More on "Don’t Kill the Dog"

The other day, I was inspired to post because I was attending a loop Q&A with an agent who stated it as one of the cardinal rules: “Whatever you do, don’t kill the dog.”

I’d heard it before (it’s apparently a big deal in Hollywood, made famous by Tom Hanks after Turner and Hooch was widely reviled…), and if you Google it, you get a lot of reviews saying stuff about that Molly Shannon movie, The Year of the Dog, which I gather is about Shannon’s character recovering from the trauma of her dog’s death? Several film critics decided to be clever by starting off their reviews with some variation of “It’s a well-known axiom in Hollywood that you don’t kill the dog. Well, in this new movie…”

However, I feel like the Shannon movie, as well as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which some commenters brought up the other day, are not exactly what we’re talking about here. Both of these stories feature doggy death as the inciting incident and primary premise of the entire story. They aren’t stories about dogs who at some point happen to die (Turner & Hooch, Old Yeller) or even stories about whatever else in which dogs die at some point (The Grapes of Wrath, The Road Warrior). So I don’t really think the axiom applies there.

Another commenter started equating it with violence in general, but I think that’s the whole point. You can kill people in gruesome ways, murder whole families, annihilate whole continents, but you can’t kill the dogs. I seem to have missplaced my copy of Stephen King’s On Writing, but I think he said something to the effect that in his books, he’s murdered children, caused the extinction of the human race a few times over, and yet never got the hate mail he did when he killed a dog. It’s a hot button issue.

It’s definitely something that would push a few buttons for me. As I said in my original post, I cheered along with the rest of the movie theater when the dog in Independence Day escaped the alien firebomb. Yeah, everyone else was turned into alien toast, but the yellow lab was okay, so Earth was going to make it. (Strangely, cats do not have the same effect on me, as I had no problem with the cat-killing scene in Holly Black’s Valiant.) And yet, I also rolled with the punches when it came to the dog-killing scene in the awesomely bloody Ginger Snaps. But it was played for laughs… (which I suppose is the same as with the squished puppies in A Fish Called Wanda). So where do I draw the line? Pets of main characters, dogs I’ve been taught to identify with over the course of the storyline… I mean, I knew there was a reason I’ve never actually seen Turner & Hooch!

Phoenix New Times film critic M. V. Moorehead puts an interesting spin on it in his 1996 article “Pet Reprieve“:

Actually, the killing of dogs–that is, the killing of dog characters–is a fairly common melodramatic method of establishing degrees of evil or desperation. Old Yeller is probably the ne plus ultra of the genre, but most of the canine victims in the movies aren’t noble, tragic heroes like Yeller or Hooch. More often, mutts who get whacked are pawns of a lazy screenwriter, incidental victims used as a shortcut to our atavistic emotions.

In screenwriters’ parlance, it could be called the Puppysnuff Technique. It isn’t, of course–I just made up the term–but it sort of fits, don’t you think?

Though I’ve always been a dog lover, and can think of few things more odious than brutality toward a dog, I was never particularly squeamish about fictional depictions of this sort of behavior. I never realized how offensive, even unwatchable, many people find it, until the early Eighties, when I took a date to The Road Warrior. I had already seen it–it was then, as now, one of my favorite films–but my date had not. When one of the postapocalyptic goons shot a crossbow out of frame and sent Mel Gibson’s faithful dog to canine heaven with an off-screen yelp, my date became livid, then lost all interest in the film. The dog was dead; as far as she was concerned, no happy ending was possible. The suspense was gone.

(The whole article is worth a read, especially as it brings up the whole cats vs. dogs subject — complete with a mention of Jonesy, the kitty on the ship in Alien who does, in fact, survive.)

You know, now that I think of The Road Warrior, I’m beginning to see why I’m dead set against seeing the new Will Smith adaptation of I Am Legend until I know for sure that his loyal pooch isn’t going to snuff it. These poor post-apocalyptic heroes have enough troubles on their plates, what with the mutants and zombies and all. Let their puppies survive. (Ahem. Carrie.)

So what’s happening here? Like Moorehead, I wonder if screenwriters, knowing that doggy death will tug the heartstrings,a nd knowingly breaking this rule hoping to inject some terror, severity, etc. into their work. Need some sympathy for a protag? Have them “save the cat.” Want to convince the audience that the bad guy is really bad? Have him “kill the dog.”

Except… saving the cat is a metaphor. You aren’t really supposed to have every character rescue a kitten from a tree. That would be cheap. And so, I think, is killing a dog to get us to take it all seriously. I’m sure there are better ways. Especially since doing so is a dealbreaker for so many folks. The “dead dog” genre is one I avoid on principle, and there you have an entire work of art dedicated to the emotions one goes through at the death of a beloved animal. (Note: Do not EVER get me started on my abhorrence of Animal Farm.) So a story which is not about that, but just contains it in passing, as a cheap emotional trick? Yeah, you’re likely to piss me off big time.

And I think these other instances, the played-for-laughs, gore-free, attachment-free squishing of the puppies in A Fish Called Wanda, etc., are the exception that proves this rule.

So, remember: “don’t kill the dog.”