As with Phil, the audience must draw upon its own knowledge of such scripts to deduce Peter’s internal workings. Campion leaves Peter’s attractions mysterious, but within the world of the film he is, for all purposes, queer: someone scrutinized for the way he defies gendered scripts. He has a potent foil in Peter, a paper-bouquet artisan who loves his mother a lot. The closet renders him as understandable and sad-or perhaps the better term is pitiful. To be sure, The Power of the Dog is not ridiculing Phil. Surely they know the sissy villains of Bond movies, and no doubt they’ve seen the memes imagining Vladimir Putin kissing Donald Trump. Perhaps they remember American Beauty’s Frank Fitts, the monstrous military man hiding same-sex lust. Viewers will infer that Phil’s awfulness derives from repression, and as they do they may be hit with a broader sense of cultural déjà vu. Far from strong and silent, this movie’s queer cowboy is the ranting and raving manifestation of pat psychology. In fact, Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, The Power of the Dog, was based in part on the author’s own experiences as a queer person in the American West and helped usher in the coming out for the cowboy.Ĭampion travels back to the milieu Savage wrote about without recognizing how insights can, over decades, become their own tropes. Many of the most important Western films have, in one way or another, complicated the lonesome-and-noble male archetype. What is, after all, so surprising about a queer cowboy? We live in a time after “ Old Town Road,” after Brokeback Mountain, after Willie Nelson’s hit 2006 cover of “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other,” written by Ned Sublette in 1981. Part of the reason the aha works is that the audience has seen this story before. Many viewers will have clocked Phil’s orientation much earlier, but Campion presents it as a revelation that makes the pieces of the previous hour fit together. Soon after, Peter happens upon that glen and discovers a stash of Henry’s beefcake mags, which Phil kept. About halfway through the movie, the camera follows Phil into a secluded glen where he caresses the scarf of his late mentor, Bronco Henry. Though the ultimate dude, he is somehow not like the other cowboys. He also shows grandiose self-loathing (he refuses to bathe so as to keep his “stink”), monkishness (a bachelor, he resents his brother’s marriage), aestheticism (he can shred on banjo), and incongruity (this bull castrator, we learn, has a Yale humanities education). The movie’s early chapters dole out expository dialogue against spare landscapes, gathering curiosity around one question: What is the deal with Phil, the chaps-clad menace of the ranch? His cruelty toward the vulnerable-Rose, Peter, horses-makes him the Platonic ideal of a jackass. Campion’s supposed provocations arise, in large part, from clichés about queer people. Yet the film left me cold, and the acclaim it has sparked seems oddly credulous. The story of interpersonal tensions on a 1920s Montana ranch-ruled by Phil and his brother, George (Jesse Plemons)-has been hailed as a mind-bending study of toxic masculinity and American progress. Such feinting and parrying with gender expectations has helped The Power of the Dog win Best Picture Drama at the Golden Globes and become a frontrunner for Best Picture at the Oscars. Read: The biblical clash at the core of The Power of the Dog
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Yet Peter does so as an expression of chivalry: “What kind of man would I be,” he asks, “if I did not help my mother?”
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Peter’s lisp and slender build make other guys call him “Nancy” and “bitch,” and he uses anthrax on behalf of a woman, his mom (Rose, played by Kirsten Dunst), whom Phil has been mocking and manipulating.
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In the film’s twist ending, the medical student Peter (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee) fatally infects the cow herder Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). Poisoning both is and isn’t a woman’s weapon in Jane Campion’s Western drama, The Power of the Dog. Yet works of entertainment such as Arsenic and Old Lace, Phantom Thread, and Game of Thrones have continuously circled the same logic: When physical prowess and social status confer strength, women fight carefully, in secret, and by exploiting their roles as helpers to men. The majority of real-life murders by poisoning are, as most acts of violence, committed by men.
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“Poison is a woman’s weapon,” Sherlock Holmes says in the 1945 movie Pursuit to Algiers, articulating one of popular culture’s favorite seductive fictions. This article contains spoilers for The Power of the Dog.