On a less subtle note, the queer western burst into the popular consciousness in 2005 with Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain.” Here were two stars, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, playing Wyoming ranchers hopelessly in love with each other. In this sense, “The Power of the Dog” has more in common with Claire Denis’ often-shirtless 1999 French Foreign Legion/battle of wills film “Beau Travail” than any western. It’s the inverse of film theorist Laura Mulvey’s male gaze, in which the world is depicted from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents women as sexual objects. But the aesthetics here are more important than the screenplay.Ĭampion, one of cinema’s great sensualists, captures Phil and his men with water glimmering in the sun off their nude bodies, muscles tensed, not a woman in sight.
The plot and characterizations deepen as Peter stumbles upon an old male nudie cache that apparently belonged to Bronco Henry, and Phil begins wooing Peter, at one point stopping just short of kissing him.
