The Power of the Dog: Removing the Covers That Hide Human Weakness

It’s easy to be cruel, especially when we are in pain. Cruelty and pain share a symbiotic relationship that, if neglected, can result in catastrophe for all.

We are mysteries to ourselves. We often bury our weaknesses so that they cannot be seen by others. We bury them so deep, in fact, that we often forget they are there. As a result, we mask our weaknesses with communally-accepted markers: our ignorance is hidden behind our pride, our purpose morphs into blind loyalty, and our truth is silenced by our lies.

It is this reality that plagues Phil Burbank, the dominating character of The Power of the Dog. The man is the epitome of Western masculinity, whether it be due to his workman’s nature, his unruly tongue, or his detachment from compassion. Physical pain means nothing to him because the emotional pain that burns inside of him is far more intense.

Phil is a mighty, compromised castle with sentinels and safeguards protecting him from disruptors. He is a creature of habit, guided by a creed concocted from the many idiosyncrasies of the Era of Expansion. He is a champion of the status-quo, petrified of anything or anyone that attempts to change his entrenched way of life.

Family, friends, and love interests can help to ‘loosen us up’, revealing sides of ourselves that we may not have known existed before. Compassion has a peculiar, efficient way of uncovering the truth behind a person’s identity.

Yet, change is inevitable, and this is a truth that Phil is taught in the hardest of ways. His change comes in the form of Rose, a young widow who marries Phil’s brother, George. Phil embarks on a wincing campaign to tear apart Rose from both an emotional and psychological front. This is best achieved through humiliation; Phil’s strategy is focused on extrapolating Rose’s shame by exposing her weaknesses for George and the world to see.

Phil’s campaign is as reckless as he is. It eventually impacts Rose’s son, Peter, with oppressive results. While Peter is just as cold as Phil, the young man does not possess the rancher’s fear. Such a disregard for fear stems from Peter’s lack of compassion which, unlike Phil’s similar deficit, does not originate from a place of pain, but from one of genuine disinterest.

Peter’s goals and motivations, some of which are even shielded in the novel that sourced this film, are his own weaknesses that he so mechanically masks. His professional ambitions are narrow-minded, not in terms of reach, but in regards to their neglect for consequence (i.e. Peter does not consider the consequences of dissecting a rabbit in front of an innocent acquaintance around his own age).

This culminates in a showdown that, comes the close, is more metaphorical than it is physical.

The Old West has so often been characterized as untamed, unregulated, and unpredictable. Redemption and regret are staples of its makeup, though so too is the reality that the era itself was far stronger and more imposing than any outlaw or gunslinger who wandered its unforgiving wasteland.

This runs counter to the framework laid out by the film’s genre ancestors; Westerns are designed to be ruthless, charismatic, colorful, and clear. The Power of the Dog is anything but, and this is done not to criticize the genre from which the film hails, but to unmask the covers that hide the genre’s weaknesses.

The film speaks both on a macro and micro level, simultaneously addressing the idea of Western storytelling and the arc of a long-suffering, though self-aware, lead character.

So, the message of this film is actually simpler than the climax may lead you to believe: identity is fragile, often contorted by a brew of truths and lies that contribute to a feeling of self-consciousness. When we feel this way, we bury our vulnerabilities to conform ourselves to the era in which we live. When this occurs, we are committing a grave disservice, because we are lying to ourselves about who we really are.

This disservice can come to the detriment of others (i.e. Rose) and also to ourselves (i.e. Phil). Clearly, this is unfair: those that surround us are (most often) not deserving of such unjust cruelty. We also do not deserve to lie to ourselves. Lies breed pain, and pain, if left unaddressed, can exist for eternity.

To remedy such pain, we must extinguish the lies. To extinguish the lies, we must tear them off our wounds so that our truth can be freed, thus given the chance to exist and endure in whatever era or world that it enters.

When our truth is allowed to flow freely, we achieve a sense of identity, an identity that needn’t be perfect for the place and time that we live in, but one that’s perfect for us. And why is it perfect for us? Because we are who we are: the perfections, the imperfections, and all else that falls in between.

Everyone should be entitled to their own identity and their own truth, for no one should have to live with pain, most especially when that pain is self-inflicted.

That is what this story teaches me.