Like John Ford’s “The Searchers,” the Kirk Douglas movie “Lonely Are the Brave, “Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove,” Jim Harrison’s :Legends of the Fall” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Crossing,” Thomas Savage’s novel “The Power of the Dog” — now an acclaimed film starring Benedict Cumberbatch — centers on the American archetype of the solitary, unvarnished cowboy, the outsider who remains true to his wild nature even as civilization encroaches upon and eclipses him.
In “The Power of the Dog,” that archetype is embodied with particular brutality by Phil, a bully who drives his new sister-in-law, Rose, to drink. Rose has a son by her first marriage to a doctor who died by suicide. That son, Peter, is a medical student and something of an aesthete who makes paper flowers for his mother’s décor hat Phil destroys. He wears white tennis shoes, part of a modern, urban appearance that Phil and the other hands deride.
It’s easy to see where the story might go, with Phil’s brutishness crushing Peter as well as Rose. But Peter doesn’t cower under Phil’s taunting. His still waters run deep. Like many medical students and educated people, Peter is observant. He surmises Phil’s secret. And he figures out a way to use that secret quietly against him to protect his mother.
Beware young men in tennis shoes.
“The Power of the Dog” is about manipulation — Peter’s of Phil, Savage’s of his readers — and about power. It asks a simple question: Who has real power, the most power — the person with brute force on his side or the person who uses his mind to overcome that force?
It’s a question we must ask ourselves in a world of Phils but particularly in a country of Phils, in which the law in many places is still a gun. Every time there is an instance of social injustice and brutality, we tell ourselves, “That’s not who we are.” Yet I just finished reading William Manchester’s masterful “The Death of a President” — about the five days bracketing the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald, a weasel who desperately wanted to be a Phil. There JFK’s cool intellect and urbanity — his Peter-ness — was cut down amid the culture of ultraconservative Dallas, a culture of Phils. That is the way we were and the way we are now.
Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. I’m not suggesting that we all become like Savage’s Peter. As readers and filmgoers will discover, all of the major characters in the story are damaged in some way. But I am suggesting that we use quiet reason to stand up to bullies, injustice and violence. It’s how Linda Dunikoski got a conviction before a mostly white jury in the case of three white men who gunned down Ahmaud Arbery for jogging while black. She didn’t come out with her metaphorical guns blazing, as the failed prosecution did in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Rather Dunikoski methodically built a case that hinged on the flaws of citizen’s arrest.
Reason doesn’t always overcome brute strength and brute emotions. And a mind without a heart is just a cold-blooded machine. But in a moment of Phils, it may be worth tapping into our inner Peter-ness to remind the world, and ourselves, that the only real psychological power they have over us is the power we give them.