Formalist though I may be, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate any given film from its association with Netflix. This is especially the case during awards season, as Netflix is throwing away obscene amounts of money on tacky gift boxes for critics and Academy members. The lavishly illustrated catalogues that depict every aspect of a given production might make good doorstops, but affording films like The Hand of God the sort of coffee-table treatment usually reserved for Frida Kahlo and Vincent van Gogh seems a little cocky. Few viewers have laid eyes on these films, yet Netflix provides all the trappings of classic-film monumentality.
But ironically, the company may have stumbled upon a kind of formalist reality with respect to the films themselves. In the marketing department’s focus on eye-catching swag, they have actually identified some essential traits of the works they are promoting. Unlike the other awards hopefuls, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is not repped by an ostentatious picture book. Instead, the promotional package includes three items: a copy of Thomas Savage’s 1967 source novel; a rose fashioned out of the pages of an old cookbook; and a keychain made of braided rope.
In other words, Netflix intuitively recognizes that the essential power of Campion’s new film is embedded in specific objects, and the exchange, movement, and destruction of those objects. Although this claim may sound vaguely Bressonian, calling to mind the materialist focus of films like (1959) or (1983), Campion’s use of objects is is an exceedingly Freudian film: it seethes with unconscious impulses that are utterly foreign to Bresson’s anti-psychological cinema. In fact, the best comparison might be to Douglas Sirk, whose use of emotionally weighted props—the miniature oil derrick Dorothy Malone fondles in (1956), or the rejected Black baby doll in (1959)—swerves quite clear of rank symbolism, instead providing something akin to Walter Benjamin’s “dialectical image,” a concrete artifact of historical relations.
