Thread by @claudioalvesDC

Currently, re-watching #ThePowerOfTheDog and was struck by a thought. Maybe our generation of gays can ask "do you see the shadow of a dog?" rather than "are you a friend of Dorothy's?"

Other #ThePowerOfTheDog musings:

- Dunst is better on re-watch. Knowing the shape of her arc makes it feel more like a poetic tragedy than a forced narrative development.
- The first thing Phil does when he sees Peter is finger his flower.

If Plemons somehow manages to get a Best Supporting Actor nomination out of this, I hope they play his scene with Rose outside. His delivery of "I just wanted to say how nice it is not to be alone." The line reading of the film!

Indeed, on a re-watch, it really strikes me how much this story could be viewed as a meditation on loneliness. Also cruelty, the kind that's born out of loneliness, whether self-inflicted or otherwise.

One of the first times we see the brothers, they're sleeping in the same room. For how different they feel, there's also a closeness that's gone once Rose enters the picture. Phil was already pretty isolated, but his inability to accept his brother's wife only worsens it.

The first things Peter does in the narrative: Make the delicate paper flowers to adorn his father's grave - kill three chickens off-screen. He's a creature of beauty and death. Coupled with the opening lines, Campion foretells how this tale will end from the very start.

Dunst's wardrobe isn't the most glamorous but I think she's one of the best-dressed characters of the year. The poor mumsiness of the beginning, the uncomfortably heavy sophistication of wealth, her arc in cloth. The flowers in her hair during that dinner are so perfect.

Notice that the flower burning is an insult to both Peter and Rose. After all, the first thing Phil knows of Rose's past is that she was a florist once upon a time. Makes the hair flowers, later on, feel like a pursuit of comfort in the battlefield of domestic terror.

The adornments are also an implicit confrontation towards the brute. In her own ways, she's trying to be as passive-aggressive as Phil. She's just not very successful at that, nor is she cruel enough. It's similar to how her pink satin cowgirl shirt feels within the story.

Peter's wardrobe is similarly full of character details. He's always loved himself clinical clean white things, but all his whites are cream and yellowed at the start. Poor and living in the middle of nowhere, they have to be.

After he goes to the city for college, he comes back with bright white things, shiny and almost blue-ish in their bleached shades. Those shoes are as out-of-place as Rose's entire costume but they don't ring like a failed insult. Instead, they are a provocation.

And those sets! I like that you can see the lived age of the constructions. The mansion is obviously immaculate - if suffocating - but Rose's establishment is a marvel of subtle design. It's humble and weathered on the outside but the interior is freshly painted and shiny clean.

I'm so glad Smell-o-vision isn't a thing that took off. Imagine how horribly this movie would stench. Phil alone would be a cornucopia of foul smells, rotten dirtiness as a weapon. The mix of manure and high-society perfumes in the dinner would probably give me a migraine.

- As @NickT00783 said to me when he was re-watching this film, Frances Conroy should be in more things.
- Dunst's face during the terrible dinner party is a monument of despair. Rose's a trapped wild animal and Phil is great at breaking in horses.

Back from college, Peter speaks of a friend who he calls "Professor." The other guy calls him "Doctor," supposedly because it's what they both want to be. I like to imagine the demon twink is having some roleplaying fun in college. He certainly comes home with sexual confidence.

It's interesting to hear how Dunst negotiates Rose's loss of control as the film goes by. Early on in her downward spiral, when the husband almost catches her drinking, she's able to talk as if nothing happened. Her voice tells a perfect lie through its steady tones.

Later in the film, she utterly falls apart at the faintest thing. Her performance can, at times, feel like a monotone of misery, but there are gradations and marvelous modulation. "He's just a man, only another man." said as if Phil's very presence is sucking away her life force.

Greenwood's score is beyond perfect. Its aggressions of strings pound the viewer, pummel them with a palpable will to disconcert, even hurt. The violence implicit in Phil's mind games toward Rose and Peter's manipulations is made explicit by the music.

The way Campion shoots Phil's gaggle of young cowboys - all looking up to the older man's ideal of western masculinity - reminds me a lot of Denis's BEAU TRAVAIL. Of course, while Galoup got to end his movie dancing like nobody's watching, Phil ends it six feet under.

With all that talk of "don't let your momma make a sissy out of you" and the obsession with the rope, Phil sure sounds like the type of guy who'd have masc4masc on his profile. He'd also like to try some bondage but he's not upfront about it.

I don't get the people that say this film is hard to understand. While I love Campion, she's not especially subtle. Look at Phil instructing Peter to sit on it and get comfortable, regard the giant phallus he's gaming into the ground.

Even my dad got the gist of it.

Every year, my parents try to watch the major Oscar contenders. While my dad wasn't wowed by #ThePowerOfTheDog as I am, he is on the Campion and Kodi bandwagons when it comes to awards. Especially, the latter. The demon twink is in it to win it, even non-cinephiles root for him.

The way Greenwood underscores Rose's downfall with repeated notes on the piano is a stroke of evil genius. It's like her humiliation is a ghost, perpetually haunting her and driving her mad. As Swinton in MEMORIA, Rose is chased by a ghostly sound - manifest in form, not in text.

Rose's open despair at Peter growing closer to Phil, almost as if the brute is stealing her son away, feels like a twisted mirror of what we saw earlier in the movie. I'm sure that the cowboy sees Rose as an intruder stealing his brother away.

Differences lie in how the actors play it, how the characters act. Cumberbatch internalizes while Dunst externalizes. Contrastingly, Phil lets his displeasure manifest in outward destruction. Rose only destroys herself. Actors and parts are out of sync, but perfect just the same.

Love how Cumberbatch plays Phil's comments on Peter's tan. he looks straight at the boy when speaking. However, when Peter unbuttons his shirt and lifts it up, revealing pale soft skin, the older man looks away. It's like something out of MAURICE or CALL ME BY YOUR NAME.

Love the music during Rose's run, her epiphany about the hides. When she gets the idea and chases the potential buyers, the piano repetition finally breaks into a clumsy melody. Finally moving on from that one note, but, as she loses energy and faints, the music gets stuck again.

Campion's directing of the scene when Peter offers Phil his rawhide is obviously exceptional. This time around, though, I was struck by how Kodi Smit-McPhee complicates and illuminates the boy's deadly decisions.

While the poisoning is premeditated, it also feels like it was a last resort. The way the actor's voice almost trembles as Peter asks Phil if he's going to do anything to Rose. Seeing his fury, he returns with the rawhide, his countenance changed into vitreous assuredness.

Kodi is just incredible in the picture's last 20 minutes. A part of his performance is a mood piece dependant on cinematic form to make sense, that's for sure. Still, it's full of such moments - the decision, the kiss of an executioner's cigarette, a question of nakedness.

One of the last times we see Phil, he's alone in a room for two people, an empty bed by his side. Outside, he asks for Peter, but he doesn't come. Delirious, he's still trying to please the boy whose greatest cruelty might be his absence at the cowboy's final hour.

There's something to be said about restraint in cinematography. As Phil dies, his hand looks gruesome beyond belief, in part, because its colors are so grotesque and discordant within the movie's palette. The world also looks more golden after he's gone, as if cleansed by death.

That last shot is perfect. Chef's kiss. FYC: Jane Campion for Best Director & Ari Wegner for Best Cinematography.

Also, I just realized that two of the main forces at play in Greenwood's score are piano (Rose) and guitar (Phil). Those two are always at war.

Apologies to those who follow but might not care about #ThePowerOfTheDog. Sorry for filling your feed with my random musings on Jane Campion's latest. I wasn't planning on live-tweeting this re-watch, but it just happened.