The Power of Playing with Genre: The Western Gothic Melodrama in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (Netflix, 2021)

Résumé En

This chapter purports to analyze the effects of genre hybridity in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. The chapter starts out by establishing Campion’s reflexive treatment of genre conventions, with a focus on the use of western landscapes. The Power of the Dog introduces a visual distance with the epic landscapes of the US-American West that steers the film away from the historiographic and mythic functions of the genre. Instead, the film uses landscapes in relation to characters’ and the narration’s emotional charge in a way that reveals the familiarity of the western genre with melodrama. The chapter then expands on the idea of genre crossings as revealing the hybrid nature of genre categories by exploring other aesthetic and narrative aspects of the film explicitly situated at the crossroads of different genres. This section focuses primarily on the horror sensibilities mobilized in the filming of interior spaces, and how gothic tropes and intertextuality are used to bridge these sensibilities to the western within the larger framework of costume drama. Finally, the chapter analyzes genre hybridity as a tool for an exploration of gender politics that articulates masculinity as performance to a history of representations. This section discusses more specifically how the film’s bridging of the western with melodrama and horror serves to compare and contrast different forms of masculine performances, and how genre hybridity in the film creatively rewrites the gendered formulas of filmic genres.