Dogville, Wild Dogs, and Love

Both the 3 hour film, Dogville, set on a minimal theatre stage, and the novel, Wild Dogs, by Helen Humphries, deal with parallels between people and dogs, and in both, the connections between dogs and wolves.

Dogville was a hard movie to watch. The setting emphasized the cardboard nature of the characters. You were never allowed to forget that this was a fable, an allegory.

Human nature is shown as basically cruel ... dog eat dog ... survival of the fittest ... and the weak are attacked as lowest in the pecking (or biting) order rather than protected. The weaker the main character, Grace, becomes, the more brutal and constant the attacks. Even the one character who says he wants to raise the level of humanity in the town is shown ultimately to be as bad as the others, perhaps worse, since he puts up a civilized front of words that disguise his true nature.

If you watch it, stick around for the credits. The old photographs depicting humans in a constant struggle for survival underline the theme.

Wild Dogs makes the case that dogs will choose a life of freedom with the pack over the love of human companions if they are given the choice, and that human beings might choose freedom over belonging too. She suggests that fidelity and love are not natural for us either; that the line between love and belonging is blurred.

She shows this in all kinds of love: between dogs and their owners, between parents and children, between men and women, between friends, and most clearly between two women lovers.

The novel ends with the words:

The heart is a wild and fugitive creature.

The heart is a dog who comes home.

And the tension between those two, between loving freely and wildly and being subsumed by love, is central to the story.

One of the characters, Rachel, says, "A lone wolf is not especially glad to be alone, but there is a serenity to its solitude that I have noticed and admired. It doesn't seem nearly as anxious or restless as the wolves that remain part of the pack."

A fine novel: it helped me understand why I am torn between my life as a hermit and the life in which there was the love of a man.

I may have found the best answer: living with a dog I love.