‘Dog’: Andrea Arnold’s striking short film about toxic masculinity
In 2003, Andrea Arnold’s third short film, Wasp, won her the Academy Award for ‘Best Live Action Short Film’. It was a sign of the filmmaker’s incredible ability to tell compelling and raw stories about working-class women, a group of society rarely given adequate screen time. From there, Arnold has impressed with titles like Red Road, Fish Tank, and Cow, focusing her lens on themes of alienation, femininity, girlhood, motherhood, poverty, and marginalisation.
Hailing from a working-class background herself, Arnold’s films all feel incredibly authentic, giving a nuanced voice to the kinds of people that are so often misunderstood in wider society. In Fish Tank, she presents us with a working-class teenage girl who, on the surface, appears gobby and rude, yet, dig a little deeper, and the film empathetically reveals her struggles with a myriad of issues, as well as her passions.
Before she made Fish Tank, which won various accolades, including the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Arnold directed the short film Dog. It was her second short following Milk, a shocking tale of a mother’s grief. With Dog, however, she focused on a teenage girl’s transformative afternoon that quickly turns sour. It’s only ten minutes long, but Arnold explores various themes succinctly: toxic masculinity, parental abuse, budding sexuality, class, and the loss of innocence.
We’re introduced to the unnamed girl in her bedroom, dancing around as she gets ready, preparing to meet a boy. After sneaking money from her mother’s purse into her pocket, she is berated by her for dressing like a “whore”. As she walks out of the council flat, her mother hurls insults at her, which she ignores – this isn’t unusual behaviour, it seems.
Instantly, Arnold presents us with the girl’s unstable, hostile living conditions, mirroring the environment that Mia from Fish Tank also finds herself in. As Mia desires to escape, so does the protagonist of Dog, seeking out sexual attention from men as a form of rebellion and independence from her mother. Yet, the guy she meets is hardly Prince Charming. He demands she give him money, which he uses to buy hash from a flat occupied by various men who leer at the girl. She plays into their penetrating gazes, enjoying the thrill of being seen as autonomous, sexual, and mature. This is echoed by her walking past a stream of cars to meet her boyfriend, who instantly comments on the fact that the drivers are all staring at her ‘skimpy’ outfit.
The young couple head to an abandoned area where a manky old sofa and other appliances have been left, and the girl’s boyfriend forces a bunch of mouthy young boys to get gone. The image of a balloon floating past echoes a loss of innocence, but not in the way we might think. Arnold’s use of imagery is subtle and clever; even the fact that we see boys who look no more than ten acting aggressively suggests that the behaviour we are about to witness from the girl’s boyfriend is often ingrained in men from an early age.
The boy rolls himself something to smoke before instructing the girl to take off her jacket. After feeling her breast, he tells her to lie down, and they begin to have sex. It is a clinical and cold interaction, with the boy ignoring the girl’s suggestion that they kiss first. It’s clear that the sexual encounter is hardly what she was wanting, and she subsequently focuses on the tired, injured dog which appears beside them.
After laughing at the dog for eating his drugs, the girl is shocked to witness the boy stand up in a rage and kick the dog until it dies. Arnold presents a close-up shot of the dog’s eye as it lay there dying, a victim of the boy’s anger. He then shouts abuse at the girl as she runs off, telling her, “There’s plenty more where you came from.”
Dog presents the realities of living in poverty for many young women; the boy, relying on drugs and sex as a form of relief and escape, is suddenly denied these things, and he lashes out in a fit of frustration. Arnold explores the kinds of toxic masculinity which can emerge when a man is, for example, humiliated or denied sex, which are all too common for women to be on the receiving end of – regardless of class. The girl is exposed to the harshness of toxic masculinity, brutally witnessing a part of her innocence dying in front of her.
Additionally, the stress of money is echoed when the girl returns home and is beaten by her mother for stealing some cash, leaving her to cry in her room, where we initially saw her at the start of the film, excited and energetic. Thus, the narrative is cleverly tied together when the girl begins barking at her mother during their fight.
She reclaims the innocent dog’s voice, highlighting the fact that, like the dog, she is young and undeserving of such treatment. The dog comes to represent the girl, and when she witnesses it being beaten, she gets a glimpse into the kind of behaviour she is likely to become a victim of (which she will experience from her mother when she returns home). Thus, when she barks back at her mother, she makes a defiant stand against violence, refusing to be beaten and defeated like the dog.
Arnold’s film is a powerful look at a pivotal moment in one girl’s life, where the struggles of poverty and the abusive and sexist attitudes carried by many men are laid out in front of her, seemingly inescapable. Dog paved the way for Fish Tank, which developed these themes with even more depth and proved Arnold to be one of modern cinema’s most vital voices.
