A frontier double feature
Hi friends! I’m back from a holiday break that managed to be both relaxing (because I spent most of it cross stitching at my parents’ house) and stressful (because it coincided with the explosion of Omicron in the U.S., which I’m now living through again in Mexico—fun!). I watched a lot of movies, and I want to write about two of them: The Power of the Dog, which recently debuted on Netflix, and First Cow, which came out in early 2020. I’d seen First Cow before, but when I saw The Power of the Dog I knew I had to watch it again so I could think about them together.
**Spoilers follow for The Power of the Dog and First Cow**
The Power of the Dog and First Cow are mirror images of each other, perfect opposites that are also the same thing. They are both frontier movies. They are both about schemes. They were both made by acclaimed women directors. They both employ ravishing visuals and staggering attention to detail. They both explore violence and hierarchy in the ultimate of masculine-coded spaces. And they are both about both how men relate to each other in that space, and how they react to the arrival of symbolic femininity.
In The Power of the Dog, femininity is embodied by Rose (Kirsten Dunst), the new wife of a rancher (Jesse Plemons) who is trying to climb the (comically short) social ladder of Montana and the American West of 1925. In First Cow, set about 100 years earlier in what is now Oregon, the symbolic feminine arrives in the form of the titular cow, unnamed in the movie but played by a cow with the perfect real-life name of Evie. The cow has been shipped in because the governor of an English fort wants milk for his tea, a comfort of home and a sign of the “civilization” he’s tasked with imposing on the region. Rose is brought to the ranch because her new husband George is looking for something similar: a domesticating force whose mere presence will tame a wild place.
While the frontier of First Cow is a true frontier, one of those very early colonial spaces I’m obsessed with, the ranch of The Power of the Dog exists at a time when the frontier was already more of a legacy than an actual place. (For more on this, see this analysis of one of Rose’s costumes by Tom and Lorenzo.) The person who keeps the ranch wild is George’s brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch)—and by wild, I mean wildly macho. Phil is aggressive, cruel, violent, and uncompromising. He skips dinner with the governor because it means he’d have to take a bath. He easily dominates both the cattle and the crew of ranch hands working under him. He psychologically tortures Rose from the moment she moves in, driving her into depression and alcoholism.
Phil is not a good guy within the story, and his presence on screen creates a huge amount of tension because neither the viewers nor the other characters are ever sure what he’s capable of. But I’ve been a bit surprised by discussions of The Power of the Dog that treat Phil as a villain whose cruelty and rage stem from his repressed queerness. Phil is definitely queer. But he isn’t repressed. In the frontier, he’s found a corner of the world where boundaries are blurry, the rules of “civilized” society don’t apply, and masculinity is allowed to exist undiluted and unbalanced by any symbols of femininity, let alone any real life women. On the ranch, Phil’s entire life and identity revolve around the relationship he had with his cowboy mentor Bronco Henry, now dead. I’m not convinced that everyone else in their orbit understood that the two had a sexual relationship, but their bond is still exalted as the pinnacle and the anchor of an entirely male homosocial world. Phil may have to hide at least part of his sexuality on the ranch, but he doesn’t have to hide his love.
Phil, educated at Yale and now spending his days in (breathtaking) buffalo-skin chaps, fled from elite society to live in a place where he can be himself, or at least more of himself than he could be anywhere else. But by 1925 the frontier is disappearing, if it still exists at all beyond the insular world Phil has created. Civilization is baring down, and it will win. In the meantime, Phil will defend the queerness of the frontier with everything he has, including monstrous cruelty directed at the people (Rose and her son Peter) and concepts (femininity and domesticity) he perceives to be avatars of that civilization. His behavior is despicable, but he’s not wrong to think that the world he built is fragile, precarious, and in need of defending.
He is wrong to think Rose, personally, is capable of carrying the weight of symbolic femininity. She cracks under Phil’s tormenting, but she’s also being slowly broken by her husband’s expectation that she will civilize the ranch just by being there and thus usher it into the arms of the West’s burgeoning high society. Rose is a human being capable of being smothered by other people’s projections and expectations. Over in First Cow, Evie fares much better in her new life, because she doesn’t know or care what she’s supposed to mean.
First Cow doesn’t center on a queer relationship, but instead a friendship between two men. Cookie (John Magaro), a white American cook originally from Baltimore, and King Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant and inveterate hustler, meet outside a fort town in the Pacific Northwest, move in together, and start a business selling oily cakes, little fried pastries unlike anything else available in the territory. Their secret ingredient is milk they’re stealing from the governor’s new cow, giving the otherwise wholesome enterprise an illicit edge. First Cow is less about the impending destruction of the frontier as it is about a tender shoot of domesticity sprouting in its soil.
Domesticity is Cookie’s gift and his dream; his goal is to start a bakery and a hotel, maybe in San Francisco. One of the movie’s most quietly touching scenes is of Cookie, moments after arriving at King Lu’s cabin, sprucing it up with a quick sweep and a bouquet of wildflowers, turning one man’s house into a home for both of them. Domesticity is also a liability in a place where drunk men leave babies perched on bar counters while they beat each other up; it’s hard not to wonder how exactly Cookie has survived this long. But once the cow arrives, domesticity becomes an opportunity. The frontier men line up around the market square for a taste of it in the form of an oily cake. It becomes a balancing force, a comfort and a joy in a place built on harshness. Precisely the sort of thing Phil is determined never to let onto his ranch, lest anyone under his control realize they miss it.
For Phil, domesticity and civilization are one and the same, or at least the former is an inevitable bridge to the later. In First Cow, “civilization” as the governor conceives it—domination of nature, private property, social hierarchies codified by law—stands in contrast to the comfort and intimacy domesticity provides. Other than the scenes of Cookie and King Lu, the only other glimpse of this kind of gentle connection between two people comes when the Indigenous wives of two local leaders are left alone to talk and laugh together. Civilization doesn’t grow out of domesticity, but rather is determined to stamp out everything tender about it.
Both movies end in death. Cookie and King Lu’s milk-stealing scheme is discovered, and they are hunted down by a young man in the governor’s employ. In one sense they are killed by the encroaching regime of private property; in another their killer is a sad teenager who resents them because he never got to taste an oily cake. (In an earlier scene we see him jostled out of line, and King Lu sells the last cake of the day to the cutter.) Phil isn’t destroyed by femininity or domesticity as he feared, but killed by knowledge gleaned from medical science, which is just as ruthless and cruel in its support of civilizing forces as Phil has been in his resistance to them. Phil’s death is the definitive end of an era, the loss of the last cowboy that liberates everyone else. Cookie and King Lu, on the other hand, are just slightly before their time, and they pay the price for it. The frontier may be a place for self-invention, but when it turns on you, it’s unforgiving.