Viking Night: A Boy and His Dog
By Bruce Hall
December 14, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Apparently, the world is going to end in 2012. This isn't because ancient Mayans say so, or even because Roland Emmerich and John Cusack say so. It's because Alien Girl says so. My association with Alien Girl came about innocently enough; we met though a mutual friend. She was single, I was single – it just seemed logical. Everything began fine, but it wasn't long until I discovered that Alien Girl is what one might charitably call an "Apocalypse Enthusiast". By this I mean someone who spends the majority of their free time concerned with the possibility that aliens are coming to destroy human civilization – and in this case, the date of their arrival is said to be December 2012. At first I thought this lovely young girl was merely a harmless eccentric. After all, yours truly briefly fell in with a group of conspiracy buffs back in college – so to each their own, right? Some people like to fish, some people like to ski, and some people spend a first date trying to convince you that Santa Claus is a tool of the Illuminati used to brainwash children. It was sort of funny at first, but my patience was exhausted when she tried to convince me that we needed to be stocking up a year's worth of food so that we could survive the coming calamity.
For the record, I am not making this up.
Call me cavalier but I am the sort of person who just isn't generally concerned about the end of the world. Whether we're talking about nuclear holocaust, Y2K, Alien Apocalypse or the End of Days, if it's going to happen it's going to happen and I doubt that having a cellar full of cling peaches is going to be the difference between life and death. Besides, in the event of a full scale nuclear exchange I personally wouldn't want to be one of the survivors. But what if it did happen and you did survive? Would you feel obligated to help rebuild civilization? Would you give up in the face of insurmountable catastrophe? Or would you look out for only yourself, living for today because you can't see tomorrow? It's an improbable scenario, but it's one with real life applications. Some would argue that who you become in an extreme situation is largely dependent on who you were to begin with. But what if the desolate world of post apocalyptia was all you'd ever known? What would separate a man from an animal if he'd never learned the value of being human to begin with?
This is a question posed by the well respected but relatively obscure Harlan Ellison short story A Boy and his Dog, as well as the movie of the same name. Released in 1975, the film originally addressed an audience for whom the threat of nuclear annihilation probably seemed more immediate. But as with much of science fiction, the plausibility of the basic scenario wasn't the point. The goal was to place human beings in improbable circumstances in order to test some basic assumptions about their nature. The most obvious question evident from the very first scene of A Boy and his Dog seems to be less "what does it mean to be human" than "what does it mean to act like one?" What makes a civilized human being; is it the physical trappings of civilization itself? Or is it the sense of culture that comes from the inherent sense of compassion, trust and justice we all must share in order to survive as a society? There's a saying that says "civilization is three meals deep" - and when you take food, water and shelter out of the equation, what is it really that separates man from animal? A Boy and his Dog explores this through the eyes of a teenage war survivor named Vic and his telepathic canine companion, named Blood. Together they scour the wasteland for food, shelter and women – and not necessarily in that order. But we'll get to them in a moment.
Far from being a dour, clinical meditation on post apocalyptic life, A Boy and his Dog is a tongue-in-cheek, darkly ironic and shrewdly misogynistic meditation on post-apocalyptic life. This, along with its rather Spartan production values, has earned it some criticism over the years. I find the criticism – mainly regarding the movie's perceived cynicism toward the fairer sex - to be valid but somewhat overstated. While Vick's motives toward women are by no means pure, it should be noted that few 17-year-olds are particularly well refined to begin with. And it is a sad fact that in times of war, when some men feel removed from their moral compass, females caught in the conflict often find their honor at a disadvantage. But part of the point of focusing on such a young man is to question whether or not an individual who has never known honor, morality, sacrifice or penance can ever come to understand these things in the most hostile environment imaginable.
Played by a young Don Johnson (his Sonny Crockett swagger and five o'clock shadow put to good use), we meet Vic in the midst of what appears to be a rescue operation. A young girl is being attacked by a gang of bandits and needs help. At first it seems as though Vick and Blood have come to her rescue, but when they arrive too late we discover that both adventurers have their own selfish motives - and neither involved helping the poor girl. Though gifted with the exclusive ability to read one another's thoughts, Vic and Blood would at first seem to be unlikely companions. Self indulgent, impulsive and heedless, Vic's primary concern – even over food - is satisfying his base, carnal desires. Blood is a hyper intelligent and perpetually hungry pooch who has agreed to use his abilities to seek out women for Vic, while Vic's task is to fend off bandits and find food. The story takes great glee in mining their relationship for comic irony, and it works more often than not. A Boy and his Dog is essentially the story of a pitiable malcontent who craves sex more than food, being led around by a scruffy dog that is too lazy to hunt and too pompous to admit it.
Outwardly, Vic considers himself superior to Blood by virtue of being human, but we come to discover that inside he may be little more than a frightened boy in need of a mentor. Blood parades his intellect as often as possible, but in a world with no more use for poetry or genius, he's as out of place as his teenage companion. And like many kindred souls, they acknowledge their interdependence by playing against one another's weaknesses rather than accentuating one another's strengths. As such it would be easy for either Vic or Blood to use the inhumanity of their every day existence as a convenient excuse to casually spiral into oblivion together. But there's another old saying that says "if you only have one person in the world that you can trust, you have one more than most people." Eventually that aspect of their relationship will be put to the test, and the dog who knows nothing of loyalty and the boy who knows nothing of compassion will learn that these may be the only two things left in the world that matter.
In the end, my only real criticism with this film would be that Blood is absent from the story an uncomfortably long period of time, relieving the story of its central relationship. The reasoning is clearly to give another character an opportunity to bond with Vic, awakening his maturity as well as his understanding of what's really important to him. While I certainly understand this, I do think that Blood being gone for so long robs the story of some badly needed momentum. Aside from this, I've found A Boy and his Dog to be a particularly enlightening experience and it remains so for me after multiple viewings. It is dark, often hilarious, occasionally poignant and above all, uncompromising in its vision. Despite its sporadic coarseness and crude production values, each time I have seen this film I am struck by something new and it never ceases to amaze me what was accomplished with such a laughably small budget. In fact, it makes me think of many a hundred million dollar blockbuster that seems to have spent sixty million on the special effects, and maybe sixty paying someone to write the screenplay.
And above and beyond it all, this is a film whose insight only reinforces the opinion that so shocked Alien Girl – which is that I would not in fact, wish to survive the end of the world. Because no matter how much creamed corn you manage to store in your basement, it will eventually run out. And when it does you'll come to realize that food comes in many forms and can be found in many strange places. But what you really need to survive in a world like that – more than love, even – is trust, loyalty and friendship, which are probably going to be pretty hard to come by. I'm pretty willing to take the risk that the world is going to be here for a while longer. Either way, while I do think Alien Girl is a nice person, I definitely don't envision spending a year in her basement eating Spam, let alone a lifetime wandering the atomic wasteland together.
But find me a telepathic Bearded Collie with an IQ of 150 and then we'll talk.