The power of The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion’s subversive new western

When I was 14, my understanding of romance was shaped by two forces: rom-coms and evangelical purity culture. In one, there was a complacent balance of the sexes, where mutual desire overcame minor obstacles on the path to true love. In the other, there was a war of sexual desire where men’s natural lasciviousness was restrained only by female purity before her sexual availability in marriage.

So in 1993, when I watched Jane Campion’s movie The Piano at a friend’s house whose parents didn’t monitor these things, Campion’s protagonist was indecipherable to me. She had a child out of wedlock and seemed neither repentant nor ashamed. She understood the violent power of male desire and suffered its vengeance but refused to bow to it, insisting on her own pleasure no matter the cost (which was steep). It felt like stepping into a sideways universe, strange and familiar at once, telling me something true I had never been told before.

Watching Campion’s movies over the next several decades, I found myself drawn to her vision of the world and to the women who populate it. On first watch, she seems to fixate on the violence and constraint that women suffer under intractable patriarchy. But she is more interested in the devices women use to evade those constraints even when it costs them dearly. They carve out agency for themselves, often through elevating simple domestic skills into artistic pursuits—playing the piano (The Piano), needlework (Bright Star), conversational wit (The Portrait of a Lady), or writing (In the Cut). Her protagonists seek refuge in women-dominated spaces and friendships.