Intro / The Novel
I started reading The Power of the Dog on July 13th of this year, and finished it about a month later on August 20th. I picked it up on a spontaneous bookstore trip, after making a list based on a "Must Read Westerns" article. I read quickly that it was a story about toxic masculinity, so I figured it would be an interesting read. Oh boy, I had no idea what I was in for. I absolutely LOVED The Power of the Dog from start to finish. It's rare for a book to grab my focus so easily, but this one had me hooked from the first paragraph. Thomas Savage's writing style is just so perfect for my brain, dripping with symbolism and a strong sense of reality to the story. The conflict focuses on toxic masculinity in main narrator Phil Burbank, but unknown to me, would evolve slowly into a complex story of internalized homophobia. In reality, the internalized homophobia is there the entire time, shown masterfully through little actions and aggressions from Phil. From the way he talks about Bronco Henry all the time, to his concerning and obsessive disgust with "sissies". While I should address the fact that the angry, violent, closeted gay man trope is overdone and less than helpful to the image of the LGBTQ+ community, Thomas Savage imbedded these feelings so deep in the story (both for literary reasons, and to make sure he could actually sell copies in the 1960s, i'm sure) that the story feels much more purposeful and based in reality than the next book's use of the trope. Everything problematic, from the aforementioned "violent closeted gay" trope to Phil's brief romantic feelings for a boy about 30 years younger than him are all so purposeful and symbolic. Mentioned in the book, Phil's parents know he's gay. They're fine with it, as long as he stays far away from them, secluded on a ranch with his equally-a-disappointment brother George. So, in short, they really aren't fine with it. His parents describe it as "something wrong with Phil" and reassure each other that it "weren't their fault he turned out that way". That hatred from his parents, along with his only worthy companion dying in front of his eyes, he closed himself off to love, claiming it was because he isn't a "sissy boy". He even says himself that he had "loathed the world, should it loathe him first". His anger and hatred isn't only because of his internalized homophobia, it's because of his parents and being hated by the world. There is so many more layers. Phil, also, is still very much in love with Bronco Henry, his old lover who was trampled to death in front of him, and sees Bronco Henry reflected in Peter's actions (seeing the running dog in the hills, being completely unfazed by what people think of him). He doesn't fall for Peter, he falls for the idea of finding a love like Bronco Henry again. He falls for the idea of being seen, touched and loved again by another man. One of the five star (spoiler-free) reviews I read was entirely focused on how baffling it is that Thomas Savage isn't a household name, and I totally agree. Have I already said his writing style is incredible and I'm a little jealous? Because I am. Now I think I have to pick up "The Sheep Queen" and "The Pass" because I can't get enough.
The Movie
On August 27th, a week after I finished the book, I watched the movie adaptation that was released in 2021. I was so excited to see how the book would be adapted, because I enjoyed it so much. I knew that some of my favourite things about the book, mainly Phil's internal monologue as he narrates the book, wouldn't be translated into a movie, so my expectations were high but reasonable. I really enjoyed the movie. It had BEAUTIFUL cinematography that really stood out to me, and music that made you feel the perfect emotions for certain scenes. It stayed faithful to the book, both in story content and the overall feel of Thomas Savage's writing, mainly his symbolism surrounding Phil and Bronco Henry's relationship (which, being my favourite aspect of the story, made me thrilled). This symbolism was especially obvious through Bronco Henry's saddle, which Phil kept after his death and cleans frequently. The way Phil caresses the saddle when shining it is very obviously an innuendo to his sexual relationship with Bronco Henry, to the point where it really makes you feel the same discomfort or awkwardness you'd feel watching an explicit sex scene. That sort of symbolism is exactly what Thomas Savage used so masterfully in his writing, mainly the same idea of symbolic sex shown through his description of the willows around Phil's sacred bathing area--the one he coincidentally shared with Bronco Henry. It's a simple nature description at face value, but once you're in the know of his feelings and relationship with Bronco Henry, it becomes an obvious (and quite explicit) symbol of sex. There are many instances of these moments in Savage's novel (regular scenes become very obvious symbolism when you're in the know), and that idea was translated so well into the movie, which I think was so important to making a faithful adaptation. There was a ton of foreshadowing to later events and nods to the book in the movie, as well. From the top of my head, Anthrax is mentioned repeatedly (including in one of the first scenes of the movie), Phil walks past a rope on the floor of his room in the Red Mill (nod to Johnny hanging himself there, as well as it kind of being Phil's fault), and Rose explicitly saying "I don't like drinking" in the beginning of the movie (she completely unravels at the ranch and becomes an alcoholic to cope). I loved being able to piece these seemingly unimportant scenes together with my knowledge of the book and the future events. One of the things that stuck out the most to me in the movie was the Burbank ranch house. It was grand and fancy--which in hindsight, was not at all how I pictured it, but it was perfect. It felt so empty, stale and loveless, a very important aspect of the Burbank family's relationship with each other. It was also clearly completely unchanged from when the Old Lady and the Old Gent moved out. It was just a house, not a home, and you could feel it through the decorations and lighting of the house scenes. You almost saw the ranch house through Rose's eyes.
Novel/Movie Similarities
I found that there were many more similarities between the novel and the movie than differences, which was a welcome surprise. This included small details, specifically some of Phil's actions, that I thought were super important and telling of his character, so I'm glad the writers/director saw the importance too. Two come to my head immediately. The first was how Phil sits in chairs (when I said small details, I meant it). He pulls the chair away from the table, before sitting down like he's straddling a horse with one leg over the chair. Savage emphasizes this for a reason in the novel, as it is just another stupid gesture Phil finds "manly" or "powerful". As soon as he pulled his chair out in the movie while at the Red Mill, I whispered to myself "oh my god, the way he sits down. he better not do it" right before he did that exact thing. I said that he better not do it because it annoys me beyond belief, but I really appreciated the detail. Another I noticed was Phil's people pleasing nature, specifically around men. It's really only showed once in the Red Mill, when he terrorizes Peter to get laughs from the cowhands, but he still strives for that male attention through stories of Bronco Henry as well. There were also so many scenes ripped almost exactly from the book, and adapted so perfectly. The scenes that stood out to me were when Rose first uses the shared bathroom, the banjo/piano playing, Peter's new jeans, the wooden pole game and Phil's sacred bathing place.
In the bathroom scene, Rose is moved into the Burbank ranch house and goes to use the bathroom shared between her and George's room, and Phil's. In the novel, Phil talks obsessively about his disgust with a woman in his bathroom for around two paragraphs. He makes a comment on every movement he hears, and the "offensive odour of women" ruining his house. The movie captures this obsessiveness so well. The scene is silent, focusing only on Phil's eyes as he sits in his bedroom. You hear Rose enter, and you hear every detail of what she's doing. As she washes up and brushes her teeth, Phil's eyes get progressively angrier. They even start to well up with tears of anger when he can hear George and Rose have sex in the other room. The sound design was so well done. You could hear every small noise as Phil obsessively focused on what was happening on the other side of the door.
The banjo/piano playing scene was one of my favourites from the book. I hated Phil from the beginning, but this seriously drove me over the edge. Whenever Rose would practice the piano, Phil would go into his room and play the same song on his banjo over top of her playing. He did it because he was "better than her" and was just another form of psychological torture for her.
When Peter gets his new, squeaky jeans, it is probably the most pivotal scene in the story, and the movie adapted it exactly how I pictured it. Peter gets a new pair of jeans, and walks confidently through the middle of the cowhands who are resting in their tents. They squeak as his legs rub together because of how new they are. The cowhands whistle and yell slurs at him, but he doesn't even blink an eye. He continues to walk confidently across the field to inspect a birds nest in a tree before turning and walking back. His second walk across these men, they're silent. Phil calls out Peter's name, because his lack of recognition toward the jeers and taunts was admirable. This scene completely changes Phil's perspective of Peter, which directly sets up how the rest of the story unfolds.
The wooden pole game was another very important scene. I recognize the importance, I really do, but It's so brutal and gross that I just naturally get really uncomfortable. Watching it was uncomfortable, but reading it was worse. The "game" in question is making a bet on how many poles you can remove from a pile before the small animal, in this case it's a rabbit, hiding underneath runs away in fear. In the book, Phil describes the feeling of seeing the animal's feeling of security get ripped away in a very sadistic and disturbing way. Phil and Peter pull poles off of the pile, until it eventually collapses onto the rabbit and breaks its leg. This scene had to be included, both because it's very telling of Phil's idea of fun, but also because it's where he cuts his hand open. The cut that eventually leads to his death. I really liked the cinematography of the scene, specifically the reveal of the wound. Peter lifts up the wounded rabbit, and Phil tells him to put it out of its misery. Phil reaches for his knife, but Peter pets the rabbit softly before painlessly breaking its neck. Blood drips onto the wheat in the field they're standing in, and it pans up to the deep cut on Phil's hand. The misdirection, where you assume the blood is from the rabbit before it's revealed to be Phil, is so interesting to me. Phil is a violent person, and he enjoys it. It would be a spectacle to kill the rabbit by drawing blood with his knife, but Peter does it clean and painlessly. Instead, Phil is the one who bleeds into the tall grass.
Speaking of tall grass, there is a scene of Phil in the place where he bathes that takes Savage's subtle symbolism and makes it perfectly clear. Before you read my explanation, I want you to read this description of the area where Phil bathes and keep it in mind:
"The opening itself had, in fact, become a sacred grove, the swimming hole a place of ablutions; only there would he expose and bathe his body. The spot was precious, and must never be profaned by another human presence. Luckily, that spot could only be approached through a single passage in the willows, so grown over that you had to stoop and crawl. In all the world, only this spot was Phil's alone. Not much to ask, was it? Even now as a grown man, he never failed to leave it without a sense of innocence and purity; the brief communion there with himself made his step lighter and his whistle as gay as a boy's"
In this movie scene, Phil lays down on his back in the tall grass, fondling a strip of fabric and dragging it across his face. This has very obvious, sexual nature, and is an example of the explicit sex symbolism I mentioned earlier. After putting down the fabric, he slides his hand into his pants as he lays there. This seemed like a jarring addition to the story, until I reread the paragraph the scene was based off of. With that scene in mind, reading a seemingly simple description of the "sacred area" where Phil was in that section revealed itself to be a purposeful and explicit description of masturbation. Now go back and read that paragraph with that information in mind. Graphic, right?
Another similarity I'm really glad they included was Peter running his fingers across his comb constantly. It's very clearly sensory seeking behaviour for Peter, but after reading a few more opinions on the story, I found someone who connected amazing symbolism to the act as well. The sound it makes is a long creaking-type noise, which could be mimicking the sound that Peter heard when he found his father hanging in his room. The creaking of the fire escape rope. The book gives you the detail that Peter was holding the comb when he found his father, and only started dragging his fingers along the teeth when he went downstairs to tell his mother what he found. I think this is extremely compelling, and such an incredible detail that I totally missed.
Novel/Movie Differences
Most of the bigger changes between the book and the movie actually heightened the experience for me. There were smaller changes that I liked, like Phil catching one of Peter's paper flowers on fire to light his cigarette, and him whistling the song Rose was unable to play on the piano around her to further torment her. There were also much bigger changes, like entire scenes being added or removed.
A scene added to the movie that I enjoyed was one between George and Rose. After they stop to have a picnic on the side of the road, Rose teaches George to square dance. He walks away with his back to Rose, and he starts to cry. When asked about it, George responds "I just wanted to say... how nice it is not to be alone." and they hug. This scene sort of happens in the book, including that specific line that George says, but I loved the detail to make him cry. George is much more emotionally vulnerable than Phil (Phil sees it as a weakness, big surprise) and seeing that moment between him and Rose is so important. Rose has been alone since Johnny died and Peter has gone off to school, while George was never treated well by the company he kept. He wasn't alone, but he felt alone and mocked by his family. They see and understand each other.
Another addition that I loved was the significance of the gloves made by the Indigenous woman, carried by an Indigenous man and his son as they go to find the land they inhabited before they were taken to a reservation. In the book, Edward Nappo (the Indigenous man) runs into Phil and offers him the gloves in exchange to let him through the government issued gate and onto his land, which Phil denies. In the movie, Edward Nappo and his son have an entirely different role--they are the people asking to buy the pelts draped over the fence on the Burbank property. Rose sells them the pelts, same as the book, and they offer her the gloves as payment. They are beautifully handcrafted gloves, complete with fringe and intricate beading. Rose puts them on, saying "They are so soft. So precious, these gloves. So beautiful." through tears. She starts to wander back towards the ranch house, before collapsing to the ground. George finds her and carries her to bed. Rose clearly sees herself reflected in the gloves, specifically who she used to be before Phil broke her. They represent her innocence and delicate beauty. I think it's an interesting choice to represent Rose through a pair of gloves, considering Phil hates gloves and never wears them. His lack of gloves is also, coincidentally, is a large factor in his death.
I loved this movie, but I docked it half a star for one reason, and that was change I really didn't like. In the movie they only speak of Johnny Gordon, Peter's father who hanged himself, loosely in passing. Chapter two, the one focused solely on Johnny, was one of my favourite chapters in the entire book. What happened to Johnny, as well as his internal conflict, shaped both Rose and Peter in an extremely important way. He is also very interconnected with Phil. I found it very disappointing that he wasn't included. Rose fell for George because he was a kind man, saying at some point in the book that the felt lucky to have known two kind men in her life, the other being Johnny. Johnny Gordon was the doctor in Herndon, who was a notoriously kind man. He was fired from job after job because he wasn't one to pressure patients to pay their medical bills. If they were really struggling, he would forgive their debts. He just wanted to help people. This caused him to receive a ton of scrutiny by townsfolk, especially when he took in and treated a sex worker without judgement. His masculinity was diminished constantly, and he started to drink. One night, while drinking in a bar, he runs into a man and gets into a fight. The man throws him to the ground with ease and Johnny goes home extremely embarrassed. He obsesses over the fear of Peter seeing something like that--a display of his father being weak. He talks to Peter, expressing that he should be resilient when it comes to mockery, but to always hold onto his kindness. He should never let the world take away his kindness. After this conversation, Johnny hangs himself in his room of the Red Mill, and Peter finds his body.
The story of Johnny Gordon is very influential to the story in so many ways. Obviously, his death is what makes Rose a widow and available for George to fall in love with, but it gets so much deeper than that. In the book, a few chapters after Johnny's death, Phil mentions an interaction with a saloon patron identical to the one in chapter two. Phil Burbank was the man in the saloon. The one who threw Johnny to the ground. The one who pushed him over the edge. This means that not only did Phil ruined Rose and Peter's lives far more than they knew, but he also had a direct hand in his own demise. The last conversation Johnny has with Peter is also extremely important, the one where he reminds Peter to never let the world take away his kindness. Not only is this basically the direct message of the book, this is a direct reference to Phil. As previously mentioned, Phil is quoted saying that he "loathed the world, should it loathe him first" when he was shunned by his family for who he was. He opened up to Bronco Henry and felt love, but all he got was pain and torment in return. He closed himself off from the world, and let it take away whatever positivity he had when he was with Bronco Henry. Johnny killing himself, specifically by hanging from a rope, is also very important. He hangs himself with a fire escape rope, and Phil's bonding experience with Peter is creating a rope with him. The rope is for Peter to metaphorically hang himself, killing who he is as a person. The rope is made by Phil with the intention of teaching Peter to rope and ride, but more simply put by Phil, to make him "a man". To reshape who he is. Who his mother and father made him.
So, obviously, I am slightly upset that Johnny was only mentioned. I think the movie would've benefitted from a flashback of some type, to give back the significance and context to all of the things I just mentioned.
Battle of the Endings
When editing the photo together for this draft, before I watched the movie, I came across an article about it. I didn't read it, but the title mentioned something about the ending being changed in the movie, and I was sceptical and a little scared. While reading, the ending of The Power of the Dog made me cry for a solid twenty minutes. Not out of sadness, but out of disbelief. Everything came to such a satisfying conclusion that I was overwhelmed, and I couldn't imagine the ending any other way. The difference between the endings was not as drastic as I thought it would be, thankfully, as it was just the order of events changed.
In the book, the final paragraph is a direct, factual retelling of how Peter knowingly killed Phil. He read about Anthrax in his father's medical books, saw Phil cut his hand, gave him diseased hides to finish the rope he was crafting, and the infection in the wound killed him. I found this very powerful as a final paragraph. It matches Peter's blunt and matter-of-fact nature, and is a simple yet satisfying conclusion.
In the movie, it is much less direct. Peter being the one to purposefully kill Phil isn't directly said, you have to piece the events together yourself. As much as I loved the book ending, I do admire this choice. The movie ends with Peter looking out the window as Rose and George return from Phil's funeral. He watches fondly as they kiss and embrace outside the house, and the movie ends. After I finished the movie, I went back and read the aforementioned article about the ending change. They said it felt much better that the story ended in a release of tension, as opposed to a retelling of revenge. Instead of Peter reminiscing on what he did, he sees the fruits of his labour. His mother's happiness.
So which ending do I prefer? Both. I like them both in their respective adaptations. In the afterword of the book, it is revealed that the story is largely based off of true events. Thomas Savage was represented as Peter, and his mother and step-uncle were represented as Rose and Phil. His mother experienced similar psychological torment to Rose, and Savage even contemplated the murder of his step-uncle but was "too young to find the clue to his own weakness and destroy him". His step-uncle would eventually died of Anthrax. I believe that the ending of the book should be a revenge story, as Savage is revelling in an ending he himself wasn't able to experience. The reality of the story makes it just that more powerful. In the movie, however, it is much less attached to Thomas Savage's personal story. It is being adapted and changed by someone without that very real desire for revenge. In the movie's case, the release of tension and happier ending makes sense narratively. I like them both.
Something I found extremely powerful in both the book and the movie was Phil's death scene. More specifically, the lack thereof. Phil wakes up pale and sickly with a swollen and diseased hand. He puts on his town suit, and George says he'll take him to the doctor in Herndon. In the movie, it is a hard cut from this scene to George picking out a coffin for his brother. In the book, the very next paragraph mentions a funeral at 2 pm, later revealing it to be Phil's. In both the movie and the book, the entire story revolves around the power Phil carries. The psychological power to unravel Rose, the narcissistic power to narrate the story. Now that he's dead, that power has dissipated. He doesn't control whether or not people care for him or mention him, so no one does. The story isn't his anymore. His power is gone.
| "Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog."
No comments:
Post a Comment