry) is a deeply etched character flaw that he would rid himself of – if only he could.  His self-loathing, then, is less about his sexuality and more about his femininity.  He wants to kill and distance himself from that, and offers to teach Pete how to be a man – so that Pete, like Phil, can master this inner feminine demon.

Pete, on the other hand, who is in love with Rose, is able to nurture his feminine self.  He uses his femininity to his advantage.  He reads Phil and we (or I, at any rate) surmise that Phil is hungry – and hungry for something that Pete has to offer.  What is that?  I think that Phil, more than anything, wants to become Bronco Henry – and Pete is the person with whom he can do that.  Phil crafts a lariat so that he can train Pete in the ways of being a cowboy with the tool that he himself has crafted.

One of the lovely things about this film is our uncertainty about the extent to which Pete is being seduced and the extent to which he is not.  We know, on one level, from the opening voiceover, what the outcome of this film will be.  But the ways in which Pete uses Phil’s woundedness, both physically and psychologically, to protect his mother – and his love for her - is both subtle and wondrous to behold.  We discover the true strength of a man (who looks like a boy) who has seen and dealt with loss – not as Pete has by denying it and falsely and incompletely idealizing someone that is gone, but by dealing straightforwardly with that loss, looking it straight in the face, and choosing the aspects of the identification to preserve.

The man who emerges victorious in this film – the man who is able to preserve love in a harsh and brutal world – is the man who is most deeply and authentically engaged with both his masculine and feminine selves.  It is the man who integrates the gendered aspects of himself to retain the connections that matter to him, even when those connections are unreliable.  This man is autonomous not because he has cut himself off from others and from parts of himself, but because he has integrated his relationships to others and to those parts of himself and made peace with them, as unsettling as that process is – and as unsettling as the actions that process unleashes are.   

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Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land - Is Dreaming of Eden Good for Us?

 

Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Novel

Cloud Cuckoo Land is a very long book (over 600 pages) by a Pulitzer Prize winning author that has a central concern the issue of climate change.  In this, it would seem to closely resemble a very long book that won the Pulitzer Prize, The Overstory.  Both books also use a similar approach of following different characters through the arc of the book with the connections between the characters unfolding across the course of the novel.  Despite their surface similarities, these two books lead to vastly different experiences for the reader.

That Cloud Cuckoo Land is so long is somewhat ironic in that the tale that lends the book its title – presumably a tale created by the author but attributed to a lost classical writer – Diogenes – is quite short.  The translation of the story, by one of the characters in the novel, is included as one of the threads that makes up the interweaving stories of the characters – characters that span classical times to the 1400s to current days and into the future.  And I think each of the characters in each of the stories, could, in his or her own way, be read as living the tale of Cloud Cuckoo Land.

The length of this book, if you have not read it, should not scare you off.  It is a page turner.  You will be done with it before you know it (and there are a lot of blank pages – it isn’t really 600 pages long…).  Besides, we are in the middle of a pandemic, retreating from another surge, and this book will give you lots to think about that surge and the process of being isolated.  It will also, in contrast to The Overstory, reassure you.  Somewhat.

I hesitate to say that.  Part of what is delightful about this book is the suspense that hangs in the air – we do not know how things will turn out for any of the protagonists for long stretches of time.  I will try not to undercut that by doing big reveals – but this book is a story told by a master storyteller about the power of a story to transform peoples’ lives.  It is an ode to the story and to its value.

The story that the storyteller has chosen to put at the center of the entire tale is a comedy – it (theoretically) comes from the lost trove of comedies from Ancient Greece and may be the earliest novel, a form of art that the Greeks, who excelled at so many things, failed to master.  The did, however, get comedy.  And the art of the comedy is not to make us laugh, but to help us live in the world.  It, like tragedy, cannot transform our world into something that it is not – even if its protagonist can be turned into a mule and then into a crow by witches.  Just as the witches in MacBeth foretell a story that humans must act out, so the witches in this story tell an allegory that people act out in the various ways that they do within the interwoven tales.

I found myself feeling that the author was being self-serving – he was advertising for his craft by making up a story that includes the positive outcomes that one can expect from stories.  He has a singular way of doing this.  The threads in the sub-stories do not so much weave a pattern as they are knotted together to form a single strand – and part of the magic of the story telling is the fear that if any of the strands breaks the loves of the people, separated by millennia, will be broken as well.  And yet the string holds.

In this way, this feels more like the impact of psychoanalysis than the impact of group psychotherapy or, frankly, writing or teaching or televangelizing or anything that reaches a broader audience.  At the same time that the author is selling his craft, he is also significantly underestimating its power by focusing on the individuals who are in line to be affected by this story.  Maybe he expects that we will realize, as he, for instance, points to the similarities between his tale and the much better known story of the Odyssey, that the power of the story is being underestimated here.  Or maybe his point is that a single story, known to a very tiny group of people, can have different, but equally powerful effects across millennia, continents, and even space…

Many years ago my mother wondered about my pouring as much energy as I have into learning a craft (psychoanalysis) that I would necessarily be able to practice with only a few people.  My quick response was that I would be practicing with people in positions of power and the effects of my analyses would be felt far and wide.  Well, I don’t know how much that has been the case.  But I do think that the ways that I have learned about how people function, from learning the craft, from my own analysis and from working with my patients, has informed my teaching and my research and hopefully that has had a few ripple effects.  I also, of course, hope that the work with my patients has affected not just them but those around them.  Certainly the lives of the characters are not the primary lives that this author is interested in, but rather the lives of us, the readers.

So, the question becomes, what does the author want us, the reader, to take from this work?  Perhaps he realizes that we don’t have the reach that he does.  But we can, as the characters do, carry the author’s work forward.  Maybe it’s that the experience we have of each story is what matters.  The irony, then, is that this story, as a comedy, allows us to live with the world as it is.  It, in the words of Hannah Gadsby about standup comedy, creates tension (over and over in each of the parallel stories) and then resolves that tension.  We walk away, as we sometimes walk away from a good therapy session, feeling more or less good about ourselves.

It is weird to think, then, that a tragedy does the same thing.  We look deeply into some aspect of ourselves – something that is horrible and disruptive – and we experience catharsis – we see the consequences of our wish for power (in the case of MacBeth, for instance).  But this also leads to a kind of cleansing.  We walk out of the theater, or the book, or the therapy hour clean.  The world is a mess and so is my part in it.  Movies and books that don’t do that – and here I am nominating The Overstory as such a book – are different.  They leave us unsettled and feeling that there is more to do. 

I suppose this suggests something that I found quite disruptive when I was in psychoanalytic class while also being in my own psychoanalysis.  Ed Kohn, who was teaching the class, proposed that the goal of psychoanalysis to teach the analysand – the patient – to engage in self-analysis.  His point was that we will never be perfectly analyzed.  We will always be discovering parts of ourselves that are unknown to us – and we will always be encountering new situations that will try us in new ways. 

I think that both tragedy and comedy don’t quite capture this part of experience.  They reassure us that this mess we are in is like every other mess people have ever been in (in the case of this novel, people have always striven towards Cloud Cuckoo Land – a sort of Eden in the clouds).  And we always fall short of it, but somehow we muddle on.  The Overstory has the ability to leave the reader with the concern that maybe things would not go on as usual – that we might have to do something to prevent a collapse of the entire system…

 

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The Lost Daughter: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Directorial Debut Explores Maternal Cruelty, Guilt, and Resolution

 

Psychoanalysis and Psychology of Film

The Lost Daughter: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Directorial Debut Explores Maternal Cruelty, Guilt, and Resolution

One of my favorite psychoanalysts, Thomas Ogden, in teaching us how to read other psychoanalysts, give us a single sentence of Donald Winnicott’s to read:

It seems to me that there is in it [the baby’s injuring his or her fingers or mouth by too vigorously sucking his thumb or hand] the element that something must suffer if the infant is to have pleasure: the object of primitive love suffers by being loved, apart from being hated.

In this sentence, Ogden tells us, there is sadness and beauty to the language, particularly in the words “the object of primitive love suffers by being loved.”  I have experienced the forcefulness, and even violence, of my children’s primitive love and their primitive love for me when they were infants – and even now that they are well into adulthood.  I, like most parents, have experienced sleep deprivation, agonizing worry and emotional fraying as a consequence of trying to meet their primitive love with love of my own.  But, as Winnicott is saying in this sentence (in accepting, but unsentimental voice), that is the nature of the beast – the nature of being the object of primitive love.

Winnicott uses the word object in this sentence not in its usual [psychoanalytic] technical sense (i.e. as synonym for a person in the external object world or a figure in the internal object world), but in its everyday sense (the object of the transitive verb love: the object of that kind of love.  More difficult for me to fully and genuinely acknowledge in reading and being read by Winnicott are the ways in which my own primitive love, both as a child and as an adult, has caused others – particularly my parents, my wife, and my children – to suffer.  And that, too, is inescapably the nature of the beast.

Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of Ferrante’s Novel the Lost Daughter is a second meditation (in my mind) on Winnicott’s sentence, one that is wholly in line with Ogden’s interpretation (and experience) of it and my own, but with a bit of added vigorish – it is the experience of being the maternal object, one that is, I believe, deeper, richer, and much more complicated by biology and gender roles than the already complicated task of being the object of paternal love.  As if that weren’t adding enough complexity, it is about the relationship between mothers and daughters.

Having read just one Ferrante novel: The Lying Lives of Adults, I trust that Ferrante’s take on this complex relationship will have an added level of complexity – performing these gymnastics in the context of the Naples mob will up the ante even further.  But Gyllenhaal has written the screen play for American actors (and a Brit) – and then shifted the scene from the Jersey Shore to Greece because of COVID, creating a kludge of a backstory for the characters that somehow, weirdly, works, but certainly in a novel, American, way.

The film unfolds in the present, in Greece, and in flashback in the life of Leda (Olivia Colman in the present, and Jessie Buckley is the flashbacks).  In the present, Leda takes on Nina (Dakota Johnson) as her pseudo daughter.  In the flashbacks, she has two biological daughters, Bianca (aged 7) and Martha (aged 4).

I will tell the story in chronological order, not the order in the film, in order to orient you.  I think the story is told in flashbacks in order to disorient which heightens the experience, but vastly complicates the telling.  I admire Gyllenhaal for much in this film, including the complexity of the storytelling that keeps us off-balance but never loses coherence.

Leda, at about twenty, had her first child.  She was married to a decent enough guy, but their relationship, between the stress of raising two kids while trying to get his academic sounding career and her foray through graduate school going, became largely transactional.  Leda struggled to master Italian, write academic journal articles, and attend to the never ending demands of her daughters.  Leda goes to an academic conference, and one of the leading lights in her field, a handsome and brilliant scholar played by Peter Sarsgaard, recognizes her talent and she starts a torrid affair with him.  She leaves her husband and children, not for this man, but for freedom.  We are told that she returns to the children three years later, but we know the damage has been done.

Twenty years later, Leda takes a break from her job (she now lives in Cambridge and presumably teaches at Harvard) to stay in a ramshackle inn/bed and breakfast in Greece.  There, her solitude is disturbed by a boisterous, huge family of Greeks and Greek Americans who, the beach boy Will (Paul Mescal) tells us, is a bad family (we assume they are the Greek mafia).  She stands up to the boys in the family on multiple occasions, and while we admire her, we think she is foolhardy and vulnerable and we fear for her. 

Leda strikes up a relationship with Nina, a member of the Greek family who has a daughter, Elena, who is about the age Bianca and Martha were in the flashback, and Leda empathizes with, supports and undercuts Nina and her parenting of Elena all at the same time.  She also supports and undercuts Nina’s affair with the beach boy Will. 

The film ends where it begins, with Leda slumping to the sand with an apparent injury.  At the beginning of the film, I took it to be a gunshot wound and kept looking for Leda to piss the boys off enough to kill her.  But her “suicide by cop” is much more satisfying than this.  It is Nina who kills her.  Angry that Leda has stolen Elena’s doll – Nina stabs her with the hatpin that Leda lovingly provided to hold in place the floppy hat Nina’s husband had given her. 

Leda had just confessed that she is a terrible mother.  We know, and Nina can’t, that Leda has had a complicated relationship with the doll.  The doll was stolen when Elena’s daughter went missing because she was angry that Nina was not paying more attention to her.  Leda knew that it was Elena’s favorite doll.  Leda, who is no favorite of the family, finds Elena, much to everyone’s relief (they had feared Elena drowned). 

Elena’s disappearance parallels a period when Bianca had abandoned Leda because Leda was unavailable.  Leda tried to give Bianca the special doll from her childhood – she wanted to share with Bianca an attachment.  Bianca, furious with Leda, defaces the doll and, in a fit of rage, Leda destroys her own doll, tossing it out the window onto the street below.  Elena’s doll becomes a sort of substitute for the lost doll, but by taking it from Elena, she causes Nina the pain that she, Leda herself, felt with an inconsolable child.  Returning the doll at the moment she does, allows Nina to feel betrayed by Leda’s cruelty, just as Bianca did, but Nina is an adult and has the power to act on her fury.

I said the film ended the way it began, but of course it didn’t.  After Leda slumps to the ground, injured, she loses consciousness.  She wakes the next morning as the tide comes in.  An orange – an important means of connecting with Bianca and Martha – materializes in her hand and she calls her daughters and has the kind of warm phone call that mothers and daughters can have (but have not, to this point in the movie).  Leda may be dead.  Whether she is or not, there is a sense that having been liberated from her guilt, she is free to have the kind of exchange that she, and her daughters, could only have dreamed of.

It is easy, from the vantage point of the elder, so say that then, when we were young, and stepping into our relationship with our children would have meant so much to them and to us, that we should have done more of it.  That doesn’t address the intensity of the desire to step into the relationship with our work, or our adult relationships, and the impossibility, at moments, of doing both – or either – as single-mindedly and effectively as we might have.  If we don’t do this now, we feel, we will irreparably damage – what?  We imagine it is both our children and our careers or our loves or whatever else we are pursuing.  By having an affair, by quitting the job, by leaving the marriage to pursue the career, we imagine that we will escape the pressure.  Leda, and Winnicott and Ogden, suggest otherwise.  We cannot love, or be the object of love, without suffering. 

What we suffer is complex.  One part of it is guilt.  The movie would offer us the solace that being paid back in kind for our cruelty will expiate our guilt.  I think that gives the movie a nice wrap, but it doesn’t quite heed Leda’s experience and her words.  There is no cure for the suffering of love.

 

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