The air is thick with unease at the Burbank ranch in Montana. Its owner Phil [Benedict Cumberbatch], a man dressed from head to toe in the Old West tradition, is anything but happy with his brother George’s [Jesse Plemons] marriage to the widowed innkeeper Rose [Kirsten Dunst].
When Rose and her lanky and seemingly sensitive son Peter [Kodi Smith-McPhee] move into the ranch, Phil treats their arrival as a threat to the established order. The order recalibrates when Phil forges an unexpected connection with Peter in The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion’s evocative study of performative masculinity.
Intrinsic to the film’s mesmerising power is its production design, which deepens our understanding of Phil, George, Rose, and Peter. Every prop carries narrative significance, from the making of paper flowers to the use/abuse of a cloth to the near-impossible spotting of a dog on a distant mountain. The dark wood-furnished Burbank home is designed to create an oppressive masculine environment. The taxidermy mounts on the walls, the arrow-heads in the cabinet and the wooden beams build a framework of masculinity that reflects the world outside. These décor details are identifiers of the wild meant to suggest the home is as much a masculine domain. Surfaces and objects are indispensable to this story set in a world where emotions are suppressed and seldom expressed.
Men like Phil saw the closing of the frontier at the turn of the 20th century as a loss of opportunity for the self-made man, especially as more and more migrants arrived on American shores. The spread of urbanisation and the growing influence of women inside and outside domestic spheres led to what they believed to be a softening of men. From this crisis came a renegotiation of masculinity and subsequent reinforcement of the more traditional ideas of it. The crisis coincided with the popularity of the Western, which assumed all these ideas that soon became embedded in its form.
Fearing the impending obsolescence of frontier traditions, Phil doubles down on his performance of masculinity, gets dirties, more rugged and obnoxious, instead of evolving with the times. In the opening moments, the brothers and their ranch hands stop by Rose’s tavern after a long cattle drive. Phil’s performance gets louder and more disruptive on Peter’s entry. He takes aim at everything which doesn’t adhere to his mentor Bronco Henry’s code: be it Peter’s lisp, the white napkin draped over his arm, or his effeminate manners. The performance is rounded off with the burning of a paper rose that Peter loves to make and his mother proudly placed on the dining table to spruce it up. It’s an act of destruction to suggest Peter failed the audition for masculinity in Phil’s eyes.
The code of the cowboy stems from the rough-and-tumble in the wild where rifles and ropes speak louder than words.
It’s a world at the margins of civilisation where taming, killing, and territorial conquests are everyday pursuits. Breaking horses, driving cattle, salon shoot-outs, and other feats of stoic strength informed the Western’s perception of what being a man entails, a perception which became normalised with the recurrence of such motifs. Campion rethinks this intersection of genre and gender in The Power of the Dog. In her eyes, the genre has never been so much about taming the frontier but reaffirming masculinity.
Campion’s native New Zealand stands in for rural Montana, whose vast landscape becomes a character in itself. The landscape of the Western is inherently masculine. Its language too reflects the same. Taming is, for instance, an act of aggression. A bronco describes a wild horse, a formidable opponent to cowboys looking to tame it. Those who do are mythologised for having performed a feat par excellence. The name “Bronco Henry” thus carries inflated overtones of a man who could possibly tame the wildest of horses but couldn’t be tamed himself.
Violence is so easily accepted in the Western’s iconography, and Campion exposes this in a scene that is deliberately abrupt but nonetheless horrifying. Phil’s swift and impassive castration of a bull punctuates his unfettered performance of masculinity. Cruelty is wreaked upon women just as easily. When Rose moves into the house, Phil makes sure she always feels his looming presence in every space. Even a piano brought in to make her more comfortable is offset by Phil’s banjo in a tormentful duel. The house turns into an inescapable prison, the anguish driving her to the bottle, each crack and crevice a hiding place for liquor and some sweet relief from Phil. The open windows and doors don’t have a liberating effect, instead ensure the overwhelming expanse of the natural world is always palpable.
Only the kitchen and Rose’s bedroom have floral-patterned wallpaper on all sides. Every other room is featureless in a way where the walls and the floor become one. The sets make the Western’s conception of masculinity available for dissection by inscribing the entire structure that upholds it in the film’s compositions. The barn is, in essence, a man cave, a staged domain full of masculine markers from the world outside. On the wall hangs a saddle, elevated to a shrine, with the name of Bronco Henry. Phil worships at the altar of his mentor to rid himself of his conflicted emotions and replenish his masculinity. The rolling of a cigarette and the braiding of a rope become acts of phallic identification and assertion.
Campion, through her camera’s homoerotic gaze, is weaving a mental rope-a-dope of her own. When Phil first brings Peter into the barn, he closes the door on a concerned Rose in a symbolic gesture to establish the barn as a masculine sanctuary. No women allowed, he seems to suggest. Indeed, the barn is where the power dynamics between Peter and Phil subsequently shift, and the latter succumbs to his toxic masculinity. Quite literally.
We see Phil at his most vulnerable not in the barn but when he passes through a symbolic passage of changeover beneath driftwood to his idyll in the meadow. It’s the only place where Phil takes a time-out from his performance, his innermost sanctum he takes great care to keep separate from the ranch and the world beyond. In a private moment, he masturbates into a piece of cloth, dirtied and frayed due to overuse, that once belonged to Bronco Henry. Campion rethinks the ideal of the lone cowboy with these moments of Phil isolating himself in order to be his true self.
Costumes reflect a character’s personality or emotional state. If Phil prefers his rawhide chaps and boots with spurs, George is more inclined to conform to bourgeois codes of basic grooming and hygiene. That he is always neatly dressed in white shirts, black jackets, and bow ties shows he is eager to fit into the urban middle class. Peter too is precisely dressed, almost surgically precise as the buttoned-up shirts keep his opacity intact. Rose’s wardrobe boasts more colours, which darken as she succumbs to Phil’s mind games.
Phil stands firm in his ways, reluctant to change or even bathe in a defiant response to modern lifestyle requirements. In compositions of contrasts, the old, decaying ranch similarly stands as a last refuge for such men against a mountain range. The rigours of the frontier play into the code of self discipline that defines the cowboy’s life in a Western. The genre invented a myth that an austere life led in absence — of civilisation, of human warmth, of readily available food and shelter — was a life well-lived. So, by contrast, an easy and effete life wasn’t. But there is no one standard mould that every man needs to fit into — and that’s a good thing.
Campion confronts the idealised masculinity of the Western by finding fissures in its mythic terrain. She turns the cowboy into a walking contradiction, a subject of oblique motives, self-punishing miseries, and repressed desires. In the end, she reforms the terrain to allow for the emancipation of a young man from stifling ideas of masculinity and his mother from the engulfing grasp of its watchdog.
Oscars 2022 will take place on 28 March.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.
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