The Power of the Dog Doesn't (want to) Understand Toxic Masculinity: A Deconstruction and History of the "Toxic Cowboy"

            I want to start this piece by recounting my very first experience watching John Ford’s 1956 masterpiece, The Searchers.

        The film sees John Wayne playing Ethan Edwards, rugged cowboy who embarks on a years-long quest to recover his young niece, Debbie, after she is kidnapped by a band of Comanche Indians, who also murder her entire family. Ethan is joined on this adventure by Debbie’s adopted older brother, Martin, played by Jeffrey Hunter.

Ethan does not welcome Martin’s presence on this mission and even tries to leave him behind at the start, and he will continue to menace Martin as they travail the desert. Part of this is because Ethan does not consider Martin to be Debbie’s real family, and he also resents Martin’s Native American lineage. But most of his animosity stems from the fact that he simply sees Martin as weak. He does not seem like the kind of guy who can hold his own on the wild frontier. But through their time together, Ethan does come to quietly respect Martin and his persistence, and he even amends his will to leave him all his possessions.

         Their quest takes them all over the country over the course of several years until they find Debbie. By this time, however, Debbie has been fully integrated into the Comanche culture and does not desire to return home, and she even begs Martin to go away. But seeing that his niece has fully embraced this Indian culture triggers a violent response in Ethan, and he pulls out his gun to shoot her, demanding that Martin “Stand aside!” In one of my absolute favorite moments in all of cinema, Martin throws himself in front of Debbie and pulls out his own gun defensively, exclaiming, “No you don’t, Ethan!” There’s a skirmish between the U.S. cavalry and the Comanche tribe, and Martin is separated from Debbie.

         The final showdown of the film sees the cavalry preparing to storm the encampment to stop a raid, with Martin sneaking in ahead to retrieve Debbie. When Martin finds her again, she is glad to see him and decides she will go home with him, but the bugle sounds, the horses descend, and Ethan goes right after Debbie, even as Martin begs him to stop. Ethan corners her into a cliff, but once he descends upon her, he picks her up in his arms like she’s a little girl again, and tells her, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” In one of the most iconic endings in film history, everybody returns home and takes their turn walking through the front door. Last at the gate is Ethan, who stands for a moment at the threshold before walking off into the horizon as the front door closes behind him.

         I watched this movie as part of my TMA 102 Intro to Film curriculum, and this was handily my favorite movie that I watched for that class. I loved it both for its simple potency as an action-adventure piece, and also because this Disney-loving kid who never thought he’d last long on the wild frontier was very validated seeing this dichotomy of masculinity displayed by Ethan and Martin. The movie is undoubtedly a John Wayne vehicle, and it is perhaps his defining role, but in a lot of ways, Martin is the film’s secret ingredient.

Martin’s not what I’d call emasculate, but standing next to a titan like John Wayne, even a reasonably good-looking guy like Jeffrey Hunter can’t help but feel a little less-than. Clumsy with the gun and the saddle, Martin is the kind of person who should not survive the unforgiving terrain of the wild, wild west. But he was also fiercely loyal and determined, traits I had always consoled myself as being truer markers of heroism than those I generally saw championed. When Martin’s ideology goes toe-to-toe with Ethan’s, even the John Wayne brand of masculinity had to capitulate to this softer vision of what it meant to be a man, and that was something I really responded to.

         Anyways … The Power of the Dog.

         The Power of the Dog is a film by Jane Campion that premiered at the 78th Venice International Film Festival and experienced a limited theatrical release before dropping on Netflix as an exclusive film in November 2021. It would go on to receive a formidable 12 Academy Award nominations the following ceremony, with Campion herself taking home the prize for best director. 

Based on the 1967 book by Thomas Savage, the story sees Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), a rancher living in 1920s Montana, who menaces his new sister-in-law, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), after she marries his brother (Jesse Plemons), to the point that Rose is driven to alcoholism. Phil is almost as intolerant of Rose’s effeminate son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who is home from college. But Phil ends up taking Peter under his wing, seeing if he can’t make a man out of him. As Peter becomes further initiated into Phil’s hypermasculine world of cowboys, Phil starts to confide more and more in Peter, especially about his relationship with his late mentor, Bronco Henry. Peter is drawn deeper into Phil’s world as Rose starts actively pushing back against Phil, spurring his rage. It looks as though Phil is actually going to retaliate against her until he comes down unexpectedly with anthrax. Phil later dies from his illness, which we learn was a result of exposure to rotten cowhides, which we further learn was a deliberate machination by Peter, who has finally delivered his mother from Phil and his tyranny.

       In the few years since this movie went up for its Oscars, the film has sort of accrued this reputation as this overlooked gem, one of those movies that “should have” won the big Oscar during its year. In April 2023, Hollywood reporter ranked it as the 15th best film of the 21st century thus far, calling it a,

“… brilliantly uncomfortable chamber piece about corrosive masculinity fed by sexual repression … A never-better Benedict Cumberbatch makes that character a figure of vicious aggression but also a tragic victim of his own macho behavioral codes in a psychodrama whose epic scope is echoed in its majestic landscapes.”

         Its initial reviews were just as glowing.

         Kathryn Rekliss, Christian Century:

“But in this scene, [Campion] draws attention to another origin story—the myths of masculinity created by film itself. Phil is already a cowboy caricature, trying to live into a masculine ideal that only ever existed in the movies and the penny novels from which they drew.”

Brian Truitt of USA Today,

“‘The Power of the Dog’ is a Western epic that revels in deconstructing the cowboy mythos and leaves its most jarring surprise for its denouement. Campion masterfully knocks you out of the saddle but this ride is so good, you’ll hardly complain when getting back up again.”

    Longtime readers might have caught onto the fact that I tend to give a lot of real estate to this idea of healthy vs toxic masculinity in the films that I discuss and in how I discuss them. They might even remember I singled out this film during my yearlong movie-splurge where I actually tried watching a new movie every day (my brain still isn’t the same …). My read of the film at the time was that it was an interesting albeit somewhat dry exploration of toxic masculinity. That first viewing left me feeling conflicted, but I was hoping that time and perspective would reveal to me what it was that everyone else saw in this film. A couple years out, though, that unease has only ossified into something else, such that I can’t help but be tremendously dissatisfied with this film, and I definitely don’t think The Academy made a wrong choice in bestowing the trophy to the much better CODA. 

         Now, I don’t mean to say that this movie is actively bad or that it’s some appallingly poor display of filmmaking. The craftsmanship in the film is fine enough, such that I’m not just baffled that people liked this movie. But The Power of the Dog is the kind of film that gets hailed as “bold” or “revelatory” for echoing back what its audience already wants to believe, especially about a genre that hasn’t really had a lot of dialogue in the 21st century (right, Kevin Costner?), and that conversation has become a lot more interesting to me than anything said in the movie itself. I don’t see this essay as a smackdown in the vein of, say, my rant about live-action Beauty and the Beast, but I am going to spend a long time talking about why as a long-time champion of soft masculinity, The Power of the Dog has always just left me feeling empty.

         A key part of discussion of this movie is how it tries to actively respond to certain tropes and conventions within the western genre. The Power of the Dog advertises itself as this deconstruction of the long-revered “toxic cowboy,” and a lot of people really responded to that line. And so in order to do this conversation right, I am going to have to lay the foundation of what the Hollywood western was even about. Once that is all out of the way, I get to start peeling away the internal contradictions within The Power of the Dog.

 

“The Revisionist Western”

         One thing I feel is essential to establish upfront is that I don’t really see myself as a superfan of the western genre (though I am one of the eight people who actually saw Horizon in theaters, which some would say makes me a zealot). Like most genres, I enjoy a good one, but it’s not like musicals where I am actively campaigning for their revival (everyone please see Wicked in theaters this November). But I've noticed a lot of people discussing films like The Power of the Dog with this tone of gratitude that this movie “finally!” said certain things out loud when … these points have been on the table for a while, and they were phrased with more grace and sophistication. Given half a second, I can think of a few reasons why these details tend to get obscured.

         As I mentioned in my essay on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the western genre has basically been on life-support since the days of old Hollywood—unlike the musical, which at least gets little spurts of reinvigoration every decade or so. Modern audiences are familiar with the basic signifiers of the genre through things like parody or homage, but they don’t really get to see the beast up close. This has allowed a lot of half-truths about the genre to mutate within the discourse, such that most modern movie goers tend to walk into the genre with certain expectations: that Westerns are uniformly dated or out of touch.

Unforgiven (1992)

       But The Power of the Dog can be categorized in what most would call a “revisionist western." The term itself gets bandied around a lot, such that it's lost virtually all meaning, but to take it at face value ... a "revisionist western" is a film that utilizes western conventions but reports to subvert the ideologies of the genre in its classic form. BBC, for example, described this movie by providing this context for the western genre,

“The Western heroes of the 1930s and 1940s like the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers stood for decency and family values, standing up for the innocent against black-hatted villains … Never succumbing to any kind of emotional vulnerability, characters like the ones played by John Wayne were physically imposing, reserved but aggressive at the right time, and fiercely protective of America as an individualistic, conservative, white nation.”

Lonely Are The Brave (1962)

        When I run into these kinds of descriptions, I always feel like I am interrupting a game of telephone. You can recognize the outline of the western cowboy in this kind of overview, but those necessary interior details tell a different story.

         Should be noted upfront that the Hollywood western —like musicals, like horror, like any genre—tended to circle around certain talking points, but itself expressed a variety of different attitudes, even at a given point in history, even within a specific body of work. For a contemporary reference, La La Land and The Greatest Showman were both smash musical hits in the mid-2010s, and even had the same songwriting team. But while both revel in the euphoria of love and music, both films had wildly different stances on the applicability of such fantasies in the real world, and you have to really engage with either film on a thematic level in order to understand why. So it is with westerns.

    The idea that westerns were uniquely chauvinistic or racist funnels larger societal issues onto one brand of filmmaking. There's a lot within the western genre that merits reflection and apology, particularly its treatment of Native Americans. But if we're really here to talk about old Hollywood and marginalized groups ...

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

         Contemporaneous horror did at least as much to demonize racial minorities through how “otherness” was directly linked to some form of monsterhood, something that the “good white hero” had to eliminate in order for balance to be restored. This was also a time when classical musical stars like Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire performed black face routines. We can obviously have detailed discussions about individual entries, but most sins of the genre had less to do with old westerns being this specific cradle of bigotry and more to do with the fact that … history as a whole just kind of sucks.

         Yet even in days of yore, you still saw classical texts questioning these basic assumptions about something like The American Dream, including things like the treatment of Native Americans. Westerns like Broken Arrow, Fort Apache, or even something like The Searchers, whose central plotline involves an Indian tribe literally kidnapping a young white girl, embedded this situation in a world that acknowledges the mutual hostility of white settlers. When Ethan and Martin finally meet the Indian chief responsible for kidnapping Debbie, we see that he is more or less a mirror for Ethan and his own revenge quest, explaining, “Two sons killed by white men. For each son, I take many scalps.” We don’t see the Native Americans in that film commit any act more violent than what white settlers do to them. That’s not to say that these films were ready to fully trace out the full implications of things like systemic racism, but there was curiosity for it even back then, which makes the whole premise of “revisionist Westerns” a lot less impressive.

    There is, by comparison, much more meat to the idea of a “revisionist musical,” like those we started seeing in the 70s and 80s. Movies like Pennies from Heaven or Cabaret were much more actively pushing back against the themes of golden age musicals in their narrative and their aesthetic, and the points which they were subverting were rooted in the actual behavior of the genre. Even the “sad musicals” of the ‘40s and ‘50s wouldn’t touch topics like capital punishment, prostitution, or any of the other new toys that started showing up in these post-classical installments. Revisionist westerns, meanwhile, liked to give themselves credit for being the first to introduce the idea that violence is bad, which is a really shallow reading of the early western films.

The closest I think we came to that more violent style of cowboy whose ends always justified the means were probably in Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy starring Clint Eastwood. But their enthusiasm for violence was more a symptom of a film landscape that was just starting to embrace the dwindling influence of the Hays Code, where you were finally allowed to show copious violence onscreen. In this way, they stand more as emblems of a post-classical vision of westerns than of true classical film. And that fascination with violence was actually questioned at the time these movies premiered, in the mid 1960s. Bosley Crowther wrote in his review of For a Few Dollars More for The New York Times,

“One may think that this is sheer fabrication, that the fantasies of killing contrived are devices for emotional escapism, that the foulness of the bandit leader … is a moral reason and justification for his being run down and slaughtered with his gang.

“But the fact that this film is constructed to endorse the exercise of murderers, to emphasize killer bravado and generate glee in frantic manifestations of death is, to my mind, a sharp indictment of it as so-called entertainment in this day. There is nothing wholesome about killing men for bounty, nothing funny about seeing them die, no matter how much the audience may sit there and burble and laugh."

The Iron Horse (1924)

         If this romanticized construct of "the cowboy who was never wrong" was ever the true default for the western genre, it was early, early on. I mean the 1920s and 30s. (And just know that in laying down that framework, I am choosing to paper over a handful of “even thoughs” and “what abouts” just to keep things simple.) But World War II kind of gave everyone a chance to ask about how we got into this mess, and westerns were absolutely not exempt from this.

         The irony of this all is that classical westerns trafficked far more in moral ambiguity and the complexity of human society than most of these “enlightened” modern takes. At the end of the day, The Power of the Dog is the one that settles for moral simplicities, especially where cowboys are concerned.

 

Westerns, Masculinity, and John Wayne (and some others too)

         The obvious face of the kind of masculinity The Power of the Dog thinks it is commenting on is western icon and patron saint of the second amendment, John Wayne. In the words of film historian, Ty Burr,

The Sons of Katie Elder (1965)

“… Wayne became the line in the sand for everyone who had an opinion about where America was going. Wayne the movie star became a litmus test; how you felt about him derived from your cultural and political views more than any other perspective. Either he was a standard-bearer for vanishing values or a pigheaded reactionary, a proud American or a bully. Wayne became the most extreme example of the movie star whose persona is mistaken for the man, in part because in swagger and sentiment he embodied the myth of the country that produced him.”

Ask Grandpa George about the western and the way the world used to be, and you’ll probably be locked into a tirade about how things were so much better back then and how real men like John Wayne don’t exist anymore, and this is where most millennials and gen Z know John Wayne from, moreso than from any of his actual movies. I’d need more than one essay to encompass the full “John Wayne” conversation, but the question at the heart of this is … was Grandpa George right? Were John Wayne movies actually celebrating uncompromised, ruthless masculinity?

         And to that, I answer … kind of.

         Something that Wayne’s contemporary detractors are generally happy to repeat is that “John Wayne” was a product of the Hollywood machine who molded the man born Marion Robert Morrisson into some mannequin that could be used to reliably lure a specific swab of the market to the cineplex, and this is largely true. In Wayne’s own words,

“When I started, I knew I was no actor, and I went to work on this Wayne thing. It was as deliberate a projection as you'll ever see. I figured I needed a gimmick, so I dreamed up the drawl, the squint, and a way of moving meant to suggest that I wasn't looking for trouble but would just as soon throw a bottle at your head as not. I practiced in front of a mirror.”

So yes, “John Wayne” was wish-fulfillment for an audience that wanted to see raw masculinity at work and having fun doing it, and it was an illusion that required some touch-up to sustain. But this sort of thing was also deconstructed within both the larger genre and the body of Wayne’s work. 

    When we first meet Ethan in The Searchers, everyone is in total awe that the heavens have parted and this pillar of strength has graced their home once again. But time gradually reveals the cracks in this demeanor. We see, for example, how he actively takes delight in desecrating the bodies of dead Indians, and all that toughness starts to read differently. We get the idea that the emotional impermeability that may have been useful in wrangling horses across the desert might portend something much darker than we thought at first. This all bubbles to the surface when we see Ethan pulling out a gun to kill his own niece, and this limp little kid who’s been dragged along the whole time reveals himself as the more heroic of the two.

A common interpretation of movies like The Searchers was that these cowboys and their signature roughness may have been “necessary” in the formation of this country (imagine like a billion quote marks around that), but in “doing what needs to be done,” these characters end up disqualifying themselves from the civilization they are paving the way for. That is something that we, the audience, as inheritors of this legacy are supposed to reflect on, which is where the real dialogue begins. Author Barry Langford describes, 

“In the famous paired opening and closing shots of The Searchers, Ethan Edwards respectively arrives from and retreats back into the desert that is his only real ‘home,’ filmed in both cases from inside the warm darkness of domestic space he is committed to defend yet within which is a powerful, disruptive, even a destructive force. And although Ethan’s every action bears powerfully on this sheltered familial space—defending, avenging, and finally restoring it—the sphere in which he conducts such decisive action, like the man himself, remains fundamentally separate from and outside it.”     

    Another classic western to be familiar with would be 1953’s Shane. Said film follows the titular cowboy, played by Alan Ladd, as he is taken in by a family out on the frontier. The details of Shane’s past are mysterious, but he gets along well with the family sheltering him, especially the young boy who sees him as this pinnacle of manhood. Still, we get the idea that Shane has known violence. And these demons claw to the surface as this family is caught in the crossfires of corrupt ranchers who try to harass them and the other townsfolk out of their homes. The conflict escalates, and eventually Shane saddles up and does what needs to be done to keep the family safe. In doing so, of course, Shane has proven himself a creature of violence, certainly not a role model to impressionable little boys. And so Shane rides off into the horizon as the kid calls out into the valley begging him to come back, to no avail.

         The film ends with Shane restoring peace to this part of the frontier, but in dirtying his hands to bring about that peace, he proves himself incompatible with it and denies himself any future within it. That is the sacrifice he makes to protect these people. In some ways, that’s the most heroic thing he could do, and the audience is meant to be aware of this tragic irony. When cowboys of old were “idolized,” this is generally what that meant.

    There is a sort of romanticization at work here that sort of keeps these cowboys unknowable and untethered, but there’s an inescapable air of tragedy to them as well. They can never truly belong anywhere. Director Peter Bogdanovic asked Wayne at some point about that famous final shot with him standing in the doorway, and Wayne is reported to have answered, “I knew a guy who stood like that all the time. And the pose always seemed so lonely to me. I thought it would work well in that last shot."

    Another piece of the conversation that tends to go underdiscussed in 2024 is the state of American manhood post-WWII. This would have seen all those veterans returning home from combat having done all sorts of "necessary evil" in order to keep their family safe, men who now feel out of place within this domesticated space. Such a crowd would have certainly resonated with the image of Ethan feeling unable to cross the threshold and join everyone for Sunday brunch. Maybe John Wayne was good for a lot more than just running across the desert shooting things. 

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962)

                As always, we do come to the question of how avid fans of the genre are choosing to internalize its themes and ideas. There is certainly a crowd that longs for the lawless world of the wild west where dominance was a matter of having the biggest gun. That is the basis of something like WestWorld. But I think it should be noted that this trapping of “not getting” what your favorite movie is actually saying is not unique to westerns specifically. (Right, Mel Brooks?) Moreover, when these machismo personalities did find themselves inserted into such stories, they usually end up playing the kinds of characters that John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, James Stewart, and Gary Cooper ended up having to take out in order to preserve peace on the frontier. 

I was also very deliberate in opening this essay with my experience watching this cornerstone of the western genre without any real context, social or academic, for how I was “supposed” to read it. This was me just interacting with an artifact of the genre in whatever way felt natural to me. And without any instruction on the “right way” to read this movie, the thing that stood out to me was the way it ultimately deferred to this sensitive portrayal of masculinity as the most powerful. Even John Wayne had to heel to the uncompromising force of mercy, loyalty, and familial love.

And the thing is, I didn’t feel any sense of gloating victory over the Wayne character. I didn’t feel venerated that Martin had “showed him up” or “put him in his place.” I actually felt sorry for him and wished there was a way to somehow get him to cross that threshold at the end. Caleb Madison recently wrote about The Searchers for The Atlantic, saying

“Ford’s depiction of the West is bittersweet and conflicted. I admit, before I saw any of his work with Ford, I thought John Wayne was supposed to be this macho hero. But Ford disassembles Wayne’s bravado to explore the sadness of the obsolete man––an aging former cowboy with no West left to win …

“By the final, heartbreaking shot, you can only pity the man. A cowboy is just an outcast with a rebrand.”

         None of this is to imagine that the old westerns said all that needs to be said about masculinity and the American mythos. I think that we could only benefit from reexamining these things in light of additional conversations about gender dynamics and American history.

         But any such movie would have to be significantly more complex than The Power of the Dog.

Phil Burbank: Toxic Cowboy

        In The Power of the Dog, Phil exhibits vindictive tendencies right from the start of the film, especially toward people who do not fall along a very strict line of traditionally masculine strength. The first time Peter and Phil interact, Phil makes fun of both his flowers and his lisp. He yells at the folks playing and singing along to the piano to “SHUUUUT UUUUP!” He’s also remarkably crude when talking about women, telling George as he’s contemplating marriage that if he “wants a piece of a**, you can sure get it without a license.” When he hears that this beacon of femininity is now his sister-in-law, he actually goes out and abuses his horse because he’s just that much of a man-baby. 

Traditional cowboys like Shane or Ethan Edwards were actually afforded in the old times some measure of sympathy, and this is where The Power of the Dog really differs from those films. You were supposed to have conflicted feelings about John Wayne in The Searchers, and that is where the movie reveals the contradictions of the society he and the audience are a part of. But The Power of the Dog goes out of its way to make it impossible to have mixed feelings about its cowboy.

Proponents of this film might argue that that's the point!, and that this is just a part of the movie's exposé on the real truths of the old west--that there was nothing conflicted or complex about cowboys after all. In that way, Phil is meant to be a token of the toxic masculinity that has pervaded American history as a whole and the western genre specifically. But even if that's the case, Phil ends up having less in common with John Wayne than the filmmakers imagine. I don’t think I’ve seen every Wayne pic, but I don’t think in any of his movies, The Duke ever literally said, “I stink, and I like it.” This kind of thing might be applicable if the movie were like a satirical spin on the genre in the vein of Blazing Saddles, but The Power of the Dog is supposed to be this grounded psychological piece reflecting harsh truths about the state of the union, yet all it ends up being is like the Maleficent of westerns.

If there is one single problem with this movie, it’s that no one has any shades of gray. Everyone is on one side of the fence, and the fence lines could not be less vague. This is funny because one thing that stands out to me in reading statements by the creative team is that they all seem really pleased with how “sensitive” and “complex” they portray Phil. In the words of Producer, Tanya Seghatchian,

“… with Phil, [Campion] saw this very, very complex character who presents one way, and is another way, that the secrets have turned him into the monster that he is but that there’s a deep vulnerability in there too which she is able to access.”

        Cumberbatch himself said, “It’s a topic that is important for us now to examine. We also need to understand what creates this behavioral pattern. To break it, to engage with it … It’s still very prevalent in our culture, whether it’s world leaders or domestic abuse, whether it’s on the large stage or the small stage, it’s there. Even though Phil’s motivations are specific to him, this is a chance to understand why that behavior comes about.”

The trouble is these affordances are very surface level. They don’t add any conflict to how the audience is supposed to feel toward Phil. They don’t make the audience question whether they are the ones enabling men like him or whether they are even seeing themselves in him. And they sure don’t make us feel any bit sorry for Phil when he’s in a coffin by the end.

    A movie like Sunset Boulevard plays this game much better. Norma Desmond has all the manic energy of a grade-A antagonist, but even as her delusions drive her to increasing acts of villainy (culminating in the murder of our protagonist), we still feel sympathy for her. A part of this is because Gloria Swanson plays Norma in all her shades, but a large part of it is how we recognize that Norma's very human need for attention and recognition was exploited by Hollywood. Norma Desmond in all her psychotic vanity is what happens when movie stars become addicted to the celebrity worship that the masses offer so carelessly. You pity her as much as you fear her. More pointedly, you feel responsible for her.

The Power of the Dog, meanwhile, tries to make a similar statement about the society that creates monsters like Phil, but it falls very flat for a number of reasons. The most central of them: the film never really lets you feel sorry for Phil.

A key part of this all is that it is strongly, strongly implied that Phil had romantic feelings toward his mentor, Bronco Henry, cowboy supremo. But these are not feelings that Phil in all his masculine-mania can tolerate, so he overcompensates with a very aggressive expression of manliness. Phil’s rampant toxicity, then, becomes a reflection of what happens when men are not allowed to express their most vulnerable selves. There’s a passing suggestion of sensitivity here, this idea that this rough brute is deeply tortured by things that he can’t say out loud, and that he’s just dishing back out the cruelty the world has thrown out to him. But this doesn’t end up playing out nearly as sophisticatedly as it sounds on paper. 

    I think it’s first worth noting that the film doesn’t really explore how hostile this society would have been to gay men. Historical context can certainly fill in the blanks, but the film doesn’t seem terribly interested in using this opportunity to display what happened to men who expressed or experienced romantic feelings toward other men. It’s not like Moonlight where our main character has been actively bullied for who he is and developed trauma around his sexuality. Nor do we know if Phil has witnessed violence done to other gay men and learned to fear similar retribution. It’s also not totally clear how Bronco Henry reacted to Phil’s romantic interest, and we don’t know if he has tried to pursue love with other men since then and faced similar rejection. In the end, it reads less like Phil is suppressing this side of him because he is confused or afraid and more because he’s just stubborn.

         Within the span of the film itself, we also don’t see him, say, crying to himself in a moment of solitude or really doing anything that might generate sympathy for him. There’s a segment some twenty minutes in where it feels like that’s where it’s going: we get this prolonged sequence of Phil walking through the house by himself at night, where we’re seeing him away from his cowboy buddies and maybe getting a glimpse at who Phil is when he’s not performing. He takes off his cowboy boots and hat and gives this deep beleaguered sigh, and it’s almost like we’re going to get some nice closeups of his eyes as he wrestles with some kind of unspeakable emotional dilemma, but the scene cuts away before we really get to see anything like that.

         There’s another bit where we do get some closeups with Phil as he is listening to George and Rose being intimate with each other in the next room, and there is some conflict here in his eyes. I might be willing to give the film some credit and assume that maybe this is him confronting how his hypermasculine affect denies him from knowing true affection like his gentler brother does. But this is not really corroborated by anything else he expresses in the film. There are not opportunities for him to give or receive affection (except arguably with Peter, and we’ll get to that) which he is turning away out of some deluded idea of how men are “supposed” to behave. (Anyways, it’s a scene that comes with some baggage as Phil is in fact listening to his brother having sex …) We are taking it at the filmmaker's word that this arc being carved out for Phil, which will culminate in his death, is not only inevitable, necessary, but also entirely of his own making.

         The most sensitive moments we get with Phil are the moments where we’re in on this juicy little secret that he’s gay, when we see him pleasuring himself with Bronco Henry’s scarf. But I still wouldn’t call this a tender moment so much as a voyeuristic one, like we're getting to see something we know this guy wouldn't want us to and feeling some authority over him for that.

   All in all, the idea that he’s tortured because he is gay in a homophobic society plays less like a humanizing character trait and more like bait. It exists to remind audiences, “This is what happens when gay men aren’t allowed to express themselves, and yes, you are a genius for recognizing this” without affording the subject any sympathy. There’s also something really disingenuous about the way Phil’s Bronco Henry worship is framed. It’s set up in such a way that it’s very obvious for the audience that Phil is in love with this guy, all while Phil himself is deeply in denial about this. It’s like we are making fun of Phil behind his back.

    This whole scenario kind of reminds me of American Beauty’s revelation that gay-hating Colonel Fitts is himself a closeted homosexual, or the glee that ensues online when a homophobic public official is outed as being a closeted. It’s a sentiment that turns gay-ness into a punchline, a means of punishment, the most humiliating thing that could happen to a person. Prospecting allies tend to have a lot of fun with this sort of thing, but at whose expense is it really? 

         At the end of the day, this was never going to actually reveal anything about where toxic masculinity comes from or how to respond to it because Phil Burbank is nothing more than a strawman. He exists to assure audiences that not only have we "figured out" toxic masculinity, but the answer was always as simple and fun as dishing back the hate that they have spewed into the world--a solution that doesn't itself really line up with principles of healthy manhood.

 

Killing Toxic Masculinity

         The film begins with a voiceover of Peter asking the question, “What kind of man would I be if I did not help my mother? If I did not save her?” And that seems to be all that the film thinks it needs to justify its ultimatum: “If I do not kill this man—literally end his life—how can I call myself a feminist?”

From Here to Eternity (1953)

         On paper, Peter has a lot in common with many other male film characters I have written about who are templars of healthy masculinity. In a way it makes sense that he would be the one to defeat Phil. That all on the table, I’ve never really felt any sense of kinship with or validation from the Peter character, or in how he eventually brings about Phil’s demise.

         I find it interesting, for example, that Phil making fun of Peter for crafting paper flowers is supposed to be the thing that signals him as this beacon of healthy masculinity because the film doesn’t go out of its way to contrast him with Phil by, say speaking up for small and helpless things. This is a pretty reliable way to signal that your hero is a hero, and it would certainly contrast him against Phil’s callousness. This movie has him on his mission to save his mother, sure, but this mode of behavior isn’t really echoed by anything else he does or how he treats other vulnerable things. There’s even kind of a bait-and-switch where Peter is shown cuddling a small rabbit only for us later to find that he has killed the thing to dissect it under a microscope for his medical study.

    Compassion, humanity, mercy, these things are part and parcel to the discussion on healthy manhood. And they feel curiously absent in this grand statement about toxic masculinity, which makes this whole enterprise really dissonant, especially the part about the “good guy” in this story killing his opponent. The film imagines that it’s any more honorable or noble for our hero to kill his enemy with an infection than with a gun. And no, this isn’t about giving a good-looking dude as many chances to squander as he pleases. This is about … is this how men who claim to have understood the basic tenets of healthy masculinity solve their problems? 

As a point of comparison, let’s examine another instance in the media sphere where a vessel of healthy masculinity is tasked with restoring order by eliminating a vindictive madman in service of a greater good.

In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Aang is a pacifistic child who spends three seasons hopping around the world and playing with as many furry little things as he can. But as the only one who can master all four elements, he also has a responsibility to end the reign of terror of an evil overlord. If he does not do this, a lot of people will die. In this way Aang has the same basic assignment as Peter: I need to protect my mother/world from this evil dude at whatever cost, but the two stories come to different conclusions.

         In the climactic episode of “Avatar,” Aang overpowers his enemy in a powerful display of strength, but at the last moment he ultimately refuses to commit this necessary evil, but it’s not because he is lacking in commitment, strength, or the things we might call heroic. His actual solution, to reach into the Fire Lord’s spirit and take away his ability to use fire, actually requires him to attain a level of spiritual conviction that no previous Avatar had ever achieved. He is so committed to peace at all costs that his resolve actually overpowers that of the bad guy he is supposed to “destroy,” and really it’s that dedication to his principles that even qualifies him to be this “chosen one” figure in the first place. That is healthy masculinity in action.

        Back in Westernland, Peter does not even look for an alternate solution. He just watches as Phil poisons himself. Orchestrating Phil's death is not a situation Peter is forced into, especially seeing how Peter actually has something like a relationship with Phil by the film’s end. In this way, Phil and Peter have a lot in common with Ethan and Martin from The Searchers, but Peter never makes any effort to leverage this newfound relationship with Phil to get him to leave his mother alone. This film imagines that The Searchers would have been better if Martin had just shot Ethan and left him to die in the dust. Peter's arc is often framed like little Timmy is finally standing up to his playground bully, but anytime I let myself think for more than two seconds about how it all plays out, the whole thing just sounds like little Timmy's supervillain origin story.

    More to the point, we don’t get the idea that Peter does or ever will feel bad or even conflicted about this. The final scene actually seals Peter’s actions with him reciting a scripture in Psalms about The Lord delivering him from “the power of the dog,” which is where this story gets its title, endowing this whole ordeal with some divine approval. This isn’t even played like some necessary evil that will hang over Peter’s soul for all eternity. The lighting in this scene is literally the most golden shot in the entire film: we feel absolutely no conflict about what Peter did.

There might have been a more interesting ending, one that made sense internally and also made valid comments on the western genre, that ends with Peter having “done what he had to” but wondering whether he paid some fatal price in the process. This might have put him in the same mold as the Ethans and Shanes before him and left the audience with something to chew on.

    But then, the movie doesn’t really want the audience to doubt whether this was a necessary measure. The story never really lets the audience sit with the fact that our hero knowingly, willingly took the life of someone who trusted him. (This man was literally his step-dad’s brother. Did he not even pause to imagine how he would feel about this?) Nuance was never really the aim of the game. Killing the Phils of the world is just more interesting than trying to understand them.

Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, one of those rare film critics who actually shared my irritation toward the film, probably said it best when he described,

“The real dramatic secret of ‘The Power of the Dog’ is that it’s as morally simple and unambiguous as a storybook fable … What you’re watching isn’t a drama of wrenching moral cataclysm. It’s an artfully staged stacked deck.”

  

Predator (1987)

   This isn’t to say that the film is wrong for asking questions about the stories we tell and how they build the world we live in, but if we really want to look at what part the media has played in reinforcing the parts of masculinity we’d call toxic, there are certainly better starting points. The 1980s, for example, gave us a lot of hypermasculine “role models” whose crassness and ruthlessness were framed as both necessary and admirable, and all without the shades of gray that dominated films like Shane or The Searchers. And again, there is so much media already out there that covers this same territory much more authentically.

        Nocturnal Animals shows how masculinity in its softer form is still penalized by a society that purports to champion it. Breaking Bad and The Sopranos do a much better job at exploring the ecosystem in which these toxic attitudes are fed. Promising Young Woman manages to be much more ruthless in its examination of toxic masculinity in the present time, not some long-gone history, and it undercuts talking points and rationales that were accepted only years before. And then, of course, you have the body of classical westerns. 

         The Power of the Dog is not smarter or bolder than past attempts to understand this thing called “toxic masculinity.” It’s just angrier.

 

Beyond the Sunset

         The prompt that got me started on this whole mess was the possibility of writing about a movie—preferably a recent movie—that poorly represented masculinity. But as I dug more into this subject, I came to see that as much as anything else, this film shows our twisted relationship to history itself. To attempt to relate to history—or even to understand it—is to risk condoning it, and that’s just not a risk a lot of people are willing to take. That conflation is a key reason why so many younger audiences simply refuse to engage with older media in the first place. And so I can't help but resent films like The Power of the Dog just a little for selling this narrative that gives audiences a false sense of progress by distorting what it is we're actually trying to move on from.

  I don’t think I’m putting out anything unprecedented in my overview of the western and its relationship to masculinity–that final shot of The Searchers is one of the most widely discussed pieces of film in the entire discourse. So I don’t totally know why both the filmmaking team and the critics come off imagining that this movie somehow flips the script or says things that no one else has been “brave” enough to before. I can only guess that the alternative is just too uncomfortable. If we’ve known about the limits and dangers of unmetered masculinity for so long, why haven’t we been able to get rid of it?

    But what's maybe even more interesting to me than just reclassifying old depictions of manhood is figuring out where manhood goes from here--imagining what it takes to bring Ethan over the threshold at the end and join his family. Coming fresh off talking about Guardians of the Galaxy, I am again reminded how those films did a much better job at deconstructing the mindset that The Power of the Dog is so obsessed with. These washed-up ruffians--many of whom are carriers of toxic masculinity--have crafted themselves an armor of imperviousness as a defense mechanism for a world that has punished them for their vulnerability. What’s more important, we see them recognizing the futility of this all and gradually taking off that armor, and how much better it is for everyone once that happens.

    I don’t have an easy answer for how to purge the world of systemic toxic masculinity, or for what specifically needs to happen for us to do better than our history. I imagine any such answer would be anything but easy. But I think it has to start with deciding to learn from it rather than dismissing it. Letting the texts of old be something you build on rather than something you throw in the fire. 

This all to say, you all really should watch The Searchers.

                    --The Professor