Who’s a good boy? In movies, the answer is often a dog with soft eyes, a wet nose and ineffable charm. Sometimes the dog is a puppy bounding with joy; on occasion its gait is uncertain and muzzle touchingly gray. The movie dog can be just part of the scenery, though on occasion it delivers a moral lesson. Dogs can be comic, lovable, heroic or tragic; much depends on their humans because, while man rarely bites dog, he does execute unspeakable abuse on his ostensible best friend.
Lately, I have been thinking about animals in movies, the creatures that rarely make it on camera and those that do. So, of course, I have been thinking about dogs, the big screen’s favorite animal. Top dogs, underdogs — the movies are filled with Canis familiaris. Consider the cape-tugging C.G.I. engine of chaos, Krypto, in James Gunn’s “Superman.”
The moment Krypto bursts into the story, you know this isn’t the broodingly dark Man of Steel but a kinder, sweeter Superman. As his name suggests, Krypto is Kryptonite of a type — he slays metaphorically, and delightfully.
This is Krypto’s purpose. Like other movie dogs, he runs to the rescue — to help Supes — but also rolls on the ground as if enjoying a laugh that we share in. That’s the thing about movie dogs: They seem so easy to read, which makes them ideal vessels for conveying ideas like happiness, fear and aggression. Cue the wagging tail, the bared fangs. As in real life, screen dogs are obedient, biddable, though also comically or scarily out of control.
They can be dear friends …
… terrifying enemies …
… fierce protectors …
… or goofy sidekicks.
They can also be weapons, monsters, afterthoughts, accessories. They’re as obvious as our reflection, or so we believe, which is why a screen dog often seems like four-legged mini-me.
HUMANS LOVE DOGS and all kinds of images of canines, too. The earliest representations of dogs may be rock engravings in Saudi Arabia that are likely more than 8,000 years old, precursors to late-19th-century proto-cinematic images of human and animal motion that the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge made using a row of cameras attached to trip wires. When he photographed a monumental mastiff named Dread taking a walk, the dog sequentially activated the wires, resulting in each camera capturing a separate image of his movements. In one such series, the dog walks head and tail down, pauses, raises his head and looks off camera.
Dread looks unhappy. Maybe he was hungry, tired or old; I hope he wasn’t abused. I prefer Muybridge’s images of a livelier Dread jumping a hurdle, which seem to literalize dogkind’s great leap into cinema. As pictures started moving, dogs walked right in, sometimes wandering into the shot or lounging, like the one that upstages a muscleman in “Athlete With Wand” (1894).
Starring roles followed in films like “Rescued by Rover” (1905), in which a family pet, a richly furred rough collie, leaps through a window, races down streets, swims a river and guides a father to his kidnapped baby in seven or so dog-driven, action-packed minutes.
Other adventurous canines soon followed, including Jean, the Vitagraph Dog as well as the mighty Strongheart and the famed Rin Tin Tin. By the time Lassie appeared in 1943, the movies had gone to the dogs. Played by Pal (whose descendants carried on the role), Hollywood’s famous collie first appeared in “Lassie Come Home” (1943), a heart-melter about a Yorkshire boy (Roddy McDowall) whose parents reluctantly sell his faithful companion to help make ends meet. When Lassie is sold, she lifts her head to the father’s hand, her dark eyes expressing love and trust at its most heartbreakingly pure.
In time, she escapes her new owners, scrambling over a fence to set off on a long, perilous journey back to her home and her boy.
Lassie cuts a romantically heroic figure, never more so than when she’s running, her pretty nose to the wind and silky fur streaming. A running dog can signify freedom but also grit, purpose and resolve. Early in Martin Ritt’s drama “Sounder” (1972), about a Black sharecropping family in Depression-era Louisiana, the title hound nearly runs toward his death. The father, Nathan Lee (Paul Winfield), has been arrested for stealing food to feed his family. As the sheriff drives the father off in a pickup, Sounder chases after …
… barking. When a white deputy raises a rifle to shoot the dog, Nathan Lee knocks the gun sideways. Wounded, Sounder runs off.
Sounder isn’t a threat. The deputy fires at the dog because he can, because he is cruel, because he is the law. He shoots because the dog belongs to a Black family in the Jim Crow South and killing Sounder will make this family’s life harder. Mostly, the deputy fires on Sounder, I think, because he really wants to shoot Nathan Lee. Still, the family endures and its fortitude is reaffirmed near the end when Sounder races at a stranger limping toward the family’s home. It’s only when Sounder stops barking and jumps on the man that Nathan Lee’s wife, Rebecca (Cicely Tyson), recognizes her husband. Sounder has signaled the all-clear.
“Sounder” was a childhood favorite, a heroic counterpart to my family’s sleepy Old English sheepdog. Yet while I’ve always loved animals and movies, it wasn’t until Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” (2011) that I understood how inherently cinematic dogs are. “Hugo” features a Doberman pinscher, Maximilian (played by Blackie), who’s a witness to human absurdity, especially that of its keeper, a railroad-station inspector.
When I first watched “Hugo,” all I could think of was that even Scorsese isn’t above dog-reaction shots — he knows the power of the dog.
The dog-reaction shot is one of the defining images in hound-friendly movies. In some films, dogs are the audience’s mirror, our secret sharers. At the end of “The Thin Man” (1934), its two sexy, boozy sleuths, Nick and Nora Charles, kiss and there’s a cut to Asta (played by Skippy), a wire fox terrier:
Like us, Asta knows exactly what his humans will do. By contrast, in the comedy-flecked weepie “Dog” (2022), about two traumatized war veterans — one a Belgian Malinois, the other Channing Tatum — the circuitry of gazes is more expansive. When the two- and four-legged characters exchange looks, they mirror each other and the audience, too.
YET WHAT IS THE DOG’S GAZE? In her book “Our Dogs, Ourselves,” the canine-cognition expert Alexandra Horowitz writes about how humans project all sorts of things onto dogs, including guilt and jealousy. Yet while dogs have emotions, they don’t necessarily have them the way that we think. “Our inability to read dogs’ emotions well,” Horowitz writes, “probably begins with our inability to understand our own emotions well.” It’s no wonder filmmakers cook up all kinds of nonsense for dogs, insert them into absurd, distinctly non-animal-like situations and put silly words into drooling mouths. Human narcissism is a bitch.
Horowitz’s book is a heartfelt plea for us to accept that dogs are, well, animals and to value them as another species, not simply human mini-mes. “We have helped make dogs who they are; we can neither exempt ourselves nor ignore their animalness,” she writes. But, of course, we do ignore their animalness, which the market encourages. We dress them in clothes, cooingly call them fur babies and spritz them with designer perfume. We also mutilate their ears and tails, and selectively design and grossly overbreed them. We use and abuse them, disposing of them like used tissues. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals estimates that 334,000 dogs were euthanized in American shelters in 2024; tens of thousands are tortured for laboratory experiments.
Horowitz again: “Who we are with dogs is who we are as people.”
This notion is axiomatic for filmmakers, who invariably use dogs to say something about the humans onscreen (as with the Great Dane who mirrors a mourning Naomi Watts …
… in “The Friend”). With or without people, dogs in movies are often just puppetlike projections, whether they’re romantically sharing a plate of spaghetti like the title pooches in Disney’s animated “Lady and the Tramp” (1955) or mouthing scatological jokes in the gross-out comedy “Strays” (2023). In his 2011 drama “Beginners,” Mike Mills gently sends up this projection when a Jack Russell terrier, Cosmo, whose human has died, explains (in subtitles):
Given that we hardly ever listen to animals, especially their pain, it’s no wonder that the ones that do talk onscreen have little to say. Among the exceptions are those in George Miller’s “Babe: Pig in the City” (1998), about a wee charmer on a grand adventure. At one point, Babe inadvertently frees a chained white bull terrier.
An exhausted Babe turns to the advancing dog and asks, “Why?” The dog doesn’t answer; it’s easy to imagine that people have turned him into a killing machine. Who dogs are, alas, is who we are as people. Instead, the dog lunges at the pig, falls in a river and is saved by Babe in a moment of grace. After, the dog tells Babe that “a murderous shadow lies hard across my soul.” I think that shadow is cast by us humans.
IF THAT SHADOW KEEPS SHIFTING, it’s partly because our views on animals (and our selves) keep changing. In the 1957 Disney drama “Old Yeller,” set after the Civil War, a boy shoots his beloved mutt (played by a rescue, Spike) after the dog becomes infected with rabies.
The boy’s father says that he “couldn’t ask no more of a grown man.” By putting his dog down, the boy faces his responsibility, and manhood. In the first “John Wick” (2014), the widowed title character (Keanu Reeves) ventures on an orgy of totalizing violence after a villain kills his beagle puppy, a gift from his late wife. There’s no question about Wick’s manhood, but the puppy testifies to his decency. Wick loved and was loved in turn, so: Bang-bang, baby!
In the fourth Wick movie, two villains discuss the need for rules because, absent them, “we live with the animals.” Which animals? I thought. Despite a handful of dogs, a stable of thoroughbreds and a smattering of plants, the natural world scarcely registers in this series. Here, pink cherry trees inevitably turn blood red and the only wild things are the people slaughtering one another. However self-consciously artificial, Wick-world holds up a grim fun-house mirror to our own. It’s a literal dead zone in which the most prominent characters ritualistically engage in a perpetual war of all-against-all, often while everyone else endlessly parties, which makes this series one of the more honest parables of how we live and die now.
In his 1977 essay “Why Look at Animals?” the critic John Berger tracked the disappearance of animals from human life. Before the 19th century, “animals constituted the first circle of what surrounded man,” he writes. “Whatever the changes in productive means and social organization, men depended on animals for food, work, transport, clothing.” We looked at animals and they, in turn, looked right back at us. Since then, wild animals have been penned in zoos and reserves, draft animals have been replaced by motorized vehicles and farmed animals turned into plastic-wrapped meat. This “enforced marginalization,” Berger argues, severed animals from us and, in the process, extinguished the look that we once shared.
If dogs have retained their supreme place in our affections, it’s partly because “some animals are more equal than others,” to quote George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” Even as the number of animal species declines at a catastrophic rate, dogs seem to exist ever closer at our side, a privileged position that is shared by few other living creatures. Given this, it is instructive that as the domination of nature has given way to its destruction, we lavish ever more attention and money on dogs and other pets. It’s as if we want to reassure them or, really, ourselves that despite all the cruelty that we have inflicted on animals — despite the factory farms, the overcrowded kill shelters, the disappearing species and our terrifyingly warming world itself — that we actually do care about animals, or at least the ones that love us.
Do we deserve that love? That question brings to mind a scene in the Hungarian thriller “White God” (2015), a political allegory about authoritarianism, in which hundreds of dogs break out of a city pound. Led by Hagen, whom the government has seized from his girl because he isn’t a purebred, the dogs look blissfully happy; some soon exact revenge against cruel people.
After many miles, Hagen and his girl finally reunite yet keep a mutually wary distance. There’s nothing cuddly about their reunion, which finds these beings — two-legged and four — regarding each other. She plays her trumpet, and then prostates herself. It’s as if they had called a truce. It’s beautiful and, I think, hopeful. Because, for the first time, this girl and this dog seem to be actually looking at each other, face to face, soul to soul, animal to animal.
Videos: Warner Bros. (“Superman” and “Cujo”); Disney (“Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey” and “Old Yeller”); 20th Century Fox (“Sounder”); DreamWorks Pictures (“Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy”); Touchstone Pictures (“Turner & Hooch”); MGM (“Legally Blonde,” “Lassie Come Home,” “Dog” and “The Thin Man”); Hepworth Picture Plays (“Rescued by Rover”); Paramount Pictures (“Hugo”); Bleecker Street (“The Friend”); Focus Features (“Beginners”); Summit Entertainment (“John Wick”); Magnolia Pictures (“White God”); Library of Congress (“Athlete With Wand”)
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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