No one wants to be called a homosexual. The revulsion that designation would inspire in a Christian fundamentalist is understandable. Given the pressures and privileges intrinsic to the position one occupies on the great homo-heterosexual divide in our society, we can also appreciate the anxiety, on the part of those straights most openly sympathetic with gay causes, not to be themselves mistaken for one of those whose rights they commendably defend. It is even possible to sympathize with all the closeted gay men and lesbians who fear, rightly or wrongly, personal and professional catastrophe were they to be exposed as homosexuals.
— Leo Bersani, Homos
Nothing should be denied the blessed that belongs to the perfection of their beatitude. Now everything is known the more for being compared with its contrary, because when contraries are placed beside one another they become more conspicuous. Wherefore in order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned.
— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 94, Article 1.
In the game chicken, two players, universally young, reckless men, drive cars directly at one another. He who flinches first, who turns the wheel to avoid a collision, loses. If neither flinches, the game concludes in a terminal draw. In gay chicken, two players, universally young, straight men, engage each other in increasingly sexually explicit play. He who flinches first, who fails to reciprocate an advance, loses. Both games are, by and large, spectator sports and ones, I am reliably informed, more imagined and depicted than carried through. They are also games involving trust, if only trust in the opponent’s instincts for self-preservation: never play chicken with someone who wants to lose.
This fact puts the hopeful loser of such games in an awkward position. We might imagine the James Ballard of James Ballard’s Crash instead joining a secret society of chicken players. Howsoever he longs for an automotive accident, this is something he can permit himself only once. And so, if he is to draw his pleasure out, he must become a good player of the game. He must win sometimes, to be an exciting opponent, but not so often as to scare the other players off. He must therefore lose sometimes, but no so often as to be thought of as a wimp or a pussy. Perhaps he becomes so attached to this routine of approximating his desires that they recede into the background, a soft thrum accompanying that of the engine.
In The Power of the Dog, Phil Burbank is just such a player. In the macho environment of early 20th century Montana, Phil gets what he must largely accept as his gratification in the company of the ranchhands of the Burbank ranch, their play and, especially, their riverbathing. To the extent that he has known love at all, it has been as the ephebe of his revered and late predecessor, Bronco Henry. Such repression would make any man bitter, and Phil is bitter, but this expresses itself in a conservative rather than revolutionary dissatisfaciton, a desire to secure rather than escape one’s confines, as things might after all be even worse beyond them.
Phil’s misanthropy though cannot be encapsulated in and so excused as repressed homosexuality or internalized homophobia. Rather, it is largely an aristocratic contempt for one’s lowers and a rather expansive sense of who belongs to that group. There’s a class element of course, an aversion to the striver and the nouvea riche with an anti-semitic edge, but this does not spare the wealthy, who are disdained for their idle comforts. Others are written off as weak, stupid, and, yes, sissy. At the top sit Phil himself and those like him, the clever and the rugged, who make things for themselves and do not depend on anyone else. The cowboy. Bronco Henry.
We should note that Phil’s contempt does not spare his workers. They too have their own stupidities, playing the cowboys they see in cinemas while their actual work has been tamed, stripped by the development of the west, the railroad and the automobile, of its romantic dangers. They waste their wages on whimsies, on whiskey, on women, pleasures which Phil will not, should not, cannot share. Of course, Phil’s values are shaky both in their foundation and application. If special ire is to be reserved for those acting out a pretense, Phil’s pretentiousness is obvious but unreflective. His ruggedness, his rejection of creature comforts, and his cowboy accents are not the necessities of a frontier life — he is a rich man living in a large, electrified house — but eccentricities cultivated to distinguish himself from and within high society. And to emulate Bronco Henry.
The novel juxtaposes Phil’s Nietzschean morality against the Christian kindness of his brother George, George’s wife Rose, and Rose’s late husband Johnny. This, however, is no simple morality fable in part because there are no pure representatives of selfless kindness, all retain some primal dependence, a need for acclaim and recognition. Nor is kindness itself sufficient to protect these characters. It is Johnny’s kindness as a doctor, his devotion to his small community, his willingness to waive payments, that lead to his desperation. It is his need to feel superior to the rich in some way, to grant himself the brains where they have the cash, that leads to his humiliation at Phil’s hands and thereby to his suicide. Similarly, it is Rose’s insecurities as a widow and as a lower-class person in the Burbank’s rarefied environs that make her especially sensitive to Phil’s bullying.
So the novel does not simply valorize kindness, not on its own. George, for all his dopey pleasantries, lacks the perception and the spine that would enable him to protect his wife. Indeed, it is only Rose and Johnny’s son Peter’s cruelty that settles the issue. It is Peter’s relationship with Phil that is the dramatic crux of the story and the inflection point of that relationship its key scene.
The scene is simple. Peter walks by the workers on the ranch to look up at a family of magpies in a willow. As he proceeds, he is harrassed by the men, as Phil has primed them to harras him. “The first sharp whistle flew like an arrow as the boy passed the second tent; the whistle men give a girl” (224). Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble, invests drag and parodic performance of traditional gender roles and heterosexuality a political, even liberatory potential. But parody is a two-way street. Such a whistle is a parody of a heterosexual whistle, but the gay man is the butt of the joke. The implication is not that the gay man is like a woman, but, worse, that he persists in pretending to be a woman. The whistle intends to rip open this pretense by sarcastic indulgence.
As we have seen, Phil is animated by a hatred of pretensions and yet is, immutably, a pretender. It is not surprising then that his earlier interactions with Phil were marked by more than the requisite viciousness. In this moment, though, their whole relationship changes as Peter refuses to acknowledge the whistle, continues to walk, looks at his birds, and returns the same way. The natural world in the novel is at once both a threatful place, taking skill to navigate and survive, and a sanctuary, one free from the judgments of men. Phil bathes alone in the river; it is no accident that their previous interaction had Peter piercing this solitude or that Peter himself is often found by rivers. This glance at the magpies establishes the pairs’ common need for such a sanctuary.
Phil’s attachment to Peter is complex in its inception. There is an element of self-recognition. Outside of this, perhaps more rationalization than reason, is a strategic concern: drive Peter apart from Rose and thus solidify Phil’s triumph over her. In its unspoken core is a longing to replicate his relationship with Bronco Henry.
At its core, The Power of the Dog is a classic hubris story. Our protagonist wants something, security, control, and is proud enough to think that he can get it. Given his misanthropy and his jealousy over his brother and their heretofore established routine, he interprets Rose as an interloper, a cheap schemer. He thinks he can drive her out, expose her to George, can even sever the tight bond she has with her son. He thinks he can buy Peter’s affection with a rope. In the end, he miscalculates and Peter kills him, manipulating him into handling diseased rawhide. This death is, however, not a simple comeuppance but a somewhat tragic event. Not only are Phil’s flaws at least in part an expression of a deep suffering, but his vulnerability to Peter, his trust, his lack of usual caution, are expressions of some kinder part of his personality.