BONUS BLOG -- 1975: A BOY AND HIS DOG

What’s it about?

Young drifter Don Johnson wanders through post-apocalyptic America with his telepathic dog, Blood. Johnson’s life is an alternating selfish quest for food and women, and he thinks nothing of killing and raping to get what he wants. Blood helps him along, but tries to interest him in a potentially better life in a legendary place called “over the hill” where people still farm and live in peace.

One night, Blood sniffs out a woman at a violent make-shift hobo camp. In pursuing her, Johnson has to fight or evade other marauding drifters like himself and frightening mutants called “screamers”. When the girl gives him the slip despite his persistence, he follows her to her home “down under” -- an underground colony of superficially civilized survivors who operate a fascist police state underneath a twisted and creepy veneer of down-home, apple-cheeked Americana.




Is it any good?

I like to classify and categorize things, so I have been secretly working under an unverified hypothesis that there is some monolithic category of “pre-STAR WARS” sci-fi movies and another of “post-STAR WARS” sci-fi movies. This is, of course, completely untrue. I would say that sci-fi movies in the 1950s may have largely followed a predictable formula (handsome scientist saves world), but even by the end of that decade there were a lot of film makers branching out into new territory.

But one thing I have noticed about the more serious-minded sci-fi movies of the pre-STAR WARS period is that they very often have an obvious allegorical quality to them. By that I mean that many of the movies don’t seem interested in probable or even possible futures -- instead, they are interested in TWILIGHT ZONE worlds that reflect back some aspect of our own society in refracted ways.

I would put movies such as PLANET OF THE APES (1968), SILENT RUNNING (1972), SOYLENT GREEN (1973) and LOGAN’S RUN (1976) in this category. And since those are some of my favorite movies of all time, I can honestly say that I don’t really mind the whole allegorical approach to sci-fi. In fact, allegorical stories are the quickest route to one of my favorite things about science fiction: grumpy satirical misanthropy.




In the case of A BOY AND HIS DOG, though, the descent into the satirical world of the underground Kansas is pretty darn disappointing. The post-apocalyptic surface world is so full of interesting things (and so unlike anything else on film prior to 1975) that the creepy version of middle America under the surface just felt ordinary and lifeless by comparison. It was also completely unexpected. Nothing in the first two-thirds of the movie made it obvious that this underground world even existed -- let alone that Don Johnson would spend the last half hour of the movie down there, separated from his dog.

A BOY AND HIS DOG is not the first post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. But even the earlier movies that imagine a destroyed Earth -- like THE LAST MAN (1960) and THE OMEGA MAN (1971) -- don’t go much farther than overturned cars in their depiction of wreckage. THE WAR GAME (1965) and ZARDOZ (1974) add bombed-out buildings to the mix, but the survivors mostly just huddle in shell-shocked groups. PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and especially BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) do go whole hog with the idea of world ravaged by nuclear war, but they take place thousands of years after the event in question, when modern civilization is an archaeological memory. BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1974) features a recently post-apocalyptic New York City, but stays mostly in the steam tunnels and basements. The closest thing I can think of is the Czechoslovakian THE END OF AUGUST AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1967). That movie is far more meditative, however, and the future is a severely underpopulated and woman-dominated one. (Which is pretty unique in itself, I might add.)




A BOY AND HIS DOG is the first movie I’m aware of that really takes pains to depict what life might be like for those who are forced to scrabble out a living from the ruins of a shattered world. But it was followed pretty quickly by DAMNATION ALLEY (1977), DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), QUINTET (1979), ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981), and then a whole blossoming sub-genre. I think there’s not much doubt that THE ROAD WARRIOR was responsible for popularizing post-apocalyptic movies (and a whole dingy aesthetic that follow them to this day), but a whole lot of what you can see there was done first by A BOY AND HIS DOG.

The biggest disappointment about the shift in focus is that there is still so much of the post-apocalyptic surface world left unseen. Don Johnson spends much of his time in underpopulated wastelands, and though he does come into “town” for a little while, he doesn’t do anything there except go to the movies. The only people he interacts with are just as unpleasant as he is. In fact, the dog Blood is the only truly likeable character in the movie, and even he has his brutal moments. (Then again, he is a dog.)

I don’t want to give the impression that this is a bad movie. It’s not, and I enjoyed much of it quite a lot. But it definitely leaves many potentially interesting stones completely unturned -- which, I suppose, is why we have had many more post-apocalyptic movies since 1975.