It's hard to think about anything but gun violence right now. Gun violence, and the toxic brand
of masculinity so often associated with it. A brand of masculinity which breeds and fuels
insecurity and repression that morph into anger and is so unnatural it constantly has to be
proven and certified, often at someone else’s expense. Think bullying, for example, or domestic
violence, or sexual assault. Or mass shootings. (According to the National Institute of Justice
database, 97% of perpetrators of mass shootings are male, so gender identity clearly factors in.)
Toxic masculinity = stunted growth and is a far cry from manhood.
Women have an equivalent bugaboo in cultural perceptions associated with their ever-ticking
biological clock. If men feel compelled to live up to a mythical notion of masculinity premised
on control and domination that sometimes leads to violence, women’s identity is largely
determined by their reproducing, sexed and relatively power-less body. A body that in many
American states is governed increasingly by laws that relegate a female’s personhood and civil
rights as secondary to a seed growing inside her. (And soon to be reflected in federal law, thanks
to the upcoming ruling on Roe v. Wade). The notion that womanhood is = to motherhood has
been around a long time. It implies that if one is not a mother (in spite of the fact that some
women cannot or choose not to bear children)—and not just a mother but fulfilled in her
motherhood—she is an unfulfilled or failed woman. This stranglehold on women parallels the
demands of regressive masculinity on men.
In two of 2021’s more controversial films, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog and Maggie
Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, I see an unwitting conversation about the consequences of the
culturally produced binary dynamics of toxic masculinity and emphasized femininity.
Campion’s film, based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, is set in early 20thcentury Montana
(although it was actually filmed in her New Zealand homeland). The Lost Daughter, adapted by
Gyllenhaal for the screen and set on a beach resort in the Greek Islands, is based on Elana
Ferrante’s contemporary Italian novel by the same name.
On the face of it, the films could not be more different. Power of the Dog has all the earmarks of
a classic western, including stunning widescreen images of “Montana’s” dusty, mountain-
dotted landscape inhabited by livestock, and brothers Phil and George’s isolated ranch house.
Long and medium-long shots and a third person point-of-view amplify the expansive setting, as
well as macho cowboy Phil’s alienation from his own bottled-up homosexual self.
The Lost Daughter, shot largely from protagonist Leda’s point of view, relies more on close-ups
and medium close-ups to create an interior, even claustrophobic world by contrast. It is a fitting
cinematic approach since much of the story plays out in Leda’s memory and imagination.
Middle-aged professor Leda meets her younger self when she encounters Elana, a young,
harried mother to a cloying toddler. Accompanied by a controlling and slightly menacing
husband and well-meaning but busy-body mother, Elana does not feel at all supported and is a
poster child for maternal unhappiness.
Despite starkly different cinematic mediums, both movies serve as troubling meditations on the
psychic harm caused when what is demanded of a man and what is required of a woman are not
commensurate with who they are.
Phil, the chaps-wearing rugged cowboy at the center of Power of the Dog, is domineering and
mean, especially towards his gentle brother George. After George weds the widowed Rose and
brings his new wife and her effeminate adolescent son, Peter, into their shared homestead, Phil
feels displaced. The new arrangement threatens Phil’s dominance and the carefully constructed
male-centric life he built alongside that of his timid brother. Driving cattle, castrating bulls,
raucous drinking, the company of men, lording it over brother George. Phil, after all, is
compelled to demonstrate and prove his masculinity. Again, and again, and again. Chafed, and
even more mean and spiteful owing to this unwelcome domestic change, Phil intends to break
young Peter like a cowboy would a restive colt. In the process, fond memories of his close bond
with the deceased Bronco Henry surface, offering clues to Phil’s suppressed sexual desire for
the long-gone macho cowboy who was Phil’s mentor and likely clandestine lover. When Phil
steals away from the ranch to swim naked in a secluded spring, his sexed body comes alive. He
is bathed in cool water, warmed by sunlight, and fondled by sensual mud. Only here, shielded
from the judging eyes of his exacting masculinist culture and the stranglehold of his macho
pose, can Phil luxuriate in his true sensual, homosexual nature.
Phil’s growing but forbidden attraction to Peter becomes twisted into a compulsion to remake
the younger man into his own macho image. He puts him on a horse sans instruction. Takes
him camping. Shows him how to castrate cows and braid cowhide. What it means to be a
cowboy. Ironically, Phil’s bent aim also proves to be his own undoing. After all, Phil is not the
only one to recognize the image of the powerful dog in the shadowed hills. The bullied Peter,
who has managed to survive in a world hostile to effeminate males, also recognizes the dog’s
image. Although his twistedness is disguised in a delicate frame, Peter, too, has been warped
and hardened by the same toxic masculine ethos that molded Phil into the angry misshapen man
he is. In Peter, Phil sees malleable clay at his disposal. Instead, he finds a more powerful dog,
as well as his own shocking and terrible death by anthrax poisoning. Sadly, in poisoning Phil to
save his mother and certify his masculine self, Peter becomes the predatory male he loathes. He
loses that tender self who creates flowers out of paper and cares for his mother. Lost, too, are
any vestiges of the secure man he might have become. A man like George who wears his
manhood easy like a familiar flannel shirt. No need to boast or prove it.
In Gyllenhaal’s delicately directed The Lost Daughter, long buried images of Leda’s fraught
motherhood unspool from her memory like so many unedited filmstrips. Leda bumps into her
younger self when she observes the guilt-ridden Elana who is desperately searching for her lost
child at the beach—a child lost due her ‘bad’ mother’s distractedness. Or so society would
suggest. It brings back Leda’s painful memory of her own young child, who goes missing
during a beach outing when she did the unthinkable and looked away for a moment. Leda finds
her of course, but the damage is done, and “bad mother” tattooed on her forehead. Both Elana
and Leda are distracted mothers. Guilty because of their distractedness and desire to be left
alone from time to time—an impossible ask with young children—they are also filled with
resentment. As a young mother, Leda juggled the incessant demands of her two young children
with her budding career ambitions. She fights for time to do her work, shamelessly holding onto
an identity outside her role as wife and mother. She escapes into a short-lived affair. In the
present, Leda is a renowned literature professor with a rewarding career, but she is keenly
aware that in society’s eyes this means little when compared to her failed performance as a
mother.
Ironically, it is Leda who finds Elana’s lost child on the beach. She also steals the child’s
precious baby doll, as if hoarding it will somehow give Leda the opportunity to be the
unstinting mother she never was. She can’t, of course. The lifeless doll can be taken out and put
away at will, unlike the two girls whose incessant demands governed her life and identity. Tanul
Thakur of The Wire says that the film, like the novel before it, “examines a common resolve
and a peculiar guilt – both related to each other – the desire to live on one’s own terms, the
struggle to live for someone else.” This is not a choice most women have. As defined in our
patriarchal culture, motherhood, unlike fatherhood, is more than a role. It is an exacting
expectation and an all-in proposition. For those who come to it by choice, mothering is fulfilling
and rewarding and full of wonder. For those like Leda marching to society’s dictates, it is a
yoke, and harmful to both mother and child. When Elana learns that Leda has had her
daughter’s lost baby doll all along, she stabs Leda with a hat pin. This symbolically suggests
that Elana, the angry, hurt stand-in for Leda’s own daughters, is lashing out against the bad
mother who failed her.
Yet, who has not failed as a mother? Who has not been failed by a mother? In a culture that
celebrates motherhood with a yearly Hallmark card there is little space for mistakes or
complexity or nuance—certainly no place for an identity that is separate from the mantle of
motherhood. There is the ideal, and there is the woman that fails to live up to the ideal.
In such a culture both the homosexual Phil and non-Mother-Woman Leda are cast as
Frankenstein-like monsters. But were it not for his maker’s perverse ambitions and stringent
expectations, wouldn’t Frankenstein’s creation simply be a different kind of human rather than a
failure of a man, or a failure of a woman?