A personal review of ‘The Power of the Dog’ (novel) — Thomas Savage (1967) and ‘The Power of the Dog’ (film) — Jane Campion (2021)
Note: This review contains spoilers of both the book and the film. As a result, it may be better read after you have finished the book or seen the film.
When Jane Campion, one of my favourite writer-directors, won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year I could not wait to see the awarded film. But with lockdowns shutting cinemas and life generally in Melbourne it seemed a long wait.
I tracked down the book and each day I went to the park and read this achingly powerful tale. This was my solace that helped me survive a bleak time.
The book
Immediately from the opening scene of animal castration I was first struck by the great power of the book’s imagery, not just the recurring dog in the clouds and the ‘power of the dog’ line from Psalm 22 but an array of symbolism from the character’s environment, especially animal metaphors, which become like additional characters. Also in the mythical, ghost-like character of Bronco Henry who is referenced in brief but very meaningful evocations by the pathologically repressed main character of Phil Burbank. This mythology occurs so subtly I didn’t realise until I went back and read the book again he had been more than just an idealised hero and mentor to Phil but likely his only lover.
Instantly from this confronting first scene of calf castration I was transported back into my own childhood of growing up as a queer kid on a property in north-west New South Wales. I knew it was familiar because I didn’t flinch at the castration description but rather remembered when my dad used to line up the calves and castrate them in the hundreds as I helped hold them down. There were multiple points of identification which cast me back from narcissistic landowners, blind loyalty to family, suspicion of the money-grabbing motives of any woman who marries into the family, and a bullied queer kid out of place in such a macho world. These points significantly mirrored my childhood experience, especially the feeling of queered otherness though my gay-themed bullying happened mostly in a boarding school in a big city more than in my small country town. One image of this type of bullying resonated the most:
“As poultry in the pen pecks to death the maimed and strange among them, so at school was Peter hazed, taunted and called a sissy — the hiss of the word was everywhere.” p. 30
The remarkable thing about this book is that although it is set in 1925 it feels so modern in theme, form and sensibility; particularly in who triumphs in the end. As I read the book I was sure it had been written recently so when I discovered it was published in 1967 I was shocked. Unsurprisingly, while it was critically acclaimed at the time no one was ready yet to deal with such a coruscating subversion of the Western and it sold very few copies until it was republished in 2003 with a sharply illuminating afterword by Annie Proulx whose own short story Brokeback Mountain covered similar taboo-breaking ground and also was expanded into a highly successful film. It is really a Western in setting and archetypal characters only — but even these are subverted. The cowboy does not beat the baddies and ride off with the girl but rather the toxicity of his fraudulent masculinity is exposed. Instead Thomas Savage gives his reader a chamber piece of four main characters, particularly the two what the modern reader would call gay ones, who thrash out their darknesses in a manner more like a Strindberg or Ibsen play to the death or to distraction.
Thomas Savage based many of the characters on his own childhood growing up in the family of his mother’s second husband. The husband also had a cruel brother who hated women and made it his mission to humiliate and drive his new sister-in-law insane. Savage, like his character of Peter, was likely gay but as his time dictated ended up marrying a woman and having a family. It is not hard to see that the book sprang from his hatred of his uncle and his treatment of his tormented mother. And this time he made the figure who is usually on the outer of literature is the one who most carries the author’s voice.
Undoubtedly this is also why the book sold so few copies because it places a battle for queer identity at the very heart of its concerns, even if depicted implicitly rather than explicitly. Very few reviews of the time even mentioned homosexuality as a theme, which indicates how groundbreaking it was to do so. Savage centralises the homosexual repression of his main character whose masculinity is a performative ruse and pits it against a young beleaguered queer who has learnt from the taunts and the wounds how to be cold and cunning in order to survive. Peter Gordon is also on a mission to honour his dead father and save his wretched mother and he will use whatever means necessary — including his profound intellect, physical allure, and a lack of empathy- to achieve his end. Here Savage is truly ahead of his time as he allows the ‘sissy’ to be the one who ultimately gets what he wants instead of the ranch owner. At its core the book is about very damaged characters who can’t be who they are by nature and so they learn to survive by moving the chess pieces to get what they want by stopping others from getting what they want.
In these fever dream final scenes of a battle between the exposed Phil and the cunning Peter, the power of desire over repression soars. I read this ending in my locked down park and I gasped. Even now, especially in a Western, the macho devoid character doesn’t usually win in the end.
And that gave me hope for other queer kids growing up on a ranch or property, that we can also have a power too.
The film
“What kind of man would I be if I didn’t help my mother, if I did not save her.” Peter Gordon (Kodi Smit McPhee)
A few long months after reading the book, now out of lockdown, I finally got to see the film in a cinema. In my first viewing it was too much, I didn’t have enough distance from the book. I am not someone who impossibly wants films to be exactly like the books and is disappointed when they leave cherished bits out, or are not exactly as I imagined in my head. I understand that the essence is the best that can be captured.
But firstly I admit I fell victim to the ‘book was better’ position in one regard; which is that the book’s second chapter is omitted entirely from the film. This depicts Peter’s father, Johnny Gordon, courting and marrying Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and bringing them to live close to where the Burbank brothers live. Rose’s first husband fails miserably to get the town’s acceptance even as a doctor who treats anyone who asks, becomes a heavy drinker and is bullied about his sissy son by Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), disguised to the reader as “The Rancher. ‘’ Phil throws Johnny across the room in a saloon with malevolent force. This public humiliation and realisation of how his son will be treated for the rest of his life leads to Johnny hanging himself, and it is Peter who discovers his body and cuts him down. While it isn’t made clear if Peter finds out about the trigger for his father’s suicide, it still plants the first traumatic seed of revenge.
This almost ‘prequel’ to the film makes Peter even more understandable and it makes his revenge a kind of double honour to both his parents. In the film Campion chooses not to have any flashbacks not to take viewers out of the present reality of the story.
Instead she has Peter stand at his dad’s grave and later tell Phil his father told him Peter “wasn’t kind.. was too strong” before he hanged himself. These inclusions are faithful in a pared back way, but what the film doesn’t show is that Phil tormented not only Peter’s mother but also his father and that is the genesis of his final act. Campion elects for more mystery here inviting the viewer to join the dots in their own way.
The second time I saw the film I was able to let this missing backstory go and concentrate on the film itself and its own way of telling the story. It was much clearer to me how faithful Campion was to Savage and how she had made a film with a power in its own right.
Firstly the actors perfectly capture the characters Savage wrote and Campion adapted and directed. Most reviews have singled out Benedict Cumberbatch for the most praise and he is extraordinary in his immersive and transformative performance, but the other actors are just as good. Kirsten Dunst’s poignant performance goes beyond the one note of coercive control and Campion gives her more scenes and more strength even when alcoholism has taken hold. Jesse Plemons is as phlegmatic as Savage depicted but Plemons gives George Burbank more love for Rose, and an unspoken nuance of a life lived with a disturbed and severe older brother.
My favourite performance of my favourite character from the book and the one I most identified with is Kodi Smit-McPhee’s chilled and chilling embodiment of Peter Gordon. The power is in his physicality: angular, awkward, seeming fragile and effete but in fact brutally strong with the searing intensity and intelligence of his eyes. In Smit McPhee’s performance there is an ambiguity between victim and perpetrator, pain and coldness, righteous avenger and callous killer. He walks the line between the audience’s sympathy and their revulsion. But in the end his overarching mission is achieved to save his mother from the power of the dog and Smit-McPhee’s performance carries the charge of that power assumption almost like a Shakespearean prince coming to the throne.
The film’s imagery is evocatively captured by cinematographer Ari Wegner, where New Zealand’s Central Otago doubles for Montana, with a great power which is not exactly the same as Savage’s. The image of the dog in the clouds is changed from a running dog to a barking dog but the mythic power still remains. Blood drips through blades of wheat, a cigarette is lit and smoked with seductive power, and Bronco Henry gets his own plaque.
The film spells out the gay references much more overtly than the book especially in the seductive final scenes between Peter and Phil. Before this, homoeroticism is developed through Peter finding hidden muscle mags of Phil’s with Bronco Henry’s name on it while at Phil’s secret bathing water hole where Peter sees Phil naked. Ari Wegner’s camera lingers on the beauty and fragility of Phil’s naked body.
There is more power in Jonny Greenwood’s acclaimed score of atonal and plucked menace. As well as Peter Sciberras’s often languid editing, even in the final confrontation, giving you time to absorb all the nuances of the characters and their themes. One of the audiences I saw it with began squirming restlessly in the last scenes between Peter and Phil, which is a testament to the editing and the silence in this scene as well as the actors. There is nothing to hide behind in the slow-burn, and there is no big Hollywood climax or manipulations of the audience’s emotions.
In the end I am deeply moved by both the book and the film of the book. While Savage’s incredible words, imagery and characters took me back to my own childhood, Campion brought his world to life with her own cinematic vision that narrowed in on some sections and omitted others. But still the essence was kept and elucidated.
It is just a shame that Thomas Savage never lived to see his book cinematically realised and finally receiving the attention it always deserved. Before Jane Campion there had been several failed attempts to make it into a movie but it took Campion’s sensibilities to bring Savage’s world to visual life 54 years after the book was first published.
The power of the dog ultimately is, according to Jane Campion; “those deep, uncontrollable urges that come and destroy us.” And while these destructive urges may be able to be spoken about more openly for a modern audience we are no less vulnerable to their power.
