Paper Flowers: Jane Campion, Plant Life, and The Power of the Dog (2021)

Taking as its point of departure the place vegetal realm within Jane Campion’s filmmaking, this article attends to both living and artificial plants, homing in on exquisitely crafted paper flowers The Power Dog explore their entanglement with human power relations. Manmade are clearly distinct from garden or prairie, but Western, they form part a broader floral aesthetic kin. Drawing upon thought that stems actual plants (Deleuze Guattari’s arboreal-rhizomatic thinking) philosophy (Marder, Coccia), well parallel botany’s attention (Lionni), I follow fate one flower it intersects gendered history making sexual symbolism. Thinking flower, engage theories variously question binary relations (Cixous, Barthes, Steinbock), reading these alongside scholarship sex, gender, masculinity Western (Neale, Mulvey, Bruzzi), broaching hierarchies settler colonialism. film’s aesthetic, argue, challenges either/or logic male female, masculine feminine, even though cannot fully break away binaries critiques, is indebted registering importance nuance (Barthes) unthreading power.