RETRO ACTIVE: A Boy and His Dog (1975)
by Nick Schager 
What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of Steven Spielberg's kid detective-and-dog sidekick saga The Adventures of Tintin, this week it's L.Q. Jones' 1975 sci-fi cult classic A Boy and His Dog. The world has gone to hell and man and beast are now equals in
A Boy and His Dog,
L. Q. Jones' uniquely bizarre adaptation of
Harlan Ellison's novella of the same name. A five-day World War IV has transformed 2024 America into a desert wasteland full of roaming bands of armed marauders dressed in tattered outfits that are part
Road Warrior-chic, part Civil War-era antiquated. Traversing this desolate landscape is dimwitted 18-year-old Vic (
Don Johnson) and his dog Blood (voiced by
Tim McIntire), who can telepathically speak with Vic as well as use a special sonar-like ability to locate nearby enemies and, more importantly, women. Blood cares primarily about safety and food (both of which are scarce), while Vic cares only about finding ladies to screw, a task in which Blood begrudgingly assists with a sarcastic aggravation almost as intense as Vic's horniness. Despite talk of finding a fanciful "over the hill" paradise, it's the hunger for food and sex that truly propel the duo, base motivations that immediately establish the material's caustically cynical view of man as a creature that?if denied education, proper parental upbringing, and basic social conditioning?is at best the equal of a pooch, if not (given Vic's inferior intellect and amorality) beneath one.
A Boy and His Dog's unfavorable view of humanity isn't hard to discern, but that's not the same as saying it's mundane, as Vic and Blood's rapport is surreal in its simultaneous affection and hostility. Theirs is a love-hate bond forged by necessity but, also, of genuine compassion for each other, all while their bickering exposes an almost brotherly relationship marked by petty insults ("Poodle!" "Jackass!") as well as more serious condemnations ("You're not a nice person Albert," Blood tells Vic, using his favored nickname for his master). Driven by survival and pleasure instincts alone, they're a rather unlikable pair made even more repellant by the fact that one of their two primary goals is the procurement of women for Vic to rape?a scenario that finally materializes when Blood helps Vic discover one at a movie theater playing scratchy pornos. The target in question, Quilla June (
Susanne Benton), is first spied by Vic in the nude, behind cobwebs, as she dresses, her leisurely demeanor amidst this female-hunting post-apocalyptic civilization as ridiculous as her distinctly ?70s hairstyle. After a pitch-black shootout with faceless predators in an abandoned hospital that's most notable for its lack of spatial coherence or continuity, Vic, Blood and Quilla June shack up for a time so that Vic can get his rocks off with his surprisingly willing prisoner, all as Blood hilariously bounces up and down on the trio's sole, nasty mattress.
A favored character actor of
Sam Peckinpah (having appeared in five of the Wild Bunch auteur's works), director Jones shows little visual flair but a sharp, biting, Peckinpah-ish eye for critiquing masculinity, which is here defined by unsavory selfishness. If its scenes don't always flow together,
A Boy and His Dog nonetheless boasts an endearingly scraggly aesthetic that conveys a potent impression of a planet gone to physical and moral seed. That notion is only further confirmed once Quilla June convinces Vic to join her in "Topeka," an underground society?located via a metal-bunker doorway in the middle of the vast desert?that's ruled by a committee of three led by debonair Lou Craddock (
Jason Robards) and populated by people in pancake make-up and red circles on their cheeks. They're a grotesquely clownish vision of southern society, one where everyone gathers on green pastures under dark skies for social picnics enlivened by marching band music, and where death sentences for disobedient citizenry are delivered by the committee in church-set meetings marked by an offhand, cavalier indifference to ideas of fairness and cruelty.
A Boy and His Dog's third-act revelation is that Vic has been lured to this nightmare "down under" to be a one-man sperm bank for the populace's women (the men have all gone impotent due to lack of sunlight), leading to a phenomenally striking sequence in which veiled brides are "married" to Vic as he's tied to a surgical table having his semen extracted by a tube. Throughout, and notwithstanding Topeka's bourgeois pretenses, societal breakdown engenders only ruthless carnivorous and carnal desires. Whether Jones and Ellison mean for their work to denounce the inherent misogyny of men when stripped of social concepts of decorum, decency and equality, or whether they're in fact promoting such a viewpoint (a reading bolstered by the relative fondness shown to Vic and Blood), the film is nonetheless infused with a disgust for women that's nigh impossible to shake or shrug off, despite Johnson's surprisingly effective portrait of Vic as an empty-headed embodiment of frightening macho appetites, and McIntire's sneering, sympathetic vocal turn as his canine sidekick. The result is a movie that, for all its wacko charm, is apt to leave a sour taste in one's mouth, especially given the way in which its notorious last scene?altered from the novel, and which apparently repulsed even Ellison himself?treads an uncomfortable line between satire and outright, gleeful sexism.
Posted by ahillis at December 23, 2011 11:14 AM
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