“Queer Cowboys” & “Dead Indians”

How NOT to write a review of "The Power of the Dog"

This past Sunday a film I loved and hated won a big prize at the Academy Awards. The Power of the Dog didn’t win the big prize, best picture. But director Jane Campion won best director, and that’s a big deal. Campion is only the third woman to win this category, and though Ang Lee won best director for another movie based on a novel about some gay cowboys sixteen years ago, there’s still something delightfully subversive about queering that most conservative of Hollywood genres: the Western.

Whether or not we see The Power of the Dog as “a victory for queer films”, critics have rightly had lots to say about its handling of genre and gender, especially its complex portrayal of the masculinity of the film’s main white male characters.

What critics have had almost nothing to say about is the pithy, one-dimensional representation of the other half of the legendary duo of the classic Western: the “Indian”.

This in spite of the fact that race and racism in the movies has been a focus of criticism at the Academy Awards in recent years and Indigenous people have been debunking Hollywood’s myth of “Cowboys and Indians” for decades. So I thought this would be a good week to write about the politics of the movie review.

Reviews are not strictly speaking a form of political writing. But they deal with politics to the extent that they comment on themes of representation and history. One guide for film reviewers recommends that, in addition to providing a summary and assessment of formal features such as plot, characters, mise-en-scene, cinematography, etc., they attend to “thematic content that resonates with issues such as history, race, gender, sexuality, class, or the environment”. While the main aim of a review is to evaluate a film’s overall quality, it can also shape how and what the audience sees in a movie, how we understand it, and how and where we place it within a wider social and cultural context.

In a sample of reviews of The Power of the Dog from the UK and US most pick up on two core themes: the film’s destabilisation of the traditional Western and its depiction of cowboys as more than the “alpha male” stereotype (Campion, who wrote the screenplay based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, confesses to having loved “cowboy movies” as a kid). The New Yorker calls the movie an “anti-Western”, a “chamber piece with chaps”, while the Guardian dubs it a “western gothic psychodrama”. Roger Ebert’s site calls it a “quiet-yet-angry Western [set] against a harsh background that’s both beautiful and imposing”. A longer analysis on the BBC website lauds the film for tackling the “toxic cowboy”, and puts The Power of the Dog in the context of a recent series of Westerns directed by women: “If the Western once existed as an attempt to justify the suppression of Native American culture and civilisation, then perhaps it can only continue to exist if it acknowledges the echoes of the US's colonial history. To reimagine the quintessential American genre, one which is built upon white supremacy, is to question the status quo”.

Yet “Native American culture and civilisation” are almost entirely suppressed in The Power of the Dog as well as in reviews of the film. The movie’s cowboy sidekicks are played by actors of different races and ethnicities. But

the two main “Indians” – Edward Nappo and his son – are examples of what Thomas King calls “Dead Indians”: “the stereotypes and clichés that North America has conjured up out of experience and out of its collective imaginings and fears”.

Set on a Montana ranch in 1925, The Power of the Dog is a film about family and backstories, about where white people come from and where they’re going, who they’ve loved and who they’ve lost. It revolves around four white characters: Phil Burbank, a vulgar and rude cowboy, and his cleaner, plumper brother, George; Rose, a hard-working widow who marries George, and is despised and tormented into alcoholic misery by Phil; and Rose’s pale, fey and quietly violent son Peter. As with any adaptation, the film’s narrative is a pared-down version of the novel. However, the white characters retain their shape while the “Indians” are whittled to mere plot drivers, paraded through in a single scene that provides a crucial clue to the movie’s twist ending.

In the novel, in contrast, Edward has a history, a family. Before “the last of the Indians were herded off their lands and sent packing to the reservation” he might have been chief.

He has dreams and memories of the land his people were forced from the territory where Phil and George’s ranch stands. He has a dead father and a wife named Jennie. These are characters created by a white author, but they have some substance, and the novel’s narrator conveys a strong sense of the injustice of their situation, of Phil’s racism and Rose’s empathy towards Edward and his son. Some critics have noted that the film neglects Rose, who is much more developed in the book. But the character who is most neglected is Edward.

For reviewers of The Power of the Dog to treat Edward and his son as real live Indigenous people instead of “Dead Indians” would mean taking an interest in them the way they take an interest in the central white characters. There are so many things a reviewer interested in sexuality and queerness, the beauty of the landscape, characterisation and narrative tension could ask about the Indigenous characters. I’ve found more online commentary on the mountain and scenery, more interest in the fact that that Montana is cleverly “played” by the empty landscape of Campion’s home country, New Zealand, than references to the Indigenous characters.

Yet in the real world of 2022 it’s hard to separate the issue of land and history in the United States from the question of Indigenous rights.

I wish this film were more daring than the positive reviews have made it out to be. I wish Campion had chosen to develop the Edward of the novel rather than shrink him down to a friendly “Dead Indian”. I wish we got more of the understated Adam Beach as Edward and less of the overacting Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil. But since the film does not give us these things, it’s up to those writing about the film, who supposedly know a thing or two about the politics of representation and the film industry, to ask: Why not? And to relate that question to the history of the erasure of Indigenous people in Hollywood, to the place of Indigenous characters in Campion’s earlier films, to a tradition of white stars getting big roles while Indigenous people get walk-on parts. To ask why only two Indigenous North America actors have ever been nominated for an Oscar and none has ever won. I don’t expect all moviegoers or Netflix streamers to know these things. I do expect people who write reviews about “cowboy” movies to know them – and to pass this information onto their readers, to challenge us to see things differently, to change our perspectives.  

To watch The Power of the Dog and ask no end of questions about the narrative and the relationships and twists and betrayals among the white characters and the beauty of the landscape and the mountains, and show little or no interest in the histories and lives and complexities of the Indigenous characters and their land is, to paraphrase Chandra Talpade Mohanty,

to watch and write about an “anti-Western” movie through thoroughly Western eyes.

As an antidote, I recommend two great reads: Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed and Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body. They’re not Westerns; they’re books by young Indigiqueer writers from what is today Western Canada. They’re about gender and sex and love and loss. About relationships. About the trauma of colonialism and racism. They’re stories we need.

What are film reviews for, anyway? Comments please!

Next week: Is writing activism?