The Power of the Dog

What defines masculinity? Is it being macho, or tough? Is it being hard and mean? How about being comfortable in your own sexuality, not defined by the gender norms or the way society feels you should be? Masculinity, just like femininity, changes as the world changes its views on what is considered the norm. And it doesn’t really matter what the world views so much as what you view it as. Alice Cooper poked fun at this with his satirical song Fantasy Man, where he went off on all these stereotypical things a man’s man wouldn’t be into, like washing dishes or watching Oprah on TV. It’s a ridiculous notion that being a man means you have to be a certain way. That includes being a gay man. The generic flamboyant gay person we all saw in entertainment from the 80s and 90s doesn’t realistically represent the way things really are. Sure there are people like that, but that is not representative of all gay men any more than being flamboyant means you must be gay.

We like to think of homosexuality as a more recent development because it wasn’t really addressed in the media in olden times. But it has been a thing since practically the beginning of time; it just wasn’t as socially accepted as it is now. When I was a kid, people bullied gay people just for being gay. While I’m not saying that doesn’t still happen, it is much more frowned upon than it once was. There were few people I knew that were openly gay when I was still in school. Now, I know of several people I went to classes with that are now out and proud, able to accept their true selves in a way that was not available to them thirty years ago. I can only imagine the anxiety and anger of having to hide that side of themselves from the world for so long. 

Having that experience and being good friends with several people who have now outed themselves, I could understand some of what the main antagonist, Phil, in Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel was feeling and why he is the way that he is. This is a man who is living in Montana in the 1920s, an environment where men were men and you could lose everything if word got out that you were gay. To hide it, he overcompensates by bullying and putting forth an overriding sense of masculinity while hiding a secret stash of gay material and harboring a deep sense of loss for his mentor who has recently died. 

When we are introduced to Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), he is herding cattle with his brother George (Jesse Plemons) and some ranch hands. During this cattle drive, they stop off for a time at an inn run by the widow Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst) and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Peter is a young man who doesn’t quite fit in with the more rough-and-tumble ranch hands, spending his time reading and making artificial flowers to place on the tables for their guests. Phil narrows in on this and bullies the young man, upsetting Rose. When George goes to apologize for his brother’s actions, he finds her in tears and falls in love with her. 

Phil looks at Rose as a gold digger, after their wealth, and makes it known these feelings about her. That doesn’t stop George from marrying her, though, and moving her and Peter to the ranch, so he turns his disdain up, taunting her and driving her into alcoholism. He also encourages the other ranch hands to mock Peter. One day, Peter stumbles over Phil’s hiding spot, including some explicit gay imagery that had belonged to Phil’s mentor, Bronco Henry, but is caught when he sees Phil bathing in a pond wearing Henry’s scarf around his neck. Though Phil chases him away, later, in front of Rose, George, and his men, he makes amends with Peter. This angers Rose, who despises Phil and doesn’t want Peter spending time with him, and her alcoholism worsens. 

This film falls heavily onto the themes of toxic masculinity and how such an attitude can be a destructive force in one’s life. Grief and self-hatred can often lead to cruelty and animosity, especially when you see those same traits you are fighting against in someone else. Peter is never presented as a homosexual, though that isn’t ruled out, either. He is, however, more sensitive than any of the cowboys on the ranch, perhaps a product of being raised by his mother, his father having killed himself years before. Peter doesn’t go out of his way to hide that he isn’t this rugged cowboy—he is comfortable in his own skin—though it does bother him when he is being bullied by Phil and the other cowboys.

Phil, on the other hand, is repressing his true self. He goes to great lengths to hide his true nature and his grief over his lost mentor. He exudes a façade of hyper-masculinity, an ideal that he uses to mask his true feelings. We don’t get any of this until very late in the movie when he is off on his own and is caressing a scarf, and himself, that once belonged to the late Bronco Henry. Later, in a rare moment of vulnerability, he confesses to Peter that Henry saved his life during a winter storm by sharing his warmth with him, coming close to revealing that they may have gotten intimate that night. 

Homosexuality would have been mostly forbidden in the West during the 1920s. Societal norms and pressures would have forced queer men into lives of loneliness and isolation.  I was seeing this, living in Montana in the 1990s, and it would have been far more repressive in the 20s. To be forced to hide one’s true self, unable or unwilling to be free, would cause pent-up emotions to erupt and lash out. We see this in how angry Phil gets at the idea that his brother George can romance and marry freely while he doesn’t have that option in life. Instead, he attacks Rose verbally, goes after her son, and wears her down until she falls into drinking to cope with him. It’s brutal in its portrayal.

Benedict Cumberbatch does an amazing job as this conflicted character. He has played closeted gay before in The Imitation Game, a film that also explored societal prejudices against homosexuals. In that film, he handled it by being closed down emotionally, unable to relate to his fellow men until someone came into his life that showed him how. In The Power of the Dog, he doesn’t have that avenue. It’s a very different way of interpreting that struggle, and he is so good at it that we come very early on to hate him, only to have that turn on a dime as that hatred becomes pity. Yet, though we feel pity, we still hate him because of his actions against Rose and especially Peter.

We also get caught off guard when we reach the finale and how that all plays out. Phil represents physical strength, though it is masking a great vulnerability. But Peter represents intelligence, a quiet manipulation of circumstances that ultimately defeats brute strength. When you look at Peter, he seems soft, weak, the kind of character who cannot fend for himself in a dangerous situation. Yet he is the one that comes out on top, showing that even soft characters can wield lethality to their own advantage. 

This film ended up being more thought-provoking than I initially expected. There is so much to chew on and digest in Thomas Savage’s semi-autobiographical novel, and that translates well into this feature. On top of that, while it is hard to find any real sympathy for Phil as a character, there is sympathy there. We’re not sorry how things turn out, but he is ultimately a tragic figure, born in a time when his kind of man couldn’t be free to pursue happiness. The West was a cruel world for people like him, and his response was to be cruel back. What makes that wholly unforgivable is that he was destroying innocent people around him in the process. 

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Jane Campion, Tanya Seghatchian, Emile Sherman, Iain Canning, and Roger Frappier

Best Director: Jane Campion (won)

Best Actor: Benedict Cumberbatch

Best Supporting Actor: Jesse Plemons

Best Supporting Actor: Kodi Smit-McPhee

Best Supporting Actress: Kirsten Dunst

Best Adapted Screenplay: Jane Campion

Best Cinematography: Ari Wegner

Best Film Editing: Peter Sciberras

Best Original Score: Jonny Greenwood

Best Production Design: Grant Major and Amber Richards

Best Sound: Richard Flynn, Robert Mackenzie, and Tara Webb

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Release Date: November 11, 2021

Running Time: 126 minutes

Rated R

Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee

Directed by: Jane Campion