In an evening otherwise marked by celebration, there was still a little room for award season controversy. Last night, director Jane Campion took home her first DGA Award for her work on “The Power of the Dog,” an Oscar frontrunner and gleeful twist on the western and male masculinity. But having spent the past few days dogged by the negative comments of actor Sam Elliott, Campion was asked by Deadline if she had a response. She didn’t exactly pull any punches.
READ MORE: Jane Campion Wins Top Prize for “Power of the Dog” at the DGA Awards
“I think it’s really unfortunate and sad for him because he’s really hit the trifecta of misogyny and xenophobia and homophobia,” the director said. “I don’t like that. I think he was being a little bit of a B-I-T-C-H. Plus he’s not a cowboy, he’s an actor.” Later in the exchange, Campion noted that there was only one way the two could possibly find resolution. “When [Elliott] gets out of hair and makeup, I’ll meet him down at the OK Corral on the set with Doctor Strange, and we will shoot it out.”
If this is the first you’re reading of the controversy – and thank you for making The Playlist one of the very few pieces of media you apparently consume – the comments date back to February, when Sam Elliott appeared on an episode of WTF Podcast with Marc Maron. In their conversation about “1883,” Elliott’s new show, Elliott volunteered some pretty controversial opinions on “The Power of the Dog,” calling it a “piece of shit,” taking umbrage at its portrayal of male physicality in the west (“They’re all running around in chaps and no shirts”), and questioning Campion’s ability as a non-American to understand the mythology of the American west.
Even a charitable read of Elliott’s comments would find them to be both homophobic and sexist, and actors like Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons have called them out as such with varying degrees of tact. But these comments also demonstrate an ahistorical interpretation of what exactly the western is. After all, the cinematic signifiers of the American west belong as much the international westerns of the 1970s as any other period of Hollywood moviemaking; westerns are a broad, borderless mode of filmmaking that deal more in the myths of modernity than any historical time and place. Ever since Justus D. Barnes pointed his gun at the screen in “The Great Train Robbery,” the western has been as much about artifice as fact. That’s not a bug – that’s a feature.
There are probably an inside-baseball argument to be made that Elliott’s comments have given “The Power of the Dog” an award season bump, an underdog narrative that prevents it from drawing heat as the Oscar frontrunner. That’s not my article to write. For now, it is great to see that Campion continues to get the accolades she deserves, and that Elliott’s comments – whether misguided or just plain cruel – have given us an opportunity to dig even deeper to one of the most fascinating westerns of the last few decades.