Watched this remarkable film called “White Dog” recently. Directed by Samuel Fuller, it is an incendiary assault on the two faces of racism: the benevolent side presented to society, and the seething violence presented to itself. But what makes this film so much more effective than other head-on treatments of racism is that its themes and criticisms revolve around a purely metaphoric site: a white German Shepard. At the beginning of the film the dog is hit by a car driven by an aspiring young actress, who then takes him to a vet and adopts him after no one comes to claim the dog. Everything seems to be going well – the dog repels an attack by a would-be rapist, protects the actress and seems about as cuddly and jovial as a well-trained German Shepard usually is, until we are slowly and horrifically presented to the truth. The dog is a “White Dog”, trained by its previous owner to attack and kill African Americans. The actress is at a loss as to what to do. She is emotionally invested in the animal and at first refuses to turn it in to be euthanized. She seeks more radical methods. Eventually she finds a black animal trainer who takes on the dog as a personal project. He believes, in opposition to his boss, that the dog can actually be deprogrammed, that its racist training based on extreme cruelty in puppy-hood can be erased and the dog saved.
It is astonishing what Fuller accomplishes with this scenario. Shots of the dog attacking, a low, zoomed in close-up of the dog with its teeth bared and seething at the mouth, tongue flapping in the wind, then the inevitable pounce at the jugular, are terrifying. This could easily be classified as a horror movie, some kind of mutant variant of Cujo. But it is so much more than that. The dog becomes a vortex for all the racial loathing that boils just beneath the beautiful furred surface of society. We see how loving and protective the dog is in the company of white people, but then how, at the drop of a coin, it turns into a remorseless killing machine at the sight of a black man. The film’s targets are numerous. One of the dog’s victims is killed in a church, and as the man writhes bleeding on the floor, the camera pans over the statues of all the white saints, the white Jesus staring down with his eternal benevolence from the cross. The black man dying on the floor is watched over by a white man dying on a cross. These images, ordinarily simply kitschy, are transformed by the movie into sites of powerful irony. What it accomplishes is quite extraordinary. It defamiliarizes ordinary symbols and re-contextualizes them according to the power-relations of race politics, so that the viewer becomes primed to seeing things as a dog would see them: in black and white and shades of gray.
In the ideological opposition in how to deal with the dog (the trainer refuses to give up on him and believes he can be reconditioned, and the increasing pressure from his boss and eventually the actress to simply kill it), we are also reminded of the blunt and utterly ineffective manner in which society tends to deal with race issues. The trainer represents all those people working on the front lines of race politics, tirelessly moving towards a method of untying the ugly knots of fear that always lie beneath the surface of hate. We learn later that the probable method of turning a color-blind dog into a white dog was that the owner paid a few black homeless people to abuse and hurt the dog as a puppy, so it instinctively equated black skin to a violent threat.
What makes the film even more powerful is that the phenomenon of white dogs is a real one, based on colonial slave traders who trained dogs to attack and capture escaped slaves. The story Fuller uses was based on a real incident originally written by Romain Gary – the dog was found by his wife, Jean Seburg, an actress and activist in the 60s who at one point supported the Black Panthers. An added level of irony is in the fact the film was quite controversial when it was made (1982), and was actually shelved by Paramount Pictures for nine years until a brief theatrical release overseas in 1991. It was only last year the Criterion decided to release a DVD of the film so that people can actually go out and see one of the most wrenching depictions of racism on screen. It was shelved by Paramount because they were afraid that the film itself was racist, which goes to show you how afraid we can be to even touch something that deals so bluntly with race issues. As soon as people feel like they’re being preached to in a movie, they shy away, even when the movie isn’t necessarily didactic. Fuller simply presents us with a racist dog; all of the universal implications are supplied by us. It’s like a litmus test – the more a person is familar with the severity of racial prejudice, the more affecting the movie becomes.
