The Power Of The Dog

March 26, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     As Oscar night fast approaches, our chief regional newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, is busy gushing over Hollywood's yearly output.  Full-page ads and special articles abound in the features section, promoting this movie or that, and using superlatives ordinarily reserved for God alone to describe the accomplishments of the director or various of the actors.

     One in particular that has garnered my attention is, as of this writing, in possession of more nominations than any other movie the industry has deigned to consider one if its own this year.  That movie is called The Power of the Dog.  It was directed by Jane Campion, and stars Kirsten Dunst, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Jesse Plemons.

     I have watched this movie, and for the life of me I can't see what's so great about it, or that it's even mildly great, from the standpoint of acting, directing, writing, editing, or cinematography (in all of which categories, and then some, I think it's been nominated).  Gretchen and I watched the first 25 minutes or so and stopped because we were bored with it.  But later, seeing all the hype and thinking that I might have missed something important, I watched the rest of it.  Then I watched it again, just in case.  Nope, it didn't get any better.  Oh sure, there's a plot, but damn, does it take a long time to unfold, and when it does you still don't quite know what's what.

     First, I should say that I don't think a movie needs to grab you right out of the chute, to borrow a rough tough rodeo term.  I am pleased to let the storyteller begin with a few clearings of the throat, so to speak, in advance of starting off in earnest.  And of course I don't expect the entire plot to be revealed immediately.  Nor do I demand that a movie be absolutely unambiguous.  But I do like to see a tiny bit of action, or whatever passes for action, within the first quarter of the movie.  That didn't happen.  Nor did it happen during the second quarter, or even the third.

     SPOILER ALERT here.  If you haven't seen it, I'll tell you how the story begins, and begin to lay out my several grievances against the movie.  It's 1924, and a couple of brothers own a cattle ranch in a vast expanse of what is supposed to be Montana.  I say "supposed to be" because Jane Campion, the director and writer, who is from New Zealand, chose to film it there, and have New Zealand mountains and plains stand in for those of Montana.  Most people who watch the film probably can't tell the difference--mountains are mountains, right?  But having spent a decent amount of time in Montana myself, I could easily tell the difference.  There's something distinctly volcanic and non-Montana-ish about the topography of New Zealand.  So what? you might ask.  Well, here's what: for all the hoopla the film has garnered about its magnificent scenery, there's very little integration of the story into this grand background.  Almost all the action, if you can call it that, takes place indoors or in comparatively confined areas outside.  The majority of the outdoor parts of the movie could have been filmed in front of a blue screen and a second unit could have been sent to the real Montana to shoot some nice backdrop footage, and no one would have been the wiser.  It's all well and good to use New Zealand as the setting for some completely fictional place like Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings movies, or when the actual story takes place in New Zealand, as in Jane Campion's movie The Piano (another snoozer), but not when there's a surfeit of vast wide open expanse in the very location where the movie is set.

     So, on with the story.  These two brothers, one a chubby would-be gentleman rancher and the other a rough and tumble dirty cowboy (but, curiously, Yale-educated), run this ranch.  The chubby one is played by Jesse Plemons, who in general I like, but who, in this case could have been substituted for by the Pillsbury Doughboy or the blow-up copilot from Airplane! for all the drama he brings to the role.  Advocates of the movie will say, well, he's supposed to be dull and unanimated.  Yes, that's true.  But do you want one of the major characters in any movie to be dull and unanimated?  I can get that for free by looking in the mirror.  And speaking of dull and unanimated, the much-touted Kirsten Dunst is almost equally dull, looking like she's just stepped in out of a rainstorm, with a washed out and unkempt 1920s curly permanent that resembles a worn mop and, I swear, never changes.  She develops a penchant for booze and spends a lot of time in bed or drunk, and occasionally expresses her fear of Phil, her menacing cowboy brother-in-law (oh yeah, she marries the Pillsbury Doughboy, offscreen, and comes to live at the ranch).   She even yells a bit here and there, but ultimately she's a timid rag doll, and not at all interesting to watch.  Nor are she and her real-life partner Jesse Plemons given anything interesting to say.  And the host of ranch hand extras who surround the place have virtually no part in the story other than to grunt and occasionally call someone a name.  They're supposed to be slightly menacing, I think, but they're not.  At all.  

     The remaining two main characters, brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are a little less dull, but just plain weird.  Peter is the Kirsten Dunst character's young adult son, who's studying to be a doctor but spends some time at the ranch on summer vacation.  Reed-thin, and limper than his mother's dishrag hair, he's as true an oddball as there ever was, twirling around, making paper flowers, dissecting rabbits (for medical purposes), and, I shit you not, swaying his hips with a premodern hula hoop.  All this is supposed to convey, I guess, that he's gay, and a gentle and delicate soul, and he gets called names on account of that, which upsets his mom, but doesn't seem to faze him much.  He seems to be fairly comfortable in his own unique skin, and not nearly as weak as mommy thinks he is.  But I think the writer-director tries a bit too hard to make him into a sort of helpless, pining away, closeted soul, which ends up just making him a bizarre and rather insulting stereotype of a certain effeminate type of person.  Still, his real sexual proclivities remain unknown.  All we know is that he loves his mother (though he's aware of and complains to her that she's overprotective) and likes to wear tennis shoes instead of cowboy boots.

     Phil, on the other hand, is truly closeted.  He's constantly praising his long-departed rough-riding cowboy mentor (and naked sleeping bag buddy), Bronco Henry, the secret love of his life, who apparently molded Phil into a butch man's man, in the Greco-Roman style.  Phil rolls his own cigarettes, castrates bulls, and never takes off his chaps and spurs, even indoors, and his crew lays around shirtless (but in chaps) and swims nude.  Guy stuff.  Wait a minute: Bronco Henry?  Why not Bronco Clarence or Bronco Leslie?  Is Jane Campion just trying to make fun of gay people here, or merely of gay stereotypes, or is she simply, as I suspect, clueless?  It's hard to tell, but if she's not trying to parody something (besides herself), then she's really got her head up her ass.

     Anyway, long into the movie, Phil stops making fun of Peter and starts in earnest to groom him into a hard (or at least harder) cowpoke, apparently the way old Bronco Henry did to the young studious Phil so long ago.  He's going to wean the lad off his mother, and make a real man out of him, because that's the kind of man he's attracted to.  As for Peter, maybe he's flattered by Phil's attention, and maybe he's a little tempted to go along, but there's something too off-putting about Phil.  It could be that he stinks, literally, or that that's not the type of relationship Peter wants.  I'm sure he hates the fact that Phil intimidates his mom so much.  In any event, Peter has other ideas, and a plot to hatch, which he does, but in such a slow moving, improbable way, and so late in the game, that we're left with a movie that ends not with a bang but a whimper, consistent at least with the way it has plodded along throughout.

      Like a decennial groundhog, Jane Campion emerges every so often with a movie of dubious quality.  If this film wins big tomorrow night, it will be for one reason, and that is that Campion is a female director and film writer, and it's important to give a female director and film writer an Oscar.  It certainly is, but at what cost, as far as quality is concerned?  Hollywood is hellbent on making amends for its historical sins of exclusion, but can only seem to do it by naked sporadic tokenism.  Two years ago, under pressure to give awards to movies made by nonwhites and non-Europeans, it gave away the entire store to a quirky Korean movie.  A few years before that, under pressure to recognize not only Black film contributions but gayness, it got a twofer by rewarding a movie called Moonlight, about nothing much more than a kid who grows up in bad surroundings, realizes he's gay, gets a handjob on the beach from another guy (in the moonlight, get it?), then goes on to become a lonely drug dealer.  I mean, really, is there nobody in the Academy with any brains?  I guess not.  

     Proponents of The Power of the Dog, or perhaps those who simply want gayness to figure more prominently in the movies (a laudable goal certainly, if it's not done to ridiculously), have suggested that there's a genre called the "gay western" to which this movie belongs.  Well, that's a pretty short list, as far as I know.  The only other one that comes to mind is Brokeback Mountain, and that was more a love story than anything else, and in addition to love it had drama, tension, sadness, and most importantly realism.  The Power of the Dog isn't possessed of any of those things.  It's just a dog of a movie that seems to have become inordinately powerful to the powers that be.  So its name is the only thing about it that works.

  

And Now For Something Completely Different

March 17, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     Nah, just kidding.  This won't be different.

     Politics is the ultimate insoluble problem.  It's just people throwing words around, right?  People hurling ideas and accusations at one another while holding shields to ward off the opposing ideas and accusations, and meanwhile taking bribes and emoluments from the highest bidders.  It's meaningless and a pain in the ass, not to mention something that saps our energy and gets the country nowhere.

     Well, no.  Not really.  Politics is, in fact, idealism.  Without political parties and factions within those parties, there would be no debate on any significant ideas, except informally.  And whether you agree with the politics of either party (because let's face it, there are only two in the United States, like it or not), the actions of its members, taken as a whole, reflect the ideals of that party, although they may be watered down by attempts at consensus.  That's why it's not too difficult to figure out, in this country, which party stands for what, and it's also the reason that people who profess to be undecided between the two parties are, to put it bluntly, idiots.

     By "ideals" and "idealism" I don't mean anything superhuman or celestial, or even necessarily good.  I simply mean the things upon which, if wishes were horses, as the saying goes, any given politicians and their adherents would ride.  They are the cherished beliefs, hidden or otherwise, of those politicians and the folks who vote for them.

     Republican ideals include American exceptionalism (the belief that the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world), white supremacy, hatred of nonwhite immigrants, hatred of taxation, glorification of wealth, suppression of organized labor, and nostalgia for the days when men were men and women were their handmaids.  More recently, the Republican idealists have added abolition of legal abortion and of homosexual marriage, and hatred of gender fluidity, vaccinations, and free elections.

     The ideals of Democrats also start with American exceptionalism, because that's been pounded into our brains from birth, regardless of who we are or which party we favor.  Republicans may think we're the greatest country on earth because of who and what we have been, whereas Democrats may think we're the greatest country on earth more because of who we can be.  But nobody here, unfortunately, can get past the idea that God has blessed this country above all others.  That's a typical nationalistic trait the world over, of course, but we carry it even further than all but a few other western countries. 

     However, Democrats espouse, in addition, the ideals of racial and gender inclusiveness, the equality of men and women, support for organized labor, help for the poor, help for immigrants, belief in the right of women to choose, belief in the benefits of taxation however much we may hate it, belief in science, and most importantly belief in free and open elections, particularly because, unless statistics lie, there are more Democratic votes out there than there are Republican votes, and to believe otherwise as a Democrat would be self-defeating.

     I know I veered off into cynicism with that last comment about Democrats' belief in free and fair elections.  But let's face it, wouldn't any self-respecting Democrat be happier if Republicans just didn't vote at all?  Certainly Republicans feel that way in reverse, which is why they wish to make it harder for nonwhite people, who tend to vote Democratic, to get to the polls.  They're not about to have another election stolen from them by the Black voters who decisively tipped the balance in favor of Joe Biden in 2020, and to whom, be it known by one and all, Joe Biden owes his very political life at this point.  In fact, I imagine that most Republicans would be much happier if Black people were somehow prohibited from voting at all.  They certainly had it that way for a long time, especially in the South (back when the Democratic party was what the Republican party is today).  But, you say, aren't there Black people who vote Republican?  Yes there are, but not those who have any self-respect.  I say this at the risk of being presumptuous about the thinking of an entire race in this country, but come on, is there really any reasonable voting choice for Black people?  I think not.  However imperfect and disappointing the Democratic party may prove to be on progress toward racial equality, it at least professes to be committed to that ideal.  Republicans don't even pretend to be.

     (A word here about foreign policy.  Because both parties are burdened with the myth of American exceptionalism, their foreign policy views do not vary significantly.  This posting is really meant to discuss domestic policy, since elections in this vast country, separated by two oceans from the rest of the world, are seldom won or lost on the basis of foreign policy.  We really care most about, as Bill Clinton famously said, "the economy, stupid."  There are a few slim differences, I guess.  Republicans, because they believe we're better than any other country, tend to be more snooty and isolationist in their approach to the rest of the world, and Democrats, because they believe we're better than any other country, feel it is their responsibility to insert the joy of our magnificent way of life into whatever corner of the world they think might need it, by force, if necessary.  Both parties earnestly believe that if everybody else on earth could just be more like us, governmentally, economically, and socially speaking, the planet would be a happier place.  But in the end, voters care much more about the price of gasoline than they do about whichever country we might be in the process of interfering with.)

     Which brings me back to my earlier characterization of people who are undecided between the two parties as "idiots."  That they are, for sure.  But why?  First, let me say that there are absolute idiots safely within the confines of both parties, the Republican party more so than the Democratic party.  Poor white people who vote Republican invariably do so against their own economic and social interests, since the Republicans don't care about them at all, and are anti-labor and dedicated to keeping their wages as low as possible.  But these idiots cling to the idea that it's better to be poor and white than to be Black, and they resent the idea that Black folks are allowed to make any progress at all (except in sports and music, where it's permissible).  That kind of idiocy is probably most impressively on display in the state of West Virginia, one of poorest and whitest states in the union, where the only decent way to make a living (until recently) was to condemn yourself to a short life mining coal underground, followed by a miserable death from lung disease.  Today, only about 10,000 West Virginians mine coal underground (about one percent of the male working population), and about 2,500 are involved in above-ground strip mining.  The largest legal employers in the state are Walmart and various chemical and pharmaceutical companies, which have never been threatened by the Democrats.  Despite these facts, West Virginia gave the Republican candidate his largest majority of any state in the union in both 2016 and 2020, based on his support of coal mining and white supremacy, in that order.  These are people who would benefit greatly from the ideals of income redistribution espoused by the Democrats, and who would be far better off without the evisceration and poisoning of their land by the strip mining of coal, which provides very little in the way of jobs for them any more, but plenty in the way of water pollution.  So West Virginians are a special bunch of idiots.  But they're white, and proud of it.  And pretty inbred too, which might help to explain things. 

     Democratic idiocy tends to take the form of "cutting off your nose to spite your face."  The more left-leaning members of the party will sometimes refuse to vote for a Democrat because that person isn't as progressive as they would like them to be.  This happened in 2016, contributing directly to the loss of the presidential election by the Democrat Hillary Clinton, and the unleashing of an unprecedented reign of terror by her Republican opponent, because Clinton wasn't as far to the left as Bernie Sanders is.  Enough Democrats threw their votes to the Green Party and another minor party to deliver Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to the more united Republicans, and that made the difference in the electoral vote.  This they did despite Bernie's earnest urgings to vote Democratic anyway, even after he lost the nomination.  That goes hand in glove with another bit of Democratic idiocy, namely, clinging to the belief that there could ever possibly be a viable left-wing third party in this country, or any government run by even a moderate socialist.  The answer to the question of whether that's possible is a resounding NO, borne out solidly by party politics at least since the time of the Civil War.  I confess I used to be this kind of idiot, but ceased to be well before the turn of the century, and in any event my votes for the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Labor Party, and the Communists didn't make a bit of difference in the outcome of any election.  Since we do not have a parliamentary form of government where parties can form ruling coalitions, third parties do nothing but mess things up for one of the two major parties, and deliver the presidency to the candidate whose party remains more united.   

     So back, once again, to the truly undecided idiots.  I'm puzzled by them, and would be tempted to dismiss them out of hand, except for the fact that virtually all presidential elections, and most congressional ones as well, seem to be run on the basis of both candidates trying to appeal to these undecideds.  I mean, why bother to spend millions just to preach to the choir, right?  They must be people who don't really possess as solid or uniform a set of ideals as do the Democrats or Republicans.  This might be due to the fact that they just don't pay attention, or simply do not possess any moral compass.  Even most "one-issue" voters can easily choose between the parties.  LGBTQ voters will easily choose Democrats.  Cuban exiles will easily choose Republicans.  And so on.  In some ways I respect an avowed right-wing white supremacist gun-toting Republican thug more than I do a person who is so benighted as to be unable to decide between the two parties based on their platforms and their members' performances while in office, particularly as the differences have become starker.  Partly this has to do with the fact that, as I said, they don't pay attention to the issues, only to the individual, as if a presidential election were a large version of American Idol or your high school prom king and queen election, rather than a duel between two different political philosophies.  Fortunately for the country, Joe Biden got elected in 2020 not because he was particularly attractive, but because he was less grotesque than his opponent.

     The undecideds, also, are folks who profess the sentiment presented in the very first paragraph of this posting, namely that all politics is worthless bullshit, and corrupt bullshit at that.  This belief relieves them of having to think and choose.  I really hope people like that don't vote at all, because the Republicans need their votes more than the Democrats do.  A flat-out numerical breakdown of voting in this country reveals that Democrats outnumber Republicans, and have outvoted them in seven of the last eight elections, even when the Republican has won.  But due to our unique form of electoral politics, giving individual states control of the process, the majority does not rule nationwide when it comes to the presidency, or for that matter, the senate.  And it bears mentioning that this system was conceived by a group of guys in wigs who were trying to make a country that could hold together even though half of its states had slavery and the other half didn't, and who had absolutely no intention of ever allowing nonwhites or women or people who didn't own property to vote.

     So, as we enter another hectic round of primaries and congressional elections, I wish to make this plea to all voters who are undecided about which of the two parties' candidates to vote for:  please don't vote.  Watch American Idol instead.