Plague Dogs, by Dylan

Cody's Introduction: Today, after reviving from a cowardly new-job induced slumber, I 'm returning to regular posting with an exciting addition to the Erection of Disbelief's roster: Dylan! Dylan is now where I was a month ago: unemployed, drinking a lot, and watching several movies a day. He makes his debut here with a startlingly well-observed consideration of British cult animation Plague Dogs, from the director of Watership Down, and in the process invents a brave new epithet for his future spawn.

Plague Dogs

by Dylan
Director: Martin Rosen
Year: 1982
Leads: John Hurt, Christopher Benjamin
Classification: Children's Film
Rating: Up to Dylan


Right from the outset, Plague Dogs is not your average children’s film. The film begins sparsely: a black screen and the song “Time and Tide”—an anemic interpretation of the gospel styling sung by British singer Alan Price. Mr. Price sings, “I don’t feel no pain, no more” in a neutered voice as a faint sloshing sound emerges in the background, and credits begin to appear in red. The splashing swells into fully pronounced slaps, and we sense that we are listening to waves in a tank. The picture fades in, and we meet Rowf, one of the film’s two canine protagonists; we have been listening to Rowf drown.

After Rowf inhales enough water to pass out, characterless veterinarians, or, “white coats” as the dogs refer to them, snatch him out of the tank by his collar and pump the water out of his stomach and lungs; we now know this is an animal testing facility. What exactly the drowning test is in service of, however, remains undisclosed.

When Rowf wakes up from a post-drowning delirium, his cage neighbor, Snitter, informs him that his pen has been left ajar. Snitter squeezes under their partition, and the two sneak out. Looking for an exit, Snitter and Rowf circumspectly skulk through a delirious carnival of torments; they encounter a long gauntlet of vulcanized rubber gloves poking out from Plexiglas, knock over a wretchedly incommodious rat-cage, and sidle by lonely, fearful monkeys sealed in vats. Eventually, Snitter and Rowf crawl into an animal incinerator and escape through an outside-connecting cadaver shoot.

Once out and amidst the surrounding moor, these dogs are not just confused, they are demented. Rowf has become conditioned to aggression, and Snitter, having had an experimental brain operation back at the facility, suffers from post-traumatic stress complete with fits, delusions, and unremitting despondency. (“Bees in my head, they keep buzzing. Feels like smoke.”) His mind now plays like a broken record, constantly replaying an incident when, he believes, he killed his master by luring him into the street.

The question inevitably becomes whether or not it is better outside, or inside the pens. Outside, the world is not hopeless like in the pens, but hope proves feckless against the horrors of living, only deluding the dogs into thinking there is a way out; at times, Snitter wishes he could be caught and sent back. Outside, they encounter towns, shops, potential masters, and possible doggy friends, but these ultimately do nothing except agonize them.

The effect is as frustrating for the spectator as it is for Snitter and Rowf. For instance, in the scene where the dogs spot the shop, the music (which is, for the most part, the Kronos Quartet playing Vivaldi) takes an unprecedented and unrepeated turn up-tempo, and the animation matches this with an artificially joyful series of jump fades accelerating us towards the storefront, effectively engaging us in the dogs excitement. When Snitter and Rowf enter, they are not greeted with pats from warm palms, as we seem to expect, but instead see a man (likely a butcher) wielding a knife (almost certainly not at them). The two dogs panic, and scramble over each other out the door. “They must cut them [dogs] up on those glass tables,” Snitter deduces.

This sort of misinterpretation and misfortune continues throughout the film. Rowf, not understanding a man’s benevolence, bites his hand when he pulls his car over to help Snitter, who, in the throes of a fit, has stranded himself in the middle of the street. Snitter and Rowf together decide, after observing two sheep dogs fluently corral their flock, to have a go in the hope that they my might ingratiate themselves to the other dogs and their master. Their attempt is hapless, however, and the sheep scatter, one even tramples Snitter as it runs off; as a result, both the sheep dogs and their master malign the two. But the most sublime of these instances happens when a hunter spots cute little Snitter sniffing around. The man, smitten by the pup’s cuteness, waves him near; Snitter perks up when he remembers the amiable gesture from times before his internment and runs towards the man waging his tail like mad. In all his excitement, however, and while trying to clamber up the man’s leg, Snitter’s back paw slips onto the trigger of the hunter’s shotgun and he inadvertently blows the man’s face off. Silly Snitter.

Now that Snitter’s plan of finding a master has proven abysmal, the two switch to Rowf’s strategy: fighting. The two make a conscious go at becoming feral, roaming for months killing sheep and raiding chicken coups. Actively terrorizing the countryside, however, makes it evident that the dogs have yet to expire. In light of this, the government can no longer keep quiet about the potential epidemic threat that Snitter and Rowf may be carrying with them; that’s right, the dogs have the plague. (Remember those rats and monkeys they discovered on their way out of the animal testing grounds? Plague rats and plague monkeys, all of them.) A full on dog hunt is now under way.

At this point the dogs have long since made friends with a Geordie fox named “the Tod.” The Tod ends up killing a white-coat sniper who had Snitter and Rowf in his sights, so the facility has no choice but to send out the choppers. Snitter and Rowf escape to the sea by train, thanks to the Todd acting as decoy, but the whirly birds eventually catch up to them, as do the paramilitary batteries. Snitter lies down in resignation, but Rowf, ever the fighter, simply refuses to return to the concentration camp from which he came. Nor will he be killed. The two run down to the shoreline, but Rowf is pinned by his fear of water. A line of soldiers marching abreast descends the dunes.

When Snitter spots the sun on the horizon, he names it their “Island” and deems it “where they have to go.” Rowf paces up and down the shoreline phobicly, but eventually gets in. As they paddle out to sea, bullets pop on the surface of the water about their heads. The fog covers them, and the bullets cease.

The fog soon opens and we see Snitter and Rowf once again, they are struggling and sucking down water; Snitter complains of fatigue and says he can’t see the island anymore, but Rowf chokingly insists that it is still there. They half swim half sink as Alan Price’s “Time and Tide” returns. In this reprise, while still being strangely soulless, the song is more fully realized; the credits trundle up the screen we get the joyous call and response of a gospel choir clapping for deliverance: “I’ve left this cruel world, and I’ve found my piece of mind.”

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Whenever a children’s film suffers the criticism of “being too adult,” it usually secures for itself some manner of cultism a decade or two down the line. Plague Dogs is certainly a member of that group, and I am a proud celebrant. The reason why these films, e.g., The Neverending Story, Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Secret Of Nimh, etc., are continually returned to is not merely for the sake of nostalgia, or to finally understand what you couldn’t as a child, but because they are just plain excellent films. This is not regardless of genre, of course, for to ignore the intended audience would be to turn these films into something they are not. These are bona fide children’s films; the only difference is that they are the best of the bunch.

The claim that Plague Dogs, or any of those other films, are “too adult” is to condescend children in the worst way. It characterizes thought provoking cinema, or worse, thinking in general, as something that ought to be delayed into adulthood. It either assumes that childhood is a time when one is too young to think, or worse, that childhood is a sanctified time where one does not have to think. This is ugly anti-intellectualism and an obviously repugnant notion.

The fact of the matter is, a truly realized children’s film does not merely entertain children, but conveys deathless concepts in a way that children can relate, and the simple conveyance of complex ideas is strikingly beautiful for the adult as well. Plague Dogs accomplishes this brand of reflection without being overly didactic, something that many children’s films suffer from. Sure, the film explicitly favors animal rights and erects a repulsive portrait of its combatants, but not based on the pithy premise that all dogs go to heaven. The concept of good dog, bad dog is still real, but shown to be impure. By our regular standards these are unequivocally bad dogs: they go through the trash, break things, kill people, and, for fuck’s sake, they have the plague. Nevertheless, we would rather see an entire cell block executed than see a rolled up newspaper anywhere near these dogs. It is never too early to impart on a child how flimsy a moral structure can be, or, for that matter, how the image of a drowning dog has within it the capacity to be both despicable as well as something beautiful.

I imagine my future-self as a parent sitting down with son or daughter and popping in Plague Dogs for family film night. By the time the evening has ended, my child will have learned that his or her life will be a series of seemingly pointless traumas with which no one will ever be able to actually empathize, and my baby girl, or baby boy will feel somewhere inside, although incapable of saying it, that he or she knows why daddy seeks complacency in a job, or in mommy. Because just as Snitter and Rowf needed to be either feral or mastered, pop needs to make sense of himself too, and when it all goes to shit and the world turns abhorrent, my babes might also get why dad can’t look mommy in the face, or why he buys a new bottle every three days; and if daddy ever gets the cherries to do himself in, you, kid—little pip from my tip—better sing me out too.