Hooptober XII | 19/31 | The animals are pissed at us
The sound of a car driving through the Hills, followed by a thud and a pained dog whimper. Julie Sawyer, a white actress, stops the car and checks on the white-furred German Shepherd. She scoops him up and speeds to the vet. They get the dog in ship-shape and suggest that Julie impound him. But when Julie realizes that the pound will likely put him down since it’s so old, she takes it on herself to care for the dog until she tracks down its owner.
One night, while watching TV, the dog asleep, a man sneaks into Julie’s house and assaults her. When a commercial break gives a moment of quiet, the dog awakens and attacks the assailant, holding him down until the police arrive. The following day, the dog gets outside and chases a rabbit. Julie is unable to keep up with him and cannot find him. That night, the dog spots a black man driving a street cleaning truck. Snarling, the dog jumps into the car and mauls the driver to death.
The dog returns to Julie, covered in blood. Unaware of what happened, Julie cleans the dog up and decides to claim it. We see the dog loves Julie and her white boyfriend, Roland. Julie brings the dog with her to the set while she films something with a black actress named Molly. When the dog wakes up to see Molly, it breaks off its leash and mauls her. Roland believes that Julie should put the dog down, as someone has trained it to attack people.
— That dog is sick!
— Then he should be cured.
— The people that made him sick made him permanently sick.
— Then they should be put to sleep, not the dog!
The film follows Julie as she discovers that the dog is what they call a white dog — a dog trained to attack and kill black people. She looks for someone willing to retrain the dog, and meets a pair of trainers: a white man named Carruthers, who shares Roland’s sentiments, and a black man named Keys, who is willing to try. Keys will give the dog five weeks, and then shoot it if it doesn’t succeed. Can Keys teach an old dog new tricks? If racism is a mental illness, can it be cured?
Both Roland’s and Carruthers’ reasoning is understandable. Roland doesn’t want anyone else to get hurt. Carruthers has seen people attempt to “untrain” attack dogs, only for the dog to kill its owner. Keys’s motivation is beyond helping this one dog — he wants to develop a program that will help all dogs in this predicament, and hopefully dissuade dog owners from raising their dogs that way. And I don’t think the movie is saying that Roland and Carruthers are totally wrong. In fact, the film sets up multiple scenes where the risk seems not worth it, as the dog hurts and kills more people.
The camera work is subjective, often taking the perspective of the dog, but also the other characters, so that we can take on their sympathies. And that’s crucial: nearly everyone we focus on is sympathetic in one way or another. The close-ups are SO CLOSE, filling the screen. Though the film has several well-staged set pieces, the subjective moments are often handheld, almost giving a family memory quality to the footage. This family memory quality extends into moments where Julie, Carruthers, and Keys are together, sharing incidental moments.
Fuller did not select White Dog—producers brought it to him because he could deliver on budget, asking him to “tone down” the race stuff. Fuller took on the film, but retooled the source material to create a more direct conversation about the nature of racism itself. But after the NAACP objected to the film’s subject matter, worried that the film would incite racial violence, Paramount shelved the movie. It would take a decade before the film got its first theatrical release in 1991, and its first release on home video came in 2008 through the Criterion Collection.
If you were to replace the dog with any far-right Republican, you would hear most people take Carruthers’s side—the Republican is a lost cause. We have seen a handful of Keys of the world talk racists into reconsidering their views, with limited success. Look at the current political landscape, especially in the US. We have openly Nazi politicians stoking a specific subset of the working class’s fears of racial minorities stealing their jobs and wealth. But the racism these working-class folks believe is not rooted in anything innate, but a social conditioning from generations that have misdiagnosed the source of their day-to-day financial struggles.
If you’re looking for Cujo, you’ve come to the wrong place. The movie takes the structure of an inspirational film and tosses in moments of “animals running amok” horror.
Stray (HA!) Thoughts / Spoilers
- The movie originally went to Roman Polanski, but once the rape charges dropped, he fled the country.
- I can’t believe this is an Ennio Morricone score. It’s fine, but it has almost no character.
- The vets are awfully money-focused.
- Whoa, the machine they use to euthanize dogs is so scary :(
- Julie doesn’t get the part she wanted before the studio even sees her test. When she talks to her boyfriend, Roland, his consolation is to compare her test to the hole in a bagel, AKA nothing, so why are they wasting their time talking about nothing? It works, sadly.
- Paul Bartel cameo!
- Carruthers has a large cutout of R2-D2 on his wall to throw darts at. The enemy to people who train animals for movies is replacing the animals with cute robots, I guess?
- The zoom-in on Keys on the animal trainer sign as we meet him is clever!
- The film makes a subtle endorsement of S.A.G. when Molly says they’re helping cover her medical bills.
- Dick Miller cameo!
- When Julie feeds the dog against Keys’ request, he yells at her. When retelling it to Carruthers, she says that Keys ought to have spanked her. ????
- Paul Winfield gives an incredible performance!
- Julie falls asleep reading “Good Night, Sweet Prince.”
- I love Julie’s blow-up when she meets the guy who trained the dog.
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