ET TU, SAM?

Without meaning to stir over the ashes of that… someone really took offence to – I haven’t heard it so it’s unfair for me to comment in detail on it – to the West being portrayed in this way,” he said (per Digital Spy).

“These people still exist in our world. Whether it’s on our doorstep or whether it’s down the road or whether it’s someone we meet in a bar or pub or on the sports field, there is aggression and anger and frustration and an inability to control or know who you are in that moment that causes damage to that person and, as we know, damage to those around them.”

Cumberbatch added that there was “no harm” in “looking at a character to get to the root causes of that”.

“This is a very specific case of repression,” he continued, “but also due to an intolerance for that true identity that Phil is that he can’t fully be.

“The more we look under the hood of toxic masculinity and try to discover the root causes of it, the bigger chances we have of dealing with it when it arises with our children.

BENEDICTCUMBERBATCH

This was Benedict Cumberbatch responding to Sam Elliot's comments that the film was disgusting and was teeming with homosexual references, strippers in chaps and no shirts and called the movie a 'piece of shit'. So I naturally have to watch it. It's on Netflix, and I grabbed some popcorn and went for it. 

So I watched the movie and kept looking out for the buff men running around in chaps and no shirts. There IS indeed one scene that takes place in the summer when some of the cowboys are indeed shirtless, but it was not sexy at all. It looked like work, not like Chippendale's or Magic Mike. No overtly homosexual scenes. No Call Me By Your Name. No Brokeback Mountain.  What I got was a very nuanced character study in loneliness, repression and toxic masculinity. A Western that works as a thriller. But it's not a documentary, Sam. It was... a movie. 

And a good movie at that. The characters all carry their lives as a shroud. Especially Phil Burbank, the most accurate portrayal of repressed homosexuality I have seen in any movie in many years. His bombastic, offensive and undiluted toxic masculinity burns the screen every time he's on it. Especially in his scenes with Peter, the sensitive, artistic (and therefore effeminate?) son of his brother's wife. I wonder if that is what Sam Elliot called 'allusions to homosexuality'? 

Maybe he was talking about the scene where Phil lowers his guard and relishes in the memories of his 'buddy', mentor and idol (who is dead) and rolls around in the mud? Or when Peter finds some beefcake magazines who belonged to said buddy? Or when Phil and Peter seem to bond over some cowhide? Does Sam think that there were no gay cowboys in the West in the 1920s? The movie is, after all, based on Thomas Savage's own experiences as a gay man in the West. Maybe Cumberbatch's response is more on target than anything Sam could say: 

Need we much look further than what’s going on in Russia at the moment, that somewhere in the mind-boggling idiocy of that man’s megalomania is some damage there. We saw in the president of the country that’s hosting me at the moment. 

Benedict is right: toxic masculinity was present then and it is still present now (just look at Sam's comments). In the movie, Phil's aggression and mockery towards Peter and his sensibility and 'not masculine enough' demeanor came from his own fears and desires (not for Peter in Phil's case, I think, but for MEN) and his inability to be able to express those feelings, unless it was through sublimation. There is also repression, of course, and it was almost uncomfortable to witness it. I think it should be the most miserable kind of life to pine for something that these men themselves yearn for with all their being: another man. And yet at the same time, they deny themselves of the one thing they want, whether by choice, by default or by the environment or social moment in which they are at a certain time in their lives (in a ranch in the Wild West, in Phil Burbank's case).

That repression nowadays also comes from the outside: from political figures like Agolf Twittler and his neverending desire to appear 'powerful' or Vlad and his megalomania and desire to hide any weaknesses. Also, conservatives and the political Right (and some kooky Libertarians and misguided Leftists). You'd think that in 2022 there's very little room for repression in America, but you can still see it in the 'Don't Say Gay' bills and in the 'Religious Freedom' bullshit. 

So if you have Netflix, go check the movie out. Or have a Netflix and Chill session with a friend with a Netflix password. I think it was well done and all the actors are very good in their respective roles. Points for Jane Campion for this one (if you can, watch Top of the Lake which she directed). The Power of the Dog, as any other character study, is a little slow to deliver, but that ending lands with a punch and it will certainly leave you thinking.

XOXO