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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