The Haunting Civility and Complex Masculinities in 'The Power of the Dog'

The dichotomies in Jane Campion's 1st film in years unravel once the dust of that eerily satisfying ending settles.

(This review contains spoilers.)

By the hot, dusty hills of rural Montana in the 1920s lived two men – one, gentle, suited, civil, and kind, while the other, uncouth, audacious, and a bully.

This dichotomy between ‘civility’ and ‘incivility’ in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog – nominated in 12 Oscar categories, the highest this year – becomes more apparent once the dust of that eerily satisfying ending settles.

Phil, played by the steadfast Benedict Cumberbatch, and George, by I’m Thinking of Ending Things star Jesse Plemons, inherited their ranch from their parents about 25 years ago. Phil may have been a Yale graduate, but he is a man of the dirt, a ranchman of the highest order – a combination his elite parents and their peers find amusing. George, on the other hand, aspires to be a socialite; he is visibly tired of the ranch life, and his loneliness drives him to finding Rose, a working-class widow, played beautifully by Kirsten Dunst.

Now, the differences between the brothers are plain as day from the start. You ever try the house bath, Phil? George once asks. But Phil – whose starry-eyed devotion towards his late mentor and best friend/lover Bronco Henry keeps him tied to the ranch – is possessive of his brother, and frankly, irritated by his disinterest in the cowboy, cooking-elk-liver-in-the-mountains life that they were leading up until then.

So when George brings home Rose as his companion, Phil is aghast; his machismo is hurt. The bully that he is, Phil makes it his life’s mission – little does he know it will be one of his final ones – to make Rose’s stay at their mansion as miserable as he can. One of his sinister projects includes making a ‘man’ out of Rose’s son Peter, played by the brilliant Kodi Smit-McPhee, which brings him closer to his end – one rawhide lace at a time.

Civility and/or Hypermasculinity

Phil’s hypermasculinity, layered in complexities of love, lust, and adoration for another man, is artfully brought to the screen by Campion; it is the obvious source of disquiet in the movie. But what I find even more disconcerting is George’s civility, or rather, what it represents.

Yes, George is kind; he is ‘clean’, and sensitive. But the life he lives (or aspires to) is that of the aristocracy. Caught in the middle of Phil, the Bully, and this socialite life of George is Rose. When George invites his parents, the Governor, and his wife over, Rose is visibly flustered. She realises she doesn’t belong in the room with any of them as they speak of King Tut’s resurrection and all else that’s happening in the world.

The anxiety is such that despite her days-long prep on the piano that George had bought her – 'It’s too good for me', she had told him – she can’t get past one (off) note while playing for the guests. But is her discomfort uncalled for? Concealed in the guests’ politeness and civility is sordid judgement – looks of contempt that the elite would give someone who has played in a working-class cinema pit for hours and hours.

Rose is as taunted by the ‘civility’ that her husband represents as she is by Phil. She wants to be around the domestic workers of the house, do the things that she used to at the inn she once ran. Rose never wanted to be a Lady. That mansion never felt like home for her, and Phil may have been just one of the reasons she takes to alcoholism.

The Art of Deception

Peter, the young medico, meanwhile, is very protective of his mother (he says so in the beginning), though both he and Rose are constantly browbeaten by Phil and the cowboys. He is expected to be a man – walk like a man, talk like a man, and ride like a man. Don’t let your mom make a sissy of you, Phil tells him.

But Campion tricks the audience into thinking that Peter’s ‘unmanliness’ is a sign of weakness. As Phil takes on the task of teaching him all things manly and accompanying him to the mountains, one can see something unmistakably sinister coming – only, one fears for Peter, because Phil has been up to no good so far.

The final shot of the movie, a Bible verse, however, makes it apparent that Peter doesn’t lack agency as one may have thought. Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog. Then it all makes sense – Phil’s death to anthrax is no accident. Rose is his darling, and Phil the dog.

Of Science and Modernity

Once the slow-burn thriller finally unravels itself, Peter’s qualities that ‘emasculated’ him in the eyes of Phil and his gang suddenly find new meaning. No, he doesn’t look at flowers and animals with poetic admiration, but inspects them with clinical precision. He is skillful and methodical, unmoved by the toxic traits of the men of his time. Because, he is a man of medicine, of modernity – someone Phil was not.

Phil couldn’t care less about hygiene, medicines, or wearing gloves while cutting open horses. Incidentally, that’s what kills him in the end. It’s almost as though science and modernity (or the lack thereof) defeat Phil. (Interestingly, while going to the doctor’s in his final moments, he ditches his cowboy boots and decides to suit up, in perhaps what is an acknowledgement of this defeat.)

The Power of the Dog encompasses the stories of two brothers, a husband and a wife, a mother, and a son, and an aggressive man and a distraught woman. But most importantly, it discusses the homosocial relationship between a young man and an older one, which, I believe, goes beyond love or lust, and reflects a larger, symbolic tussle between logocentric modernity and ‘unmodernity’ (for the lack of a better word).

It is interesting that Campion would use these two characters to represent a changing 1920s Western America, slowly metamorphosising into a modern society that ultimately wants to be devoid of ‘lawlessness’. While Peter’s premeditated actions (represented by modernity) in the film can be construed as an assertion of power for he is an oppressed gay man in a patriarchal setup, in reality, modernity is not free of bias.

The American society today, or modern societies at large, tends to conceal this bias under garbs of progress.

The truth is that prejudices tend to fester and live on in modern societies as well, but their veiled nature often makes them difficult to address. On the other hand, Phil’s in-the-face hypermasculinity, which is presumed as a characteristic of the so-called unmodernity, has an innocence of sorts, simply because it is not hidden. This begs the question: can modernity be considered morally superior to unmodernity?

Whether Campion planted this dichotomy in the characters of Phil and Peter as a subversive technique or as a misconstrued notion of progress is, I believe, for the ‘modern’ audience to decide.