Reading Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog with Deutsch, Nietzsche and Nijinsky

Abstract

In this article I argue that Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog (2021), can be read through Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1967); and that Campion’s films more generally can be viewed insightfully in a Nietzschean frame. Campion’s films are often concerned with ancient mythic themes and forces that continue to find expression in later times and places. I argue that Campion is also a feminist filmmaker who questions Hollywood narrative cinema from a subject position of difference, from within its genres but re-writing and re-valuing the values of its ‘plots’ (Gillett, Sue. 2004. Views From Beyond the Mirror: The Films of Jane Campion. The Moving Image 7. Australia: Australian Teachers of Media, Australian Film Institute and Deakin University). Campion explores abiding psycho-social phenomena and needs – here, masculinity, men’s relations with ‘mother’ – by drawing on mythological figures in service to the present in original ways and as a female director. I draw on Hélène Deutsch’s (1969. A Psychoanalytic Study of The Myth of Dionysus and Apollo: Two Variants of the Son-Mother Relationship. The Freud Anniversary Lecture Series, The New York Psychoanalytic Institute. New York: International Universities Press Inc.) analysis and discussion of Apollonian and Dionysian mythologies in support of this argument.