The Western Mythmaking of Jane Campion’s <em>The Power of the Dog</em>
In the past 30 years, two Westerns have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and both redefined that most American of genres. When Clint Eastwood’s brutally revisionist Unforgiven won in 1993, it marked a turning point for films that had long idealized frontier violence. The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men then won in 2008, defining modern Westerns beyond the typical 19th-century setting.
And now, in 2022, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is the most Oscar-nominated film of the year and may yet mark the third Best Picture–winning Western in as many decades. But front-runner status invariably means criticism. This week, the actor Sam Elliott went off on the film, denouncing its gay story line and New Zealand photography as untrue to the Western.
Filming in the American West is no prerequisite for great Westerns of course (the term spaghetti Western exists for a reason), but more importantly, the genre’s power was never in its familiar tropes. Westerns aren’t about gunfights or stagecoaches. They’re about how an extreme landscape boils human storytelling down to the essentials: man versus nature, man versus man, man versus society. The Western is Greek tragedy for America’s rugged individualism—and also for its machismo.
The genre has endured through its flexibility to contain action, drama, and comedy, but it also relied on a fairly fixed relationship to masculinity, one defined by stoic icons such as Gary Cooper and John Wayne. That inflexibility is where Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog draws its exquisite tension. Despite its sweeping photography, the film is ultimately a claustrophobic psychodrama orbiting Benedict Cumberbatch’s Phil Burbank—a bullying rancher whose performative masculinity is a not-so-subtle cover for his closeted sexuality.
Set in 1925, well into the twilight of the Wild West, is about the mythmaking of the American frontier in more ways than one. Cumberbatch’s character never bathes, costuming himself as a hypermasculine cowboy in a world where that lifestyle is fast fading into myth.
