Watching Superman at the drive-in with Bento (below)
I took my dog to the drive-in, something he loves, and this got me thinking about the status of dogs in contemporary films. James Gunn's Superman is, among many things, the first live action film to depict Superman's dog Krypto. The dog features prominently in the film, in its advertisements, and in its afterlife in memes and. jokes online.
Bento at the Drive in
Krypto's presence has been central to both the film's marketing, he appeared in the first trailer, and in the film's memed afterlife. One scene features fairly prominently, at least in the memes, The scene in question is when Superman announces his decision to turn himself in to the Department of Justice. This is after the full recording of his parents' message has been leaked, revealing to the world that he was sent to dominate Earth not to save it. He tells Lois about his decision. It is important what he doesn't say, he does not tell her that he is turning himself in out of his respect for "the American way," or that he believes that no one is above the law, or any such lofty claims. He tells her that it is the best way for her to find his dog, Krypto, who was kidnapped by Lex Luthor.
To be clear about the context, this decision takes place in the midst of Superman's identity crisis. He is not sure who he is or what he represents at this point. So perhaps it makes sense that he just wants to find his dog, and not worry about his image or his place in the entire symbolic order. However, it is hard not to notice how his search for the dog works for us, for the audience. It is, in the parlance of our times, relatable, but which we could say something that is immediately intelligible and identifiable in a way that "the American way" is not, especially now. The immediate identification works in the film, a film that is balancing so many different narrative threads, billionaires, border conflicts, teams of meta-humans, robots, kaiju, and so on, so much so that a simple "boy looks for dog" story offers some grounding to the fantastic.
Or to take another example, I cannot help but think of John Wick, at least the first film. Formally the film could have used nearly anything to set of its orgy of gun fu, some Macguffin to get the plot in motion, and yet it picked a dog. That the motivation for the violence is so basic and wholesome is something that the characters in the film constantly question, and wonder about.
If I was writing more about the Wick films I would say something about the odd juxtaposition of the motivation of the first film, they killed his puppy, and the way that the latter films focus on a byzantine world of complicated rules and rituals. John Wick belongs in the odd sub-genre of genre films that mix in a little fantasy or science fiction world building at first only to have it build up in subsequent films. The first film is a revenge film, in which the world building, special hotel for assassins, gold coin based currency, etc., just hang as so many ornaments to its fundamental core. In that way it is like Mad Max, which added a little social collapse to a car flick, and the Purge films, which used a dystopian premise to fuel a basic home invasion horror film. In all three cases what started as a slight deviation, a little estrangement, from the world as we know it ultimately becoming its own universe.
I would situate this turn towards the dog in terms of four theoretical concepts. The first is from Jodi Dean, the decline of symbolic efficacy. This is especially the case with Superman, the ideals of justice, of the American way, just do not work like the used to, especially overseas. Hyperpolitics, to use Anton Jäger's term, means that any political subtext, Superman's immigrant status, or how the film represents government, lends itself to a proliferation of divisions between "woke" and its "MAGA" opposite. Saving a dog just plays better across all divisions.. It is immediate, to use Anna Kornbluh's term, "direct and literal.' It is free of subtext, or even text, just look at that cute doggy face. Saving a dog or avenging a dog as a motivation is something that does not need any narrative development. It is the kind of thing that could be communicated in one image. It is a meme made plot. The last concept is from Fredric Jameson, from his incredibly influential essay "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," which I have written about here. As Jameson argues in that essay, mass culture, even the blockbuster film needs its element of utopia, its way of connecting with real desires and fears. Such a claim opens up a hermeneutic of utopia in even the most reified films, finding images of a just and fair world behind the fantasies of super powers or of a reconciliation with nature in a dinosaur film. The dog is a kind of minimal utopia, something that everyone can hope for or worry about, without much narrative construction.
The dog also works beyond the film, in its meme afterlife. I have seen both the text above from Superman and the scene below repackaged and reformulated in so many different dog jokes. For example, the clip below with the added text, "Me at a party when I find out that the hosts have a dog." John Wick has also become the focus of memes and jokes, mainly by dog lovers, who would also kill anyone who hurts their dog.
To bring the two films together, I saw this exchange online with the caption "Joan Wick"
I could talk about dogs and movies all day, but here is the point that all of this leads up to or illustrates. I think that we are living in an age of mediated immediacy, almost no one experiences art, politics, or anything without seeing how those things are discussed and memed online, but what mediates is essentially immediacy, opinions, affects, and gut reactions. With respect to the first part of the formulation, I would argue that what an opinion is has fundamentally changed. It used to be if you saw a film you might be aware of what the people you saw it with thought about it, and, if you took the time, you could read reviews and opinions of others, but those reviews would take the form of film reviews and essays, in other words they would be mediated through their own specific genres. Nowadays we are immediately confronted by a much more immediate mediation. First, through the omnipresent references to the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, which offers simply a numbered rating, and immediate quantification, that means we do not have to read reviews, and beyond that the way in which reactions are memed and tweeted, sometimes before the film has even premiered. The elevation of the trailer, and even the teaser of the trailer, as cultural events in themselves reveals this turn towards immediacy in culture. By all accounts the most recent Spider-Man film just started filming a few weeks ago, and has already released its first teaser trailer, consisting mainly of a reveal of the costume. Films are made or unmade through these immediate reactions, which are instantly spread around the world, it is no wonder that they are going to the dogs. turning towards motivations and plots which lend themselves towards more immediate responses and identifications than complex motivations. In an irony of history it is us, the humans, who have become more Pavlovian than dogs, responding to images of cute dogs.
This fall we are even getting our first horror movie filmed from a dog's point of view. I will let that play us out.
Updated 10/13/25
I saw Good Boy because of course I did. Overall I liked the film. In some sense it is a demonstration of the power of the Kuleshov effect as much as it is that of a patient crew and dedicated dog. The film gets a lot of mileage of combining closeup of the dog star Indy's face combined with a shot of some ominous dark shadow in a corner. I have often thought that Deleuze's formula of the action image of perception, affect, and action, a shot of something seen, a closeup on a face or eye reacting, and then some action is in some sense a basic formula for producing a kind of subjectivity. It is a way to use images to produce depth. Perception, affect, and reaction are just a series of images, but placed together in sequence, they suggest a depth, an interiority, that we can never see. The film uses this to the fullest possible extent. That I expected. What I did not expect is how the film also uses dream sequences to flesh out its canine character.
To explain that I have to say a little about the film's fairly bare bones plot (no pun intended).The film more or less begins when Todd, who is suffering from some disease, possibly cancer, decides to leave his apartment the city and stop treatment to move out to his grandfather's old cabin in the woods with his dog Indy. There is some discussion that his grandfather died under mysterious circumstances, and that his dog, Bandit also mysteriously vanished. The film is more or less shot around the dog, so we only catch snippets of conversation between Todd and his sister Vera. Mysterious things happen as soon as Todd and Indy arrive at the house, noises from the basement, strange shadow figures, and so on. We see these from a dog's perspective, so sometimes a mysterious figure is just the neighbor, or eyes in the dark are a fox, and sometimes they are something more sinister. Indy also begins to have dreams, dreams where he sees Bandit the dog who lived in the house before. In his dreams he follows Bandit into the dark basement and into the woods, seeing something of the horror that exists. In these dreams it seems that Bandit is warning Indy. The inclusion of dream sequences is a nice touch. Anyone who lives with a dog knows those moments when a dog is deep asleep, dreaming, legs kicking, eyelids twitching, and sometimes even barking in its sleep. It is in those moments that one is really confronted with the idea that a dog has an interior life that we are only vaguely aware of. What do dogs dream of?
The film gives us two versions of a dog's subjectivity. The one mediated, even manufactured by the language of cinema, shot reaction shot as a way to indirectly get what the dog sees, the other, immediate, a dog's dream, or nightmare.
Bento showing that our horror are not the same as dog horrors
As the film progresses the horrors get more and more intense, and I admit that I jumped out of my seat a few times, probably because I am one of those people who can watch aliens, zombies, and monsters kill a room full of people and not flinch, but I have paused a movie to check Does the Dog Die more often than I care to admit. The film definitely gets a lot out of the sympathy many feel for dogs. Especially since Todd is not always a sympathetic character, he alienates his sister for the simple fact that she cares about him, and is unkind to Indy for the same reason, yelling out him, roughly handling him, and chaining him outside. These actions do not change Indy's dedication and protectiveness. He tries to save Todd to the very end. In the end we begin to see that all of the film's images of ghostly figures and strange noises are in some sense allegories for another fear. Todd is dying, and nothing Indy can do, no dedication, can protect him. I do not presume to know what sort of nightmares dogs might have, and what kind of movies they would make if they could, but Good Boy seems to suggest that if a dog could make a horror movie it would be about losing their person and being left alone. Spoiler Alert: Don't worry. Indy does not die, and is not left alone. Vera arrives at the end, after Todd has died, to bring him home.
Update 6/26/26
Supergirl the movie seems to in some sense be a cinematic version of the meme above. A group of space pirates, called Brigands, poison Krypto with a dart and Kara Zor-El (Millie Alcock) has three days to find them and get the antidote. So in other words, Krypto is even more central to this film than Superman, and for the same reason. If rescuing Krypto was something Superman focused on in a moment of crisis of faith, Kara is presented as someone without faith. As we learn in the back story, unlike her cousin she was not blasted off from Krypton as a baby, she spent years, much of her life living not on Krypton, but on a kind floating fragment of the planet protected by a force field. This diasporic community is able to live until crystals in the planets crust prove to be literal kryptonite, poisoning every one. She is then launched to Earth by her parents, who have no plans for domination, to possible start a new life on Earth. She finds herself without a world, Krypton is gone, Earth is not home, and as we learned in the previous film, she travels to red sun planets to get drunk much to the dismay of her cousin.
As I mentioned above, and as is my thesis, the dog functions as a plot device at exactly the point where any other motivation or purpose is in question. It offers a kind of immediate motivation, look a puppy, when the more mediated ones, justice or nation, seem suspect or questionable. As such it is also situated at a point of metalepsis, vacillating between text and subtext. This device can be internal to the film, as in the example of Superman, where rescuing a dog is something for a character to do when other motivations are in question, or it can be positioned more allegorically, or almost anti-allegory. John Wick's dog revenge plot is a way to avoid any political subtext at all. This might be my own experience, but I think that the dog in the John Wick films functions to conceal just how nihilistic the films are, in Lawrence Grossberg's use of the word, The only value the films affirm is that of simply being the last man standing, of killing more than being killed. John Wick is no more noble than everyone else in his world, the only thing that makes him different is that he is doing all of this killing for a dog. I have some serious questions for myself about why I enjoy those films so much, other than the fact that I like to see a good kotegaeshi or iriminage in a movie.
Supergirl fits the above pattern, when the film begins Kara has no interest in being a hero, or really being anything at all but drunk. She is offered the chance to come to another young woman's aid in seeking justice and revenge, but she refuses. It is only Krypto's life being in danger that puts the plot in motion. Of course this is supposed to be a story of redemption, of how in saving her dog she finds a bigger purpose and saves herself. I am not sure how well it sells that point. There is a moment in the film when she learns that the Brigands, the same gang who poisoned her dog, capture women on a desolate planet to use them to breed members of their all male gang. She does eventually rescue the women in rescuing her dog, and, in doing so moves beyond the interest in just rescuing her dog. However, I thought that the film should have said more about her battling patriarchy in space, since the film has been battling patriarchy online and in the mediasphere on Earth. It seems distressing to me that there is so much hostility towards this film for the sole reason that it is about a girl. This is not one of those cases where a character's gender or race has been switched, Supergirl has always been a girl, so it is not a matter about defending a canon, just defending an all male gang.
Supergirl's star Milly Alcock has been even subject to cruel jokes
by former Superman actor and current troll Dean Cain
I found the film likable enough, I liked a few of the needle drops, the Wet Leg especially, and I liked that it was in some way a small story. As a longtime comic book reader I find it frustrating that so many of the comic book movies follow the logic of the big events, like the big crossover events Marvel has every year now, where the stakes are high and the characters are many, overlooking that comics as a medium can tell small stories, stories of just making it through the day. One of my favorite Spider-Man comics as a kid was the issue where Peter Parker has the flu, and he is just trying to get through his day without letting any of his rogues gallery know that he is sick. Supergirl does not save the universe, just her dog. However, I think the film just does not work, we are supposed to believe that in saving the dog she saves her friend, Ruthie, the kidnapped women, and herself, but all of this feels forced. Ironically, I think that the film would have worked better if it was more "woke" if it focused on the thing that connected Supergirl to Ruthie and to the kidnapped women, that they are all women. If dogs are a way of avoiding subtext and meaning, Supergirl shows how that kind of avoidance might work for a man, but women are subject to more scrutiny in our society, so that every action, even their appearance, takes on more meaning than they might want.
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