Puppy

Puppy is a weird movie in that it wasn't great, but I wanted to write about it. The narrative wasn't particularly compelling, but I'm compelled to give it more consideration than I felt it warranted after my first viewing. In its heavy handed attempt to defy expectation, the plot unfolds fairly predictably. A young woman taken hostage, Liz, finally seizes her freedom only to linger around her kidnapper's home for a while, making friends with his dogs and rummaging through his CDs. Soon she is manipulating him and everyone in his life--pushing his guilt such that he automatically trusts her, and blames everything that seems amiss on his own psychosis. By the film's conclusion, Liz is the raving lunatic--murdering her abductor's wife so that she might take her place, and forcing herself on Aiden emotionally just as he once forced himself on her physically. This shift can be seen coming early on--Liz is needy, suicidal, and Aiden is too young and good looking to be cast as a committed villain. What surprised me about Puppy is the total moral ambiguity of the film's conclusion--an ambiguity brought about by something more than a simple reversal of roles. In her final assessment of Aiden's life, Liz is correct. His wife did not love him, and most likely did abandon him hoping that his inevitable breakdown would allow her to inherit his home. Both Helen and Liz abuse and take advantage of Aiden, but unlike Helen, Liz is willing to share the space she steals, and in her desperate attempts to blame her own actions on Aiden's illness, she all but shines with the virtual of incidental forgiveness. I should have hated Liz by the film's conclusion, in which it's made clear that she is the perhaps the highest functioning form of parasite known to innocent and unsuspecting kidnappers, but by the credits I had only just grown to love her and her utterly irrational behavior. There is absolutely no need to blame Aiden for the car she crashed, the dog she murdered, or the dead doctor she's buried in the yard. Honesty about the circumstances in which she came to live with him would completely absolve her of these actions, for they were committed in her many attempts to escape. She is, however, totally uninterested in blaming or even mentioning to Aiden the time he held her hostage. Rather, her focus is entirely on nesting into her new environment and explaining away wounds that are visible rather than those that are actually significant. What anger she does express for Aiden's treatment of her is directed not at his actions but at his inability to be honest about the total lack of love between them. Ultimately, Liz can't be read as a victim--not because she herself is a criminal, but simply because she has no expectations of innocence in others.

Much has been made comparing this film to Black Snake Moan, though the only parallel I can see is the basic outline of the plot--the abduction of a young woman by a man who will quickly be revealed to possess depth and complexity that exceed our expectations for a psychopath or common criminal. But assuming two films to be linked based on their plot outlines is kind of like comparing Solaris to Solaris. It just isn't a great idea. I much prefer the comparison that Chris suggested: to Audition. As he put it: Audition begins with an intolerably trite love story, and ends with the lover shackled and fed like a dog. Puppy takes the exact opposite arc: it begins with dog collars and debasement and evolves into a love story. Despite the inverse narrative structures, Puppy brought to mind the uneasiness with which i first watched Audition and realized that something, not love, but a kind of kinship is established through violence and degradation. Puppy is, if nothing else, very well titled.
[Photo: Like Audition, Puppy has a few weird moments with feet.]