<em>The Power of the Dog</em> Has a Queer Problem
Western films have long complicated the ideals of stoic masculinity. So what’s still so surprising about a queer cowboy?
This article contains spoilers for The Power of the Dog.
“Poison is a woman’s weapon,” Sherlock Holmes says in the 1945 movie Pursuit to Algiers, articulating one of popular culture’s favorite seductive fictions. The majority of real-life murders by poisoning are, as most acts of violence, committed by men. Yet works of entertainment such as Arsenic and Old Lace, Phantom Thread, and Game of Thrones have continuously circled the same logic: When physical prowess and social status confer strength, women fight carefully, in secret, and by exploiting their roles as helpers to men.
Poisoning both is and isn’t a woman’s weapon in Jane Campion’s Western drama, . In the film’s twist ending, the
