White Dog (1982)

Here is a tough uncompromising film from an equally tough and uncompromising filmmaker (Samuel Fuller has my vote for the most interesting man of the 20th century). When I say tough, I’m not saying that White Dog is hard to watch because it’s not; the film is an engaging thriller that indulges in the more pulpy elements of the horror genre. What tough means in relation to White Dog is that it uses genre to examine social issues that most mainstream films would consciously turn their eyes away from. The titular canine of the film becomes a symbol for the process of how society addresses and hopefully redresses ingrained racisms.

White Dog features characters who make decisions and follow through with them – I know that sounds simple but I want you think about films that flip-flop all over the place. Characters in typical films make decisions and then the film forgets to follow those choices to their logical conclusions: the implications of their characters’ decisions are ditched for the next plot point the creators want to get to. White Dog does not indulge in such whims; rather, the film is almost scientific in the way that Fuller is devoted to portraying and analyzing the consequences of his characters’ actions.

The ideas about race relations in White Dog are progressive for its time and instructive for the political climate that we inhabit today. At one point in the film, the animal trainer (an always stoic and marvelous Paul Winfield [who starred in my favorite Star Trek: TNG epidodes: “Shaka, when the walls fell”]) who is attempting to rehabilitate the white dog (a dog trained to attack black humans on sight) has reached a crisis point. He admits to the main character, a young white actress who found the dog and adopted it after nearly running it over in the road, that he wants to kill the dog and call it a day, but instead he recommits himself to the re-education of the dog. He admits that he looks on his trials with the dog as an experiment. He dedicates himself to the project because if he can retrain the dog, then he can retrain other dogs and therefore begin to eradicate what they’ve been trained to think and do. He is a scientist, establishing hypotheses in an attempt to create uniform laws of dealing with dogs of this nature.

In this way, Winfield’s character serves as a model for one of the most trying practices of being an anti-racist: continuing to try to educate-reeducate racism, despite how time-consuming and often soul crushing that process is. Shutting off and tuning out when one feels like they can’t get their point across to bigoted and hateful people is a natural and justified human reaction; however, in reaching a point of true equality, racisms needs to be unlearned to be destroyed, meaning that a true anti-racist must commit themselves daily to combatting racism when they see it. If racism isn’t addressed as a learned condition that can be unlearned through thoughtful dialogue and care, and the people who espouse hateful viewpoints are abandoned to their own perceptions, then hatred will proliferate like a weed.

White Dog‘s ending is absolutely stunning in its implications for the future of race relations, but the film starts a valuable reflection within the viewer that will hopefully lead to them committing to fighting the good fight and not giving up in the face of willful ignorance.