The Power of the Dog by Will Aitken

Will Aitken is a Montreal artist and writer who works in collage using Japanese chiyogami decorative paper, laser-printed images and text. He is new to the medium and to art-making in general, having picked up his scissors in 2020. As a writer he has published four novels - The Swells, Realia, A Visit Home and Terre Haute - and two non-fiction works - Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove and the Art of Resistance and Death in Venice: A Queer Film Classic.

View PIVOT, a video collage created by Will Aitken describing his art practice.

"The Power of the Dog"

I watched the first two thirds of Jane Campion’s 2021 Oscar-winning The Power of the Dog with increasing dread, sure I was seeing yet another variation on what’s sometimes known as the pretty dead queer narrative, in which the male centre of attraction perishes at the story’s climax. From Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1924) and its 1962 film adaptation to DH Lawrence’s story The Prussian Officer (1914) to Claire Denis’s film Beau Travail (1999), a repressed homosexual man either deliberately or inadvertently brings about the debasement and death of a beautiful young man.

But Campion cannily reverses the gestalt with The Power of the Dog: the seemingly fragile, darkly gorgeous subaltern kills his closeted cowboy tormenter. The final turn of the screw comes when the cowboy collaborates in his own death, so that the movie becomes a queer Liebestod.

And no, the decorative flourishes along the collage’s border – among the pansies – are not what one might assume. The Nepenthes Holdenii, more commonly known as the pitcher plant and more vulgarly as the penis plant, was originally found in western Cambodia and is now such a rare and endangered species that the Cambodian government has asked its citizens to stop picking it.