A Boy and His Dog – Only for Die-Hard Misogynists
By stephanie - Monday, June 19th, 2006
Don Johnson had quite a film career in the 1970s prior to starring in Miami Vice. First, he was The Harrad Experiment, which was a film about a college where the students were shacked up with one another to explore concepts of sex and group marriage. (That film, by the way, is worth renting, because it’s so dated and silly on many levels.)
He continues his career as a walking sex fiend in 1975′s A Boy and His Dog. There, in a post-apocalyptic America, Johnson runs around a Mad Max world as a serial rapist, with a telepathic dog as his only companion.
Some have called this the greatest science fiction film ever made. I can only guess that such folks either haven’t watched a lot of good sci-fi films or they’re just off their rocker. Besides the awful politics, which I’ll get into in a second, A Boy and His Dog has this main problem with it:
An absolutely annoying “talking” dog. He talks in his mind the way the kids from Look Who’s Talking do. There’s no explanation as to how he got these mysterious powers. It’s completely unbelievable, never mind that the actor has a voice who sounds a lot like KITT from Night Rider. I’m not sure what the heck a real dog might sound like if he spoke telepathically, but this sure wasn’t it.
The dog is also surprisingly mean and sarcastic. I might have even bought this rotten personality, if the dog had been some sort of mean-looking hound, like a pit bull with a scar over his eye. But no, he’s one of those shaggy dogs, the same type of dog found in the Shaggy Dog movies. Ridiculous.
If you can get past the fact that the dog talks, then you must then accept the fact that he’s somehow lost his ability to sniff out food, and yet he can find any woman in the vicinity through his psychic powers.
This is hardly “hard” science fiction.
From there, we find that the dog finds these women so that Vic (Don Johnson’s character) can rape them. Really pleasant.
It is with this astonishing premise that the film sets off on its journey. Vic gets conned by Quilla June, a woman from the underworld whom he initially tried to rape. The underworld is community that lives under the ground, protected from the effects of the nuclear holocaust. Only, the men there are sterile, so they want Vic for his sperm.
Vic is lured underground and captured. They tie him up on a bed with a tube attached to his nether-regions to suck out his sperm, which is, in my mind, some small payback for the rapes that he perpetrated on women.
The only good part of the film is the bizarre depiction of this underground community, called, appropriately, Topeka. Here, people are living in a surreal uber-patriotic Christian dictatorship, flying the last remants of the American flag in an obscene recreation of small town America.
Some of the scenes here are reminiscent of the best of The Prisoner, with mindless citizens wandering around a world where marching bands play incessantly for no good reason and constant commands are given over a loudspeaker system.
I felt that part of the film, at least, was a political satire. The representation of Topeka was pointed and pertinent, especially today with the rise in Christian fundamentalism.
But I could not figure out, until the end, whether the misogyny in the film was making some sort of statement against it, or was the film just reveling in it. What was the whole point of the film? Did it even have a point?
A Boy and His Dog has one of the most controversial, shocking film endings of all time. Because of the nature of the ending, I will need to discuss it in order to complete my political analysis…so be forewarned…
SPOILERS AHEAD: Do not read further if you don’t want the ending to be spoiled!
Quilla June rescues Vic from being a walking sperm bank. So they escape to the surface, only to find the dog bleeding and starving to death. Quilla June, expressing the most bizarre, unbelievable personality switch, had already gone from yelling at Vic about what a horrible guy he was to telling him that she loved him and wanted to spend her life with him. This, after he had attempted to rape her at gunpoint. (Whaaaat?)
She is portrayed as this inane, manipulative woman, who just sucks up to Vic the rapist for no good reason except that she wants stuff from him. I suppose she would be the post-apocalyptic version of a gold digger.
So at the end, given the choice to run off with Quilla June, or save the dog, Vic choose to kill Quilla June and feed her to the dog. It’s also implied that Vic had a bite of Quilla June as well.
Pretty darn sick, if you ask me.
What amazes me about this is that I’ve read other reviews on the Internet by regular guys, who think somehow A Boy and His Dog is a love story about a man and his dog.
I’m not even sure if I can begin to touch that particular sentiment.
But apparently a lot of guys find this film to be funny. Hilarious. Sick and twisted, and “kinky.”
Honestly, even before the shocking ending, I didn’t find the film to be funny at all, in any way. Not because I was railing against it the whole time, but because it just wasn’t. Lengthy scenes with Vic and the dog arguing over getting food, with Don Johnson’s somewhat painful acting? Ummm, no, not funny.
So I can only guess that the reason guys find this film funny is that it taps into some sort of primal anger and resentment they have towards women. It’s a release for them.
My concern with this, however, is that without there being any greater social commentary on the misogyny, this film is in effect encouraging the rape and killing of women.
It does this very explicitly. At the end, we see Vic walking off into the sunset with his canine companion, having learned nothing whatsoever, but victorious against the horrible woman who plotted against him.
I’d be open to this whole setup if there was a bigger point to be made. But I’m afraid, there really isn’t. If anything, the film makes a sad statement about what some men think the true nature of the male gender really is – selfish, violent rapists who don’t care about anyone but themselves. (Themselves, and their dogs.)
I don’t think that’s the real truth, thankfully.
June 19th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
It really is a dreadful movie, viewed from the marginally more-enlightened perspective of 2006. But taken on its own terms, and in its own time, it was a half-decent post-apocalyptic nightmare.
I think your analysis is missing a key point: Topeka. The horror of topside life is the cheap thrill of the story (in text and on film); the point of the story is Jason Robards and the enforced Americana of the subterranean town. I’ve cited it any number of times in my attempts to deal with the flag-waving numbskulls who continue to vote for Republican liars.
For what it’s worth, I don’t identify even slightly with Vic in this film, and I’ll bet there are plenty of other guys who don’t.
June 19th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Hi David,
Thanks for your comment. I did talk a bit about Topeka in my article, because that was my favorite part of the movie, and if the film is put in the context you suggest, it does have much greater value.
June 20th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
I remember the movie from many years ago. While I don’t remember it as a movie where Sonny Crockett runs around trying to rape everything, I do remember the ending and loved it. Ya know, sometimes you have to choose between loving the girl or killing the girl and feeding her to your dog. As for the girl suddenly liking Don Johnson, it must be what the Luke and Laura plot lines from the daytime soap were based on.
July 5th, 2006 at 4:17 am
Hey, it’s SCI-FI, not a serious work of literature!
It was hilarious when I saw it a the only sci-fi convention I ever went to,
years ago, before the PC culture and this rejuvenated christianism….
Yes, it’s a release for the target audience (every Male teen who was turned down by good looking women who might have used them)…
But unless you’re on the “All men are rapists” bandwagon, you can’t really believe that most men think that the rape part of the story was actually meant as “funny” or a propos….. It was just setting up the character’s background as being immoral in the post apocalyptic future where the only morals and rights you will have will come from your fists or the barrel of a gun…maybe you should see “The New women -2001″ and get revenge
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0217686/
Cheers
May 13th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Well, it makes perfect sense from the character’s POV and who knows what society might be like after WW IV ?
You also seem to fail to distinguish between the POV of the characters and that of the writer/director, but it’s not a good enough movie to argue about it.
March 16th, 2011 at 2:15 am
I saw this movie in a haze in the early 90s, so it figures I would cite its political aspects to a woman I barely knew at a party, and get my head bit off for not acknowledging its supposedly rampant misogyny. While I probably need to see it again to be sure, this is what I remember to contradict your opinion on it.
First off, Don Johnson’s character is written as an idiot being run by the dog. Don finds food for both of them, and kills crazies to protect both. The dog does 90% of the talking in the movie and all the planning. Don tells the dog he needs sex, and the dog reluctantly agrees, and then Don finds the very attractive Quilia June. I dont remember him raping multiple women in the movie, so maybe I need to resee it. I also remember him taking a while to get her in the sack, and them building a sort of alliance, which ultimately, does not supercede the alliance with the dog. Thus the title – A Boy and His Dog, not A Boy Falls in Love with A Girl.
The end, where Don makes a choice between her survival and his pals, is partly shock for the sake of a surprise ending, and, sure, a bros before ladies sentiment. People shouldn’t confuse the shock of cannibalism with misogyny.
There’s no gore. In fact, the whole thing is treated in a comedic light. Fact is, a movie that has a talking dog that does nothing but wag its tongue while dialogue is dubbed can’t be taken THAT seriously.
But to call this movie rampantly mysogynist when it is mostly about post-apocalypse and a statement on the rotting core of conventional America is a bit much. It is certainly not a masterpiece, but a hard-edged underground movie from a time when people made weird movies they wanted to without worrying about splitting hairs for focus groups. It uses an attractive woman in skimpy clothes as a fantasy figure. By this measure, any movie with a hot female lead is misogynist.
After having sex a few times, she is eaten for food. Again, if she’s really raped in the movie, then I’ll change my statement, but I remember the movie being WAY lighter than that.
Fact is, entertainment is targeted for genders, ages, etc. There’s all sorts of preposterous romantic comedies out there for women which deify handsome tall leading men, while openly mocking ‘lesser’ men. Get over yourselves. Women are as competitive and ruthless and insensitive as men.