Feedback Friday: The Ambiguity of the 'Dog' (Patreon)

In an effort to streamline the podcast and encourage a little more conversation around some of the feedback letters we receive, we're putting some of them here and responding to them individually. This one's a little late, but it is running on a Friday. Continuing a conversation among 2021's most acclaimed and elusive films, Jake writes:

I had some thoughts on Power of the Dog I’d like to share. I do think that Phil is grooming Peter, but not in a sexual direction. The film is wonderfully ambiguous, so it’s difficult to tell what motivations are, but after Peter discovers Phil, it seems likely that Phil is motivated to keep the secret of his sexual identity from everyone else. He’s getting closer to Peter only to be able to eliminate him and keep his secret safe.

When he approaches him under the guise of taking him under his wing, he tells him he’s going to make him a rope, which he’ll “teach him how to use,” noting that the West can be lonely “unless you get in the swing of things.” Later, we find out that Peter’s father killed himself by hanging himself, a fact Phil continuously hammers home. Phil is a violent person, but all of his actions are at a remove. I think he hopes to encourage Peter to kill himself with the rope he’s making for him. This explains why Phil is so dismayed when he believes all the hide is gone, and he can’t finish the rope.

The problem for Phil is he underestimates Peter. He sees himself in him, but he sees the part of himself he keeps hidden from the world. The mistake he makes is thinking that Peter not hiding himself is from weakness, when actually it shows how much braver than Phil he is. This inability to perceive Peter’s strength leads to Phil fastening his own rope around his neck unwittingly so to speak. Anyway, just how I read it. Would love to know what everyone thinks.

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Keith says:

I’m tempted just to reply “Interesting…” and leave it at that. Because it is interesting, and it sounds like you might be onto something. There’s just so much ambiguity baked into The Power of the Dog that there might not be any wrong theories. A while back, another listener suggested made a case for Peter having killed his father prior to the events of the film. Honestly, I’d never considered either of these possibilities, which make me eager to revisit the film. I appreciated its mysteriousness, but now I suspect there are mysteries within mysteries I might have missed. And that's fine. As we've argued on the show (at least I think we did, I know I've argued it elsewhere), movies aren't puzzles to be cracked. To think of them as such is to miss much of what makes a film a compelling piece of art, including the pleasures of ambiguity, which Campion supplies in spades with Power of the Dog. (If we hadn't already done Picnic at Hanging Rock, that might not have been a bad pairing for this film.) Let’s keep the theories coming in the comments!