The Economist February 19th 2022 Culture 79R
osegordonistrapped.Playedby
Kirsten Dunst, she is swabbing a floor
in the halflight when she first appears in
“The Power of the Dog”. It is 1925, and the
widow runs a boarding house in a one
saloon town in Montana. For their part,
the Burbank brothers, Phil and George,
are trapped in a gloomy ranch house and
each other’s company. Jane Campion, the
director, is trapped too—in her case in
the moribund genre of the Western.
Or so it may seem. After George (Jesse
Plemons) marries Rose, the film tells a
story of strength and vulnerability, secret
hurts that boil over as rage and unsayable
things expressed without words. Along
the way, “The Power of the Dog”—which
is up for a whopping 12 Academy
Awards—demonstrates the genius of the
Western form, and the freedom to be
found in artistic constraints.
The death of the Western has been
anticipated by critics for decades. All
those panning shots and wagon trails are
said to be too languid for today’s audi
ences, who want more action and whiz
zier effects. The vistas are overexposed
and the politics irredeemable. Parts of
the template can be tracked to other
kinds of movie—to the cops and hood
lums in gangster flicks, or the frontiers
explored in science fiction. But the West
ern itself has been declared, on and off,
to be as doomed as Butch and Sundance.
It has never died, because it is an
unkillably flexible genre. Natural justice
versus the formal kind, the embrace of
domesticity and the wide world’s allure,
duels between men and callousness
towards women, perilous journeys, fears
faced and fled: these Western themes, all
of which feature in Ms Campion’s film,
will never be stale. The Western served as
a commentary on McCarthyism in “High
Noon” and on the Vietnam war in “TheWildBunch”.Crucially,themeaningofits
key elements can be reversed at will.
The violence at the Western’s heart can
be noble or tawdry. Masculinity can be
virtuous or toxic; lawmen, outlaws and
avengers either righteous or sadistic.
America can be a dream or a racist night
mare. Revisionism is one of the genre’s
proudest traditions. It encompasses the
homoeroticism of “Brokeback Mountain”
and John Wayne’s oldschool heroism in
“Stagecoach”. Its setting is both the blasted
terrain of “The Outlaw Josey Wales” and
the grandeur of Monument Valley.
“The Power of the Dog” finds new
depths in Western motifs—fresh dangers
in the landscape and suffocation in the
homestead, and a queasy affinity between
villain and innocent. In the novel of 1967
on which it is based, Thomas Savage
writes that Rose’s arrival at the Burbank
ranch “could mean the end of the world, as
Phil knew it”. Played by Benedict Cumber
batch, Phil sets out to destroy her, to that
end bullying and then befriending her
effete but steely son Peter (Kodi Smit
McPhee). Only now the weapons are notsixshooters but a stretch of rawhide
rope, a banjo and a whistled tune.
Like the violence, time and memory
are recalibrated. In lots of previous West
erns, the clock ticks down not only to a
gunfight but to the demise of the West, as
railroads and the government move in.
Here the Old West is not just past; it is a
legend, even a lie.
In the novel the ranchhands are “all
playacting, like they saw in the moving
pictures”; in the film, Mr Cumberbatch
walks with a tense strut that suggests
Phil is impersonating a cowboy as much
as the actor is. He longs for a dead com
rade named Bronco Henry, a figure more
powerful for remaining offscreen. At the
last, the story turns out to have been not
only a Western but a murder mystery, its
clues scattered lightly and the plot
wound tight. The killer, you realise, gave
warning of the crime, but nobody lis
tened, as people often don’t.
For these characters, as for most
people in real life, liberation lies not in
running away but in making the most of
constricting circumstances. Likewise, a
seemingly limiting form—the selfpor
trait, say, or the sonnet, or the Western—
can be a chance for an artist to take a
personal stand. Each departure in look
and feel can be an assertion of indepen
dence. The contrast with the canon re
doubles the effects. In lazy hands, a
genre is a shortcut or a comfort blanket;
in talented ones, it is a challenge.
Ms Campion rises to it triumphantly.
By rights, her film will win a tengallon
hatful of Oscars at the ceremony on
March 27th. Then again, awards, like life,
are not always fair. Or, as a character says
in “Unforgiven”, another drama of rough
justice that was said to have saved the
Western 30 years ago: “Deserve’s got
nothing to do with it.”Back Story The Western rides again
“The Power of the Dog” demonstrates the grit and flexibility of a venerable genrewith Pewabic’s glittering tiles. During the
Depression, which hit Michigan and its
manufacturing badly, the pottery pivoted
to make smaller pieces such as buttons,
brooches and ashtrays. Jobs and people left
cities after the second world war; in 1965,
four years after Perry’s death, Pewabic was
handed over to Michigan State University’s
ceramics programme. Later a nonprofit
organisation took it over.
The workshop’s fortunes recovered as
Detroit crawled out of its protracted slump;
the city’s low prices attracted creative
youngsters from across the country. In 1987
Michele Oka Doner, a Floridaborn artist,
won a competition to design a new
installation at Herald Square subway sta
tion in New York, and chose gold Pewabic
tiles for her 11,000piece mosaic, “Radiant
Site”. In 1991 the studio was designated a
National Historic Landmark. More recent
ly, when construction began at Detroit’s
flagship stadium, Little Caesars Arena, in
2014, the pottery was commissioned to
create an imposing, 5,000piece exterior
mosaic. And these days riders on the city’s
new tram network, the QLine, can see its
tilings at every stop. Today Pewabic is part of a renewed Arts
and Crafts movement, argues Mr McBride,
as some consumers again opt for artisanal
products rather than massproduced
schlock. Sales of pottery and tiles have in
creased by a fifth since 2019; Mr McBride
reckons the pandemic inspired people
stuck at home to spend more on furnish
ings. But, true to its roots, Pewabic remains
a small outfit with only a few dozen em
ployees, who still use its original clay mix
er from 1912. Its story over the pastcentury,
much like Detroit’s, is one of ingenuity,ad
aptation and, above all, resilience.n