What does The Power of the Dog mean in Psalm 22?

After Phil’s brother ‘George’ brings home a new wife and her queer-like son, ‘Peter’ Phil responds with brash hostility. But beneath Phil’s cruelty are layers of repressed sexuality and emotions from the loss of his mentor Bronco Henry. Some viewers may get a kick, while others may be irritated by Phil's personality. However, the true nature behind his blunt exterior unravels throughout the plot’s events, inevitably garnering empathy from the audience.

Sadly, this side of Phil is short-lived as he dies in a mysterious manner which leaves the audience with several questions. But the answers to these questions are strung along with the plot. As earlier stated, this melodrama is as subtle as it can be. It demands perceptive senses to fully comprehend the story being told from the beginning to the end.

So we know in the mid-act, George’s wife learns she’s pregnant, which prompts her to have a conversation with her son. Peter quickly understands where she is coming from, assures her he won't let any harm happen to her, and protects them both from Phil [Seeing George isn’t bold enough to do so].

While this might sound like a harmless statement from a concerned son, that statement is the birth of the unexpected; Killing Phil Burbank!

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But Peter is no shrinking violet, and we soon learn that, despite his weak appearance, he has impressive reserves of intelligence and cunning. Sensing correctly that the ostensibly macho Phil in fact is suppressing powerful homosexual desires, the young man commences first to seduce, then to manipulate, and finally to destroy the one antagonizing both him and his mother. At the close of the film, we see Peter reading the Psalm verse that provides the movie’s title: “Deliver my soul from the sword, my darling from the power of the dog.” Many of the interpreters of the film appreciate it as an expose of “toxic masculinity” and exult in the way in which a nontraditional form of masculinity manages to trump it. A conventional type of power is bested by an unexpected and underestimated type of power. 

If the blunt, gruff, straightforward violence of Phil is undermined by the subtle, insinuating violence of Peter, how are we any better?

But if that is the message of the film, I’m tempted to quote the Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again: “Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.” Under the baleful influence of Nietzsche and especially Michel Foucault, our postmodern culture is obsessed with power and its exercise. We investigate, over and again, who has power, who is victimized by it, and how the tables can be turned. It is no accident that the revenge fantasy (think all of Quentin Tarantino’s movies) is such a popular genre today. But if “toxic” masculinity is undone by a masculinity that is different but just as toxic, how have we made any progress? If the blunt, gruff, straightforward violence of Phil is undermined by the subtle, insinuating violence of Peter, how are we any better? We might feel a certain rush of satisfaction at the ending of The Power of the Dog, since our sympathies are naturally drawn to the put-upon young man, but if he proves to be just as heartless as his persecutor, then so what? 

The reason that Nietzsche and, after him, Foucault put such a stress on the plays of power is that they both denied the objectivity of moral value. If there is no real good or evil, then all that finally matters is, as Nietzsche put it, the “will to power.” But this is dangerous nonsense. The classical tradition appreciated power as the capacity to effect change and hence as something, in itself, morally neutral. What mattered far more to authors from Aristotle to Aquinas is the virtue with which power is wielded and the moral purpose which it serves. I imagine that if Thomas Aquinas were assessing the characters in The Power of the Dog, he would critique, not so much Phil’s power, as his cruelty. And therefore, he would certainly not exult in Peter’s exercise of power in service of an answering cruelty. 

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