Jane Campion is renowned for making long, dull, moody flicks that are as gorgeously filmed (and as boring) as anything David Lean ever did that wasn’t Lawrence of Arabia. Naturally, they’re reliable Oscar-bait and great favourites for wide, dull, moody feminists.
The Power of the Dog is no exception. It’s already notched up 12 Oscar nominations, as well as winning numerous other international awards.
But it’s not exactly a hit with folks not suffering a surfeit of oestrogen.
Sam Elliot is none too pleased with the recognition “The Power of the Dog” is receiving ahead of the Oscars.
The actor slammed the film, which is nominated for 12 Academy Awards. During an episode of “WTF With Marc Maron,” Elliot, 77, was asked if he had seen the film yet, to which Elliot replied: “You want to talk about that piece of s—?”
Elliot referenced a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times that featured a review blurb that described the film as “an evisceration of the American myth.”
Which is, it seems, entirely the point. Everything else in western culture that has even the vaguest hit of testerone or unapologetic whiteness has “re-imagined”, “deconstructed”, to the point that the English aristocracy are black, Tolkien is “woke”, and Vikings are “transgender”. Now, Hollywood is out to destroy that last bastion of unabashed masculine American pride, the Western.
What particularly irks Elliott is the idea of cowboys, to borrow a line from the great Blazing Saddles, prancing about like a bunch of Kansas City faggots.
“It looked like — what are all those dancers, those guys in New York that wear bow ties and not much else? Remember them from back in the day?”
“Oh, the Chippendales?” Maron replied.
“That’s what all these f–k-ng cowboys in that movie looked like. They’re all running around in chaps and no shirts. There’s all these allusions to homosexuality throughout the f—ing movie,” Elliott said.
Again, Elliott seems to be missing the fact that that’s the whole point.
“[Jane Campion’s] a brilliant director, by the way. I love her work, previous work,” Elliott qualified. “But what the f— does this woman from down there, New Zealand, know about the American West? And why in the f— does she shoot this movie in New Zealand and call it Montana and say, ‘This is the way it was?’ So that f—ing rubbed me the wrong way, pal.”
“I mean, Cumberbatch never got out of his f—ing chaps,” Elliot maintained of the film. “He had two pairs of chaps — a wooly pair and a leather pair. And every f—ing time he would walk in from somewhere … he never was on a horse, maybe once — he’d walk into the f—ing house, storm up the f—ing stairs, go lay in his bed in his chaps and play his banjo. It’s like, what the f—?”
But Elliott hits the nail on the head when he demands to know:
“Where’s the Western in this Western?”
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Clint Eastwood “deconstructed” the Western mythology in his Unforgiven — but Eastwood understood the Western, from the inside. So his film, at the same time it holds Western mythology under the microscope, is also an homage, as well as a paean to a genre that might have been thought to have had its day. But then, Sam Peckinpah thought and did the same thing more than a decade earlier, with The Wild Bunch.
Sam Elliott might better understand Campion’s film if he read more women’s erotica.
Women’s erotic stories — a massive genre, because women are more powerfully affected by the word than the image — are full of gay cowboy stories. Power of the Dog is nothing but a gay cowboy story. It’s even got the classic, gay-porn daddy’n’twink combo. It couldn’t be gayer if they were wearing leather posing pouches and singing show tunes.
Women love gay porn for the same reason men like lesbian porn: there’s no competition from the protagonists. Just as men don’t have to contend with well-hung studs in lesbian erotica, women don’t have to compete with perfectly toned porn queens in gay porn.
More importantly, gay cowboy erotica is double-manly. You got cowboys, the manliest of mythological men, getting erotic with other manly men. It’s a woman’s double-choc serving of masculinity. For the same reason, biker erotica and even werewolf erotica (is there anything more manly than a hairy man-beast like Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine?) Although, no-one, I suspect, is about to call Kodi Smit-McPhee “manly”.
Sam, this is what you’re not getting. The Power of the Dog is not a man’s film: it’s women’s porn, for nice, middle-class women who wouldn’t be caught dead watching an actual porno.
