Review of White Dog (1982) by Nikolus Z — 15 Aug 2010

One of the intriguing aspects of Sam Fuller's White Dog is that it is an exploration of racism in which no racists appear on camera 'til almost the very end of the film, and in which the psychological drama of working out environmentally-conditioned race hatred takes place in the mind of a canine. If we take the dog as analogy, it falls short in a few ways. The "white dog" was trained to attack black individuals by a man who had black men attack the dog as a puppy. In this way his trepidation and hostility toward people with black skin is a rational outgrowth of this conditioning. Secondly, the dog's response is to color stimuli (the trainer remarks that dogs literally live a black and white world, unlike humans who only live a social black and white world) and not to ideological or socio-historical assumptions about the moral standing of people of various ethnicities or extractions.

The dog can be seen not as an analogy, then, but as a symptom. Indeed, this is the explicit motivation for the trainer's willingness to take on the job of "unlearning" the white dog (and his vow to, if he fails, try and try again): only by learning to blunt the effectiveness of the instruments of racism can racism be reduced to a benign travesty rather than a lethal reality. In struggling to undo the handiwork of the dog's previous owner, the trainer is cleansing a small portion of the world of the stain of race hatred, and researching a method to extend to other dogs and other areas of society.

This is all, naturally, couched in a nature-nurture typology, and this question wisely remains unanswered. The end is unnerving, pessimistic, yet ambiguous. Sam Fuller had the good sense to not claim to have solved the problem of racism.