Yesterday during my film group, while discussing the ending of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, I was caught off guard by how everyone else in the group saw the ending—that is, how it actually ended, which I somehow didn’t see. It’s implied—well, ok, not actually implied, but made fairly explicit—that the lisping effeminate medical student had killed the closeted toxically masculine never-bathing tormentor of him and his mother.
At first I was aghast that anyone could have read it that way, but then all the overwhelming evidence that I had suppressed started popping up in my head. (By “popping up in my head” I mean “gently explained by my dear fellow-cinephiles.”) It’s funny how I chose to completely overlook all this stuff, I think because of my naive belief (or projection) that a film with such antediluvian tropes could no longer be made—at least not by such a sensitive and intelligent artist as Jane Campion. Hadn’t she read Vito Russo? Another effeminate psycho killer? And I use “effeminate” here through the antiquated filter of the film’s perspective, not because I find Peter’s affect to be at all feminine, but an expression of masculinity commonly and culturally misattributed to the opposite sex. I saw the ending through my own revisionist lens, a film about grappling with one’s sexual identity, rising heroically above societal rejection, moving past tragedy and learning from it, rather than creating it, and without ending up a lisping bachelor living with mom after getting away with murder.
Or maybe Campion is toying with us, using our deep discomfort with difference to make a point about stereotypes? In that case, then of course Peter didn’t kill Phil. They were just starting to get along. Mom would have adjusted. It’s a hopeful story about fate, a tragedy, an allegory. I actually liked the film a lot better before being challenged to rethink my interpretation, so I’m going to stay with my ending.