S01E07: “Target For Terror”: Dichromatism

Our misty, videotaped dreams of the un-human Hobo as an actor of radical freedom may have been premature, if not delusional. The dog's narrow focus on interpersonal justice leaves no room for ideology, politics, or other forest-over-trees considerations. “Target For Terror,” the seventh episode of TLH, is a mix of menace, moral clarity, and naiveté that mimics a dog’s worldview, but draws uneasy parallels with our own.  

The fairly fantastic characters of “Target For Terror” literally leap from the headlines. The first thing we see is the bold, 72-point pronouncement at the top of a broadsheet, filling the screen: "TERRORISTS MAKE MORE DEMANDS." The unidentified newspaper reader then folds down the page, which, like an upside-down opera curtain, has the effect of revealing our human hero. Paul Hamilton – young man, snub-nose, Lego-hair, jacket-collar popped, flared pants swishing – is striding confidently into a train station. Following closely behind are two sketchy characters, who we immediately surmise are the terrorists. It is as if the dramatic headline conjured these players, or as if we have passed through the headline, into the world of ALL-CAPS anxiety, entering the fear-soaked deathscape of broadsheet news.

Briefly now, let’s jump ahead to an almost unaccountably strange moment that occurs halfway through the episode. One terrorist walks in on the other, who is perusing a thick paperback, and tells him to “Stop reading that junk!" Why were we invited to this moment? The title of the book, unfortunately can't be glimpsed. The only part of the cover we can see in an element in the lower left-hand corner: a swastika! Is it a book about Nazism? Are we being told that the terrorists are Nazis? Or that they're anti-fascists who consider Nazism "junk"? Perhaps it's a red herring to focus on that graphic detail. But surely there's a reason the one terrorist is chastised for reading a book.

I think it has to do with the newspaper headline at the start, which introduced our setting as a reductive and fearful world. Being in the world of a panicked newspaper means rejecting the world of books, which would include depths of context and greater stores of information, reasoning, empathy. Even the terrorists reject any intrusion from that world, which is foreign to the territory of the tale.

A dog must naturally see the world as tense and simple, but we are coached that way by broadsheet profiteers. And those who manipulate their message.

Paul Hamilton is a kind and rich fellow. The terrorists want to kill or capture him as part of an obscure plot to get at the boy's grandfather, Chief Justice Hamilton, played by John Carradine. Carradine, very old at this point, sometimes struggles with his delivery, but still has a large, theatrical presence, and beautifully gnarled, expressive hands that cling to fine lapels in his opulent office, which is replete with mahogany furnishings and a deep, patterned carpet that no doubt hides expensive Cuban ash. The camera films that office with a certain staid reverence: we’re not to scoff at this man, we’re to see his perspective as right and proper. The terrorists, in comparison, have weird, strained faces, natty clothes, and awkwardly-carved facial hair (one is played by the great Cronenberg regular Geva Kovacs).   The dog – named Nick, this time around – saves Paul in the train station, but Chief Justice Hamilton warns his grandson that the rugged schemers are still out there. Now that the terrorists have spooked their prey, they take another line of attack. By successfully kidnapping Paul’s fiancée, Pam, they force the groom-to-be to come out to a remote hotel in the country, where he too is kidnapped.  

“We have a cause,” the terrorist tells Paul, warning him not to try any funny stuff. “We live for it, and we’re willing to die for it.” But what this cause might be is, glaringly, never even hinted at.

In the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, US intelligence officials initially concluded that Syria was behind the attack, as retaliation for America’s downing of an Iranian passenger jet earlier that year. President Reagan, however, shifted the blame to Libya’s President Gaddafi, who was a more convenient villain (and happy to play along, to boost his anti-American cred). The U.S. president-cum-actor even participated in the creation of a neo-conservative conspiracy theory that had Gaddafi and Carlos the Jackal heading a deranged hit-squad hellbent on assassinating Reagan. A similar form of narrative alchemy happened in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when the Bush administration shifted the story to point blame at the unconnected Saddam Hussein, even though almost all the attackers were Saudis. The point is that American government ideologues seem to kind of like terrorists because, unlike a state army, their origins and motives often seem unclear, and so can be manipulated in the public mind. Obviously, anyone willing to kill and die for a cause has strong beliefs, but American governments would rather obscure the meaning, or even existence, of a cause. We can all remember George W. Bush nonsensically asserting that the terrorists simply “hate our freedoms.”  

This matters, because our films tend to reflect, intentionally or not, the false storylines being peddled. At the height of the Bush-era terrorism panic, The Dark Knight was released, starring a Bush/Blair-style Batman battling an anti-ideology lunatic who just wanted to “watch the world burn.” Why? Oh, no reason. Terrorists, we’ve been counterintuitively led to believe by state propaganda, don’t really need a reason. Apparently they just want to fuck shit up (or “maximize chaos” to use the ridiculous description of Nazi motives peddled by Jordan Peterson). It’s clear why we’re fed this lie. Obfuscating the position and ultimate aims of the terrorists makes their actions seem mad, and any opposing actions seem justified.

With both Pam and Paul captive to the villains, it’s up to the dog Nick to save them. And here we’re introduced to the episode’s most sympathetic character: Osborne, the meek, bespectacled man who runs the dilapidated country inn where the criminal action is happening. Unlike Paul, Osborne is not aligned with state ideology; he’s motivated by narrow, everyday concerns, like ensuring no dogs loiter on his property. We’re clearly meant to identify with Osborne: when Nick sprays the hotelier with a water hose, to get his attention, the water is first sprayed directly on the camera lens, at us.

Nick rouses the non-ideologic self-interested character to the defense of one political side. However, he does this not by appealing to ideology, but by threatening the comfort of the passive actor. This is reminiscent of how the newspaper is always declaring our comfort to be under threat. The sleight is possible, since the terrorists’ positions have been strategically re-written so that it appears that threatening stability is a goal unto itself, rather than a means to an end.

The Hobo is of course not actually acting in defense of state ideology, but his narrow focus on context-free morality (and waking up the non-ideological actor with his moral concerns) can be exploited to that end.  

The dog comes from a third world, not of power or of resistance, but the world of the woods. Among the trees, living as an animal, there are only immediate concerns, so of course he can’t see the greater context of his actions. But at times, this can also be an advantage, for him. When the terrorists chase Nick, he leads them off into the trees, and there they become hopelessly lost. In the woods, among individual trunks, their ideology can't follow, so they're easily duped.  

Osborne has a “No Dogs Allowed” sign on his property. By forbidding dogs, Osborne wishes to keep the wildness of apolitical moral action at bay (the forest, after all, is cut down a safe distance from his beloved lawn). And yet, even though he appears unaligned, Osborne’s cherished obsession with self-concern is policed by the channels and apparatuses of the state (which are nourished by a particular ideology, though he doesn't see it).

The wildness of the dog's morality runs outside of these channels. And yet, it is the dog, the apparently-radical actor, that draws Osborne's actions to a political side, for it is a roused Osborne who eventually unties and frees the kidnapped couple.  

Here we see the dangers of radical actions being co-opted to state ends, if the actions don't have their own, competing ideological compass.

This is why Osborne changes his sign at the end, crossing out the “No,” so it says simply “Dogs Allowed.” Since the moral-ideological motivation of the terrorists has been successfully hidden from him, and his own morality has been manipulated to be indistinguishable from self-interest, he is now able to see morality, state ideology, and his own comfort as compatible, and indeed mutually-reinforcing.  

The freed Paul Hamilton says he wants to make the dog his “best man.” Nick has been granted humanity because he is perceived to have collaborated with the correct (state) ideology.

The Hobo naturally flees this.

2 stars

S01E06: “Silent Witness”: The Tell-Tale Hound

“Even though white is often associated with things that are pleasant and pure,” Melville wrote, in Moby-Dick, “there is a peculiar emptiness about the color white. It is the emptiness of the white that is more disturbing than even the bloodiness of the red.” The characters in that novel end up stalked by an immortal and savagely stark white God, whose power can foam the blue sea into its own frightening colourlessness. Not a black that obscures, but a white that, in its translucent emptiness, reveals too much, too directly showing a bloodless world. It is worth keeping this in mind when trying to understand how the harsh and spectral white of The Littlest Hobo’s videotape aesthetic seems to become more complex and unsettling as we move from the warmth of “Double Trouble” to the sixth episode of TLH: the uncharacteristically haunting “Silent Witness.”

Sam Powers has a horrible secret. In the first scene of the episode, we saw him drunkenly drive his blue truck home through a clear dawn. After refusing an offer to crash at a friend’s place, and barreling through garbage cans and mailboxes, he managed to drive right into the kindly neighbourhood deliverywoman, knocking her flat, then fleeing the scene in a panic. The deliverywoman was injured but alive, fortunately. Unfortunately for Sam, however, waiting in the passenger seat of her van was her new friend: The Hobo, who had been helping her with the deliveries. The rest of the episode consists of the Hobo – the lone, mute witness to the crime – hounding Sam Powers like an avenging specter, trying to force the beleaguered alcoholic to turn himself in to the law. The dog stands imperiously on Sam’s lawn, staring, challenging him through the window. He places the injured woman’s hat inside the man’s truck. Sam is a wreck, and is driven to the brink of madness by the dog, yet still he refuses to present himself to the police.

As the menacing Hobo stands guard outside the wrongdoer’s home, the dog’s fur glows in the ethereal white of the videotape aesthetic. You can almost feel the alcoholic’s hangover when you look at the way that white burns. Is the man being taunted with the dog’s purity? After all, in “Double Trouble” that glowing white seemed to be associated with the purity of the endangered school girls.  But something else is going on.

Sam Powers tries to shake off the hangover and the misery by returning to his job as a construction worker. Yet the work is hellish, and even there, the dog is watching. The sky, which was a dull blue before, becomes at the worksite a punishing white. The white sky is so overwhelming and unforgiving, it seems to eat into the blue bulldozer Sam operates, dominated the screen like never before. What is happening? This can only be a world transformed by the man’s guilt. Yes, Sam is surely hungover in that scene, but what makes a hangover so unendurable if not the guilt that typically accompanies it?

There’s a popular internet joke that a human is “a monkey with anxiety.” But it never made much sense to me to choose anxiety as the constant of the human experience that sets us apart from the animals. Monkeys (who grin when they’re stressed) often seem extremely anxious, and you only have to look at a squirrel to recognize how present anxiety is in the animal kingdom. If anything, I would think that anxiety, or the perpetual stress of vigilance, is experienced by animals even more constantly and acutely than by ourselves. But if there is a nagging, existential unease that we do experience so regularly that it separates our experience from that of all other living things, I would propose that it is our guilt. Not the fear of what is to come, which is common among simpler animals, but the regret for what has happened, which is the poisoned bequest of our deep memories and complex, socially-evolved perception. A dog that has eaten the garbage or torn up a pillow does seem to look guilty, but it’s hard to think of another animal to which you could attribute that sickening sensation. And, in the case of the dog, it might be a feeling that it has contracted from its human hosts. After all, and as has already been discussed, a dog is an animal with one foot in its world and one foot in ours.

From this angle, we begin to see the Hobo’s apparent mission, of returning stray humans to their humanity, in a bleaker, Calvinist light. Forcing us to be “more human” may not simply be a question of returning us to fellow-feeling and blissful goodness. It may also mean rubbing our faces in the scalding bath of our own inescapable guilt. Perhaps the Hobo takes no pleasure in this task. Perhaps he sees humans as fundamentally broken, as they rely on perpetual self-chastisement to remain functioning members of the colony. But for the good of the colony, of humanity at large, as well as for the good of the individual, who will only stumble into pain as a pariah, he accepts the challenge to return us to the painful self-flagellation that is the constant, defining undercurrent of the human experience.  

The glowing white is Hobo’s vision of our humanity: kind and moral, yes, but also an essence of burning guilt, for the guilt is the bitter lace that binds the collective goodness.   This is shown more clearly when we try to break down the two colours that dominate this episode’s palate: blue and white. Blue, the colour of Sam’s all-jean outfit (“Canadian tuxedo”) and his truck and bulldozer, seems to stand for assuredness of one’s place in society. When the deliverywoman is discovered supine on the ground, she is surrounded by authoritative cops, in blue of course, but all the civilians in the frame are also dressed in blue. They feel secure in knowing that they are not the transgressors here, and are on the same team as the authorities. Drunk Sam’s blue outfit is a smug certainty that he also belongs, but he’s driven mad by the white that haunts him, until the very sky overhead has turned from blue to blinding clarity in the scene where he is banished from his blue bulldozer and exposed, howling, to the brilliant, bloodless air.

In fact, Sam’s own home gives us an insight into his psychology. His outer door is painted blue, showing the confidence he uses to protect himself from society’s judgments. But, on the inside, the door is painted white, showing the pain of guilt that excludes him: The real enforcer that torments us is internal.   The Hobo finally succeeds in bringing Sam to admit his deep guilt by bringing the cops to his doorstep (the cop car is both blue and white: enforcement of the law comes from both sides). In the next scene, a repentant Sam, visits the deliverywoman in the hospital where she is recovering. Here, for the first time, he has ditched the blue getup, and is humbly wearing drab colours. The woman forgives him, and refuses to tell others who injured her. There is hardly a glimpse of white now: the guilt has been banished by the victim's kindness.   How does the Hobo feel about this conclusion? Impossible to say. Had he been hoping Sam’s guilt would be absolved all along? Or does he resent that the deliverywoman removed the cudgel that the dog had wielded to keep a dangerous actor in line? The Hobo, of course, wanders off shortly after, but this is hardly clear evidence of his frustration; it’s what he always does. Another human returned to humanity, though what humanity will do to the man, the dog cannot alter for long. The fresh ties snap again, and the silent witness moves on.

3 stars

S01E05: “Double Trouble”: Gentlemen of the Road

Where even is The Littlest Hobo set? It’s obviously filmed in Canada, and usually not too far from Toronto, but this is generally disguised. In the two-parter “Manhunt,” a bar has clearly been decorated to look as if it’s in the United Stated, with only American beer brands present and advertised on the walls (the fact that the only two beers on tap are Schlitz and Pabst strongly suggests that the episode is specifically set in Wisconsin, for whatever reason). The Hobo could, of course, be wandering all over the continent. Some of the wonderful opening shots of the fifth episode, “Double Trouble,” give us a sense of place beyond geography: Bales of hay, an old tractor sputtering, a grinning tramp in a straw hat, fresh-faced country girls cheering, sturdy horses whinnying. This could be Russia, the French countryside, or the Argentine pampas. It doesn't matter. We’ve been transported to the realm of folklore.

“Double Trouble” might be the most visually striking episode yet. After these establishing glimpses of the hay-scented, sun-ripened farmland, we’re treated to a gorgeous tracking shot that leisurely promenades up among a county fair. We take in stages draped in circus-coloured cloth; more young girls cheering from astride bales, truck-beds, the hood of a yellow school bus; and several farmers interacting with their animals: a horse, a goat, a chicken, and a young pig cradled like a beloved infant. Far from the crackling schism of “Smoke” and the xenophobic religiosity of the previous entry, this bucolic folklore setting – where men and beasts toil in tandem, unsuspicious of one another – is a breath of fresh country air.   Now would be a good moment to finally bring up the aesthetics of The Littlest Hobo. TLH was one of the earliest broadcast dramas to be filmed on videotape, rather than film. One effect of this on the viewer is to cast a net of associations different and broader than those of the usual stupefying, soundstaged film-for-TV aesthetic. The videotape look doesn’t necessarily feel like televised fiction; the mind scintillates with associations ranging from network sports telecasts, to TV news reports of Reagan-and-Bush-era invasions of Latin American countries, to cringe-inducing home videos, to pornography. All these associations might become as upsetting as they are hauntingly familiar, if it weren’t for the softness and warmth of the visuals produced.  

One feature of the videotape look is that it flattens the focus, placing far and near objects together, without a crispening of the in-focus plane held apart from the blurred depth of field. It’s pleasantly painterly the way every object in the composition appears to occupy the same space, with hardly any impression of depth beyond that provided by simple perspective. For a show that questions the lines we draw between man and nature, it is appropriate that the visual style crowds the frame this way, foregoing the familiar foreground-background dichotomy familiar from film and TV. Here, natural surroundings cannot be visually presented as mere background, divided from the hero by a wall of stark focus.  

The impression of looking at a painting, as well as the pantheistic sense of world-melding, is only strengthened by the soft, pastel colours created by videotape, which banish the slicing brutality of black shadow. Dulcet pigments meld into one another with a sunny-afternoon borderless haze, reminiscent of an Impressionist canvas. A Monet, perhaps.  

A peculiarly strong effect is created by videotaped white, which positively glows like a milky dream. In “Double Trouble” especially, where schoolgirls are often on screen, their uniform white T-shirts radiate an unreal purity, a white that seems to impel the surrounding pastel hues to modestly retreat from the colourless bloom.

But maybe the most remarkable effect happens not out in the sun, but when the camera moves indoors (which is fairly rare, in this show). Whenever a window to the outside enters the frame, the light coming from this window appears as a glowing, pale, indigo shape; a bluish, creamy blossom of unreal ether, with misty, crinoline-paper edges. The exterior imposes on the room as a beguiling but dangerously impossible fantasy. It reminds me of two films. One is Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, where windows similarly appear as glowing blue squares in orange walls. In that film’s orange-and-blue colour scheme, the window emerges as a nagging reminder of fantasy’s grip, and the possibility that even domestic moments are part of a dreamscape. The other film I think of is Hirokazu Kore-eda's Afterlife, where heaven is depicted as an office building, normal in most respects, though the windows to the outdoors (whatever the outdoors may be, in the afterlife) are occluded by opaque blue. That film is about the recently-deceased selecting and recreating their favourite memories, to be relived for eternity. The recreated memories are recorded on videotape.  

The Hobo here appears as the pal of an indigent bum named Ben, played by British TV veteran Barry Morse. Compared to the first four episodes, The Hobo gets more reaction shots where he seems to be simply enjoying himself, often looking up at Ben when the two share a joke. In previous adventures, Hobo reaction shots appear almost exclusively in moments of grim decision-making, but in Ben’s company, the dog seems relaxed and at home. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, this time around, The Hobo is given no sobriquet. Perhaps, in this company, he feels comfortable to be himself, and no name-yoke is imposed. While the human-animal schism will play a hand (once again) in this episode, the Hobo-Ben relationship, like the men coexisting with their animals in that early tracking shot, shows us the possibility of a relationship with no interspecies tensions. Their shared hobo-ness seems to cut across animal lines.

We have looked at The Hobo’s character, up until now, as if he’s toiling under a sense of responsibility, or even enslaved by his love for people. “Double Trouble” invites us to entertain a happier possibility: that the dog can wander and make connections without plan or compulsion, simply for the enjoyment of it.

Certainly, he seems to enjoy his fellow hobo. “Where would two gentlemen of the road be most likely to assuage the pangs of hunger?” the dramatic vagabond asks the amused hound, before the two’s ears prick up at the sound of the nearby fair’s reverberating PA announcements. They enter the fair in the middle of a contest to see what can pull more weight: a tractor, or two Clydesdale horses. “These magnificent mammals versus the machinery of modern man!” the bombastic MC intones. As you can see, the dialogue is more exaggerated this time, as befits the folklore atmosphere.  

The horses win the contest, and are put up for auction. A cynical businessman named Rogers is initially the only bidder, saying he’ll give ten dollars to turn the horses into fertilizer. He proclaims that no one truly needs workhorses anymore and, despite the pastoral setting, the other villagers’ lack of bidding seems to prove him right. And yet a schoolmistress named Miss Allen – urged on by the shock of her girl students, who are aghast at the thought of the Budweiserien steeds going to soil – is compelled to begin bidding against Rogers. There’s an interesting moment when Ben sees Miss Allen accidentally drop a bill, and he puts his food on it, with the intention of stealing. The Hobo urges him silently to give it back, and he does. We see here how the dog doesn’t actually cling to morally-perfect Good Men, as we might have previously assumed, though he does encourage good behaviour in his friends. Ben is then moved to help the teacher outbid the scoundrel, but is thwarted when he has to reveal to the auctioneer that he doesn’t actually have any money.

So Rogers gets the horses anyway, but Miss Allen is pleased by Ben’s attempted good deed, and invites the vagabond to sleep in her hayloft. In the morning, we discover that The Hobo has gone ahead and stolen the horses anyway, much to Ben’s frustration. It’s a funny inversion of the moment with the dropped bill, where now the human scolds the dog, but their friendship isn’t threatened but this tug-of-war over correct behaviour. By his actions, we again see that The Hobo has no real respect for human laws or social norms, and operates according to private moral principles.  

The episode changes for the dramatic when we learn that the yellow school bus, full of the glowing, white-shirted girls, has become stuck in the middle of a furiously churning river. The bus conductress apologizes for the gaffe, and seems genuinely contrite, though it’s honestly pretty hard to imagine just how she managed to fuck up in such an incredible way. Ben and Hobo pledge their services to the rescue operation. The dog swims a heavy rope out to the girls (who, between their cheering in the early moments, and their panicked entreaties in the climax, are basically only ever seen vocalizing in a chorus of barely-comprehensible squeals, like a flock of birds) who tie it to the bus. Ben ties the other end to the tractor and tries to tow the bus out. No luck; the tractor isn’t powerful enough. The sopping-wet pooch returns to the scene with the solution in tow: he has brought the Clydesdales, who, as we have already seen, are stronger than the vehicle. Once again, the natural world (associated with informal kindness and interspecies friendships) is stronger than the mechanical world (associated with the craven selfishness of Rogers and the moral-blindness of property laws). The girls are saved.

The final scene sees the mayor bestowing honours on the heroes of the hour. The schoolmistress gets an official deed to the horses. Ben is awarded the key to the city, and he greedily declares that he’ll be sticking around for a while. The mayor then tries gift a fancy, glittering dog collar to the canine hero, only to turn around and find its intended recipient already fleeing. Everyone is shocked except Ben, who smiles knowingly, and even becomes the first human friend to receive a fond final look from his erstwhile companion. The tramp seems to understand that a gilded collar is exactly what The Hobo has been trying to avoid.

2.5 stars

S01E04: “The Defector”: Cynocephali

The fourth episode of The Littlest Hobo forces us to finally confront something that has been increasingly difficult to ignore over the thrilling course of the first three excellent episodes. Like a canine Prince Myshkin, there’s a distinct possibility that The Hobo is not just a very good boy, but The Very Good Boy. The dog might be Christ himself.

The plot of “The Defector” makes heavy symbolic use of a Saint Christopher’s medal belonging to the man whom the dog – here called “Sport” – befriends this time around. Saint Christopher is the patron saint of travellers (his most famous association, though Wikipedia mentions that he also has patronage for archers, bachelors, boatmen, soldiers, bookbinders, epilepsy, floods, fruit dealers, fullers, gardeners, market carriers, motorists, sailors, surfers, and toothache) and a medallion bearing Christopher’s image is historically worn by travellers seeking protection and good luck. It is worth remembering why.

According to the story, the very tall and sturdy Christopher, recently converted to Christianity, had devoted himself to helping people cross a dangerous river (this is perhaps at some point between the years 249 and 313 CE, if he was indeed a real person). Christopher was carrying a child across, when the boy became as heavy as lead, yet good Chris made it to the other bank all the same. The child then said (by way of apology, I suppose): “You had on your shoulders not only the whole world but Him who made it. I am Christ your king, whom you are serving by this work.” Then vanished.  

So in “The Defector,” the man with the Saint Christopher medal is a wanderer named Paul, dragging his tight jeans down a baked highway, and as our attention is drawn to this icon around his neck, it’s impossible not to speculate about the German Shepherd who trots by his side.

I’m not saying that The Hobo is necessarily literally The Christ. But the ecstasy and tragedy presented by the ownerless dog’s boundless love for humans may have only one familiar analog in the Western tradition. This actually gives us an interesting inversion of the usual human-dog relationship, since the man is here cast as the unthinking, faithful servant, and the dog is the complicated and burdened one in need of a companion.

In fact, in Eastern Orthodox iconography, Saint Christopher was often depicted as having the head of a dog. There appears to have been the belief, at times, that he came from a tribe of dog-headed people. This might have been a case of mistranslation: confusing the Latin “Cananeus” (meaning “Canaanite”) with “canineus” (meaning “canine”). However, Christopher is believed to have come from Libya, and Libya is indeed one region where the cynocephali, the dog-headed people, were apparently believed to reside in antiquity. India was also a frequently reputed homeland for man-dogs, and Jason and his Argonauts managed to battle them in what was probably Southern Hungary. The list of accounts of men with the heads of dogs is surprisingly extensive, with stories appearing among the Egyptians, Greeks, Ancient Chinese, and Mediaeval French and English, though with little consistency on the question of geographic location. All regions probably share a border with The Land of Xenophobia, though not all accounts of dog-headed men are negative.

Some great Christian thinkers, including Augustine of Hippo and the Frankish theologian Ratramnus, felt compelled to address the question of whether or not the dog-headed men were truly men, and sons of Adam. Both concluded that they were.

I like to think that it’s appropriate that Christopher would be dog-headed, because his uncomplaining servility towards a master, in the river story, shows the kind of character we often admire in dogs. Of course, a normal dog is only slavishly servile to a single person, or a small group of people. And the owners who benefit from this servility are pretty randomly determined. You could argue both that this makes dogs less moral (since they don’t choose to serve only “good” people) or actually more moral (since they don’t divide people into “good” and “bad” in the first place) than us. Of the many admirable attributes of dogs, their in-bred servility is one I struggle to see as a net positive.  

So the plot of the episode is basically that Paul and Sport stumble upon a couple of shady characters who are trying to kidnap a famous foreign ballerina. They try to enlist the help of a beat cop, but he laughs at the St. Christopher’s medal, and points out that the house to which the kidnappers and kidnappee apparently absconded is the house of a police lieutenant. Paul and Sport try to settle things themselves by sneaking into the premises, but are apprehended in the house of the lieutenant, who is in the pocket of a dirty foreign government. Sport escapes with the Saint Christopher’s medal in his mouth. By showing the talisman to the police officer, Sport makes the cop understand that its owner is in danger, and the now-good cop returns to the scene in time to foil the kidnapping and halt the execution of Paul.  

Compared to the first three episodes of TLH, this fourth is actually pretty shit. The story is thin and silly pulp, and the foreign villains (the ballerina is a defector being punished by her native country) are slimy and cheap, without any backstory. What makes it especially disagreeable is the vague and xenophobic othering of the presumably communist villains, who come from a country the episode refuses to name. It relies on familiar, nasty Cold War short-hand for scheming foreigners.

Marco Polo, by the way, also located the home of the dog-headed people. He said he encountered them on the Andaman Islands. These famously isolated islands have been in the news lately, after the Sentinelese fatally punctured some very stupid American missionary who risked all the natives’ lives by attempting contact. Polo would have been aghast, for unlike Augustine and Ratramnus, he believed that the hound-heads of the Andamans were beasts, and not human at all.

I was relieved, at this episode’s end, to see the emotionless Hobo trot away from a disquieting mess of religion and xenophobia.  

1 star

S01E03: “Manhunt: Part 2″: Reverse-Mask

Should we pity The Hobo? I return again to the theme song. It’s a fair question whether the lyrics can be taken as a genuine expression of The Hobo’s innermost thoughts, or merely as some human’s imaginative, anthropomorphizing folly. And even if the words can be taken as the best English expression of how the dog actually feels, we still come up against the fundamental untranslatability of a non-human animal’s sensations or experiences. But let’s assume, as an exercise, that the lyrics are our best approximation of the mysterious Hobo’s preoccupations. The voice that’s always calling him has to be the voice of a human, since a dog can’t be said to have a voice, and even if it’s a vague desire he chases, that desire clearly appears for him in human vocal form. The call of domestication, as we’ve mentioned, is the most likely culprit. How does this haunting appeal affect him? “Down the road, that’s where I’ll always be.” He’s unable to live in the moment, as he’s always possessed by a mental displacement towards an as-yet-unrealized comfortable future entrapment. Perhaps part of him envies the house dog, who is nothing if not a creature living always in the moment, always beholden to the desire of that very instant, completely enrapture by the squirrel, toy, or potential for food directly in front of them. Of course, they are imprisoned within this endless moment. Unlike the ownerless Hobo, who can picture a Down The Road, think In advance. But that freedom also introduces melancholy, and the anxiety of displacement. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll finally settle down,” he thinks, but this is a grim thought, because he’s talking about sacrificing his own identity for the unshakeable call of domesticity, that suicide of the self. We know that Tomorrow is not something to look forward to, because, “until tomorrow, the whole world is my home” is a happy thought, made slightly dark only by the implication of its finitude. Of course, all these traps he fears, and many more beside, may be what he sees foremost when he looks upon human beings.

Maybe The Hobo pities us.

Part two of “Manhunt,” just the third episode of The Littlest Hobo, introduces wild plot twists and strong symbolism, and comes up with a pretty dark conclusion about humanity, as seen from the perspective of our mute hero (read the previous post to get caught up on the plot and discussion).

The first section of the episode involves our dog hero, named “Einstein” this time, helping the fugitive Tom escape, with the wounded Old-Timer (whom Tom rescued) in tow. Einstein does this through his uncanny knowledge of the physical world, using trees, logs, elevation, and improvised simple machines to outwit the pursuing forces, who are over-reliant on projecting their quarry’s thoughts.  

Thanks to Einstein, Tom manages to elude the pursuers, and drag the Old-Timer to the edge of a road, there to flag down a passing vehicle. Then comes the shocker. The Old-Timer produces a pistol and says that he’s turning Tom in. The man that Tom killed in self-defense was the Old-Timer's nephew.  

Tom is aghast. As are we. The plot was already motivated by a tangled web of qualifying circumstances, with characters acting on partial information and assumption. Now we realize that we and Tom have also been victimized by partial information. The Old-Timer's allegiance to his family is stronger than that to the man he’s just met, even if that man saved his life.  

The next we see, Tom is in jail, and completely crestfallen. He is only glimpsed through the prison bars for the next several scenes. The prison bars are, well, prison bars, but the visual insistence on them begs our consideration. What has trapped Tom, who sees himself as fundamentally unguilty and deserving of freedom, is the many compromising beliefs and allegiances that make up human existence. It is peoples’ insistence on sticking to things they can name – “family” and “the law” – rather than the confusing mess of verifiable evidence (which, as should be clear by now, we can only ever see imperfectly) that has trapped him in this situation.

The Old-Timer visits Tom in prison, and it’s a striking scene. First, we hear Tom pronounce that he is “innocent,” and that he “didn’t do it.” Notable, because what he’s saying isn’t exactly true – he DID kill a man, after all. But even Tom feels the need to wield language to boil down his experience into a sharper, if less accurate, point. Then, as the Old-Timer is waiting outside, he witnesses Tom talking to Einstein through the bars of his cage. “I wish you could talk,” Tom says to the dog. It’s not clear that the dog, on the right side of the bars, wishes the same. Then the Old-Timer comes in to tell Tom that, “regardless of everything else,” he does greatly appreciate what Tom did for him, out in the bush. Depressed Tom is unmoved. In his defense, the Old-Timer says, “the law is the law, and I have to answer to it, just as you have!” An unconvincing argument, given the circumstances. Even the Old-Timer seems to realize this, as he murmurs, looking around him, “I suppose that’s easier to say out here.” Hearing himself say “the law is the law” seems to be the moment that changes the Old-Timer's perspective. The flabby tautology shakes him out of his rhetorical reliance on comforting language. Indeed, the Old-Timer is hobbling on crutches throughout this scene. He seems to become aware that he’s using verbal concepts like “the law” as a crutch to cover for his lack of availability to a messier narrative based in the observable world.  

So he sets out to correct that. Though keep in mind that he’s probably only doing this because Tom saved his life, not because he’s determined to exonerate his fellow man. More qualifying circumstances. Every experience and belief is a question of relativity (and now perhaps we begin to understand why the dog is called “Einstein”). The Old-Timer identifies this as the key to the case: Tom claims he was assaulted with a tire-iron before killing in self-defense, but the men who were there insist there never was a tire-iron. The Old-Timer only has to voice his suspicions out loud for the Hobo to come to the rescue, as is his wont. Einstein draws the Old-Timer out into the bush, and shows him where the tire-iron was hidden. The incriminating evidence has been recovered, and is passed from maw to hand.

The Old-Timer hobbles into the bar where the family of the dead man are playing cards. He throws the damning implement into the middle of their game. There’s a shot of the tire-iron clattering among the playing cards and currency. This represents what happened to the instrument when it was passed from the dog to the man. Playing cards and dollar bills are objects that are almost pure signification. By being placed among them, we see that the tire-iron has also been transformed into a signifying object. It is now not just a physical thing, but something that speaks, something imbued with a value and a meaning in the context of invented human laws and beliefs. The concept of “the law” locked up Tom, but now this “trump card,” played correctly, can be used to free him through use of the same concept.  

In the concluding scene, we see Tom as a free man. But he isn’t happy. He has clearly been transformed by the experience. In the flashback to the encounter in the bar, in “Manhunt: Part 1,” we saw Tom as almost blissfully confident in his ability to freely and guiltlessly interact with strangers. Clearly, after having been trapped and tortured by mitigating circumstances, after having been made a villain in the eyes of a man he saved, that is no longer the case. He can no longer believe in humans’ ability to interact justly with one another, and this is made clear by the remarkable final line.

Einstein trots off into the woods without a single glance behind him. Tom hollers his name twice, but to no effect. Tom looks sour, then growls this startling conclusion:

“That’s the only goodbye in the world worth anything.”

What on Earth do we take this to mean? Perhaps Tom is so disillusioned with the deceits of language and meaning that he no longer trusts any spoken sentiment, not even a “goodbye.” As harsh as it is, he prefers the pure, unsympathetic act of Hobo’s departure to any potentially false sentiment. It’s unclear whether The Hobo shares in his disgust. It is clear that he feels he has to leave. 

4 stars

S01E02: “Manhunt: Part 1”: If a German Shepherd Could Speak We Could Not Understand Him

Bloodhounds yap throughout “Manhunt: Part 1.” Their constant angry chatter reminds us that our hero is not the only dog out there, appraising the human world. The non-human gaze at the centre of the series is only complicated when we’re forced to consider that The Hobo is one of a species, a species that may have its own beliefs, interpretations, misunderstandings, and even ethics. In this second episode, there are even dogs on opposite sides of the law. They are also on opposite sides of ethics, but with the polarity switched.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel asked “What is it like to be a bat?” and concluded that the evidence will never be conclusive. “An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism to be itself.” Obviously, a thing we will never be able to comprehend, and not only because the beasts lack language. As Wittgenstein opined, even a speaking lion could not expect to be understood.

In interpreting Wittgenstein, poet Vicki Hearne (also, not incidentally, a dog trainer), clarifies that the lion’s reticence should not be interpreted as “the reticence of absence,” but rather “of tremendous presence”: the presence of “all consciousness that is beyond ours.” We humans have long puzzled over the locked trap of animal consciousness, and even tried to crack it. Koko and other gorillas were trained in sign language. The controversial CIA-funded researcher John C. Lilly dropped LSD with captive dolphins and tried to telepath with them in their tanks. Lilly was certain that cetacean intelligence exceeded our own, and daydreamed of a Sperm Whale that had “gone so far into philosophical studies that he sees The Golden Rule as only a special case of a much larger ethic… he probably has abilities here that are truly godlike.” But still, the black box of non-human animal minds remains, and will remain, impenetrable.  

This is what’s so fascinating about the Canadian TV series The Littles Hobo. Even though it seems like an obvious idea, it’s hard to think of a single film, let alone TV series, told from the perspective of a non-human animal. Perhaps Au Hazard Balthazar counts, but the donkey in that film is an entirely passive actor, pathetically absorbing human folly and abuse. The Littlest Hobo is much more radical than Bresson’s film, with a very active non-human beast judging and intervening and choosing among us. Balthazar is Christ on the cross, but the German Shepherd is Christ among the sinners, teaching and struggling. Yet we’re asked to read his process, without being able to understand the mind that does the processing.  

A domesticated dog is an even trickier, denser subject than a wild animal. What of a domestic dog’s mind is actually the dog’s? We can assume (and we have to hope, if we want to be forgiven for domestication) that the secret, innermost parts of her mind remain her own. But the parts we can see, the desires and reactions, have been entirely conditioned by us, to meet our own needs. A domesticated dog is actually a pretty horribly sad creature. If you’ve spent time with a street dog (and the majority of dogs worldwide are street dogs) you know that it can be possessed of much greater calm, and near-philosophical attentiveness, than that of the scatterbrained household variety. Our household hounds remain stunted, spoiled teenagers, constantly enslaved by needs that only human attention can satisfy, their brains scrambled by loops of desire-feedback. We’ve made them this way. We’ve bred and kept another species to be our love-slaves. It’s kind of shitty.

So we have to keep in mind, when trying to peer into the thoughts of The Hobo, that his attraction to humans cannot be considered merely his own choice. Without knowing his background, his familiarity with people, and even his markings (a “reverse-mask” German shepherd), show him as part of a domesticated breed. Does he need to leave a human as soon as he becomes attached to them because he’s like a recovering addict, trying to break a dependency he was born with? He is, as we have already mentioned, a radically free “ownerless dog,” but this doesn’t mean he has completely escaped the stupefying enslavement instincts that are his genetic inheritance. Is the voice that’s always calling him an inner voice drawing him towards freedom, or is it something more sinister: the voice of humans, always tempting him to submit himself?

As already mentioned, Hobo is half of the non-human animal world, but half of the human world. This should always be held in mind when attempting to decipher his motives, even if they come from an unknowable place.  

The genius of “Manhunt: Part 1” is how it superimposes these speculative considerations over a plot about Law vs. Ethics. As we’re asked to think about how perception and perspective shape ideas of right and wrong, we’re simultaneously (and a little mischievously) asked to consider the task of judging an ethical question from an animal’s perspective. Which, again, is fucking impossible, but the exercise forces us to consider how our own conclusions – dependent on not only cultural forces, but even on our very inescapable “humanness” – can hardly be considered “universal.”

The episode begins in media res, and the bloodhounds are already barking. A sheriff and a posse of yokels are on the trail of a bedraggled man running through the brush. The man is accompanied by The Hobo, who in this episode is known as “Einstein,” “because he’s so damn smart.” We see Einstein urge the man on and wake him up when he collapses. Clearly, the dog is not just along for the ride, but is an accomplice. Why would the immaculately benevolent Hobo be assisting a man on the run?

Before we learn the answer, there’s an interesting scene where Einstein throws the bloodhounds off the trail by encouraging the fugitive, Tom, to wade through a creek while he (Einstein) drags the Tom-scented coat into a cave elsewhere. What’s interesting is how Hobo isn’t tricking the angry people, he’s tricking their dogs, dogs who are with the law but (as we shall see) against the ethics of the situation. So both sides (good/legal and bad/illegal) are being led by their dogs, rather than the other way around.  

As he flees, Tom encounters an old man trapped under a flipped car. After rescuing him (with, of course, Einstein’s invaluable assistance), Tom starts dragging the old-timer to safety. As he does so, Tom reluctantly agrees to tell the story of just why he is wanted for murder.

Flashback time! It’s important to note that the temporal gymnastics aren’t here just because they’re cool, though they are very cool. By robbing us of crucial context at the start, the episode is highlighting how our judgment of any situation is coloured by the information we’ve had access too, and how we’re able to interpret it.  

So anyway, Tom (we see in the flashback) had entered a smalltown bar while his vehicle was being repaired, and he got into an altercation with a drunken man who thought Tom was hitting on his wife. Outside the bar, the drunk tried to kill Tom with a tire-iron, and Tom killed the man with a pitchfork, in self-defense. The Hobo, wandering into town, came upon the incident just as the drunk was bearing down on Tom. The Hobo therefore decided to help Tom defend himself and escape.  

It’s interesting that The Hobo is also missing some context here, as he was never privy to the scene inside the bar. Presumably, he’s reacting to Tom being attacked. Or is he? Maybe he’s reacting to a sense of innocence in Tom, perhaps even something he can smell in the man’s hormones through a dog-sense we could never describe. What if Tom had killed three people inside the bar, and that’s why he was being attacked? Would Hobo, unaware, still choose to defend him, now erroneously? How exactly does the dog judge a human right or wrong?

We can’t know, but the fascinating second half of this gripping two-parter comes to some startling conclusions. To be continued...

4 stars

S01E01: “Smoke”: Stop! Sit! And Think

The first shot in the first episode of The Littlest Hobo is a furious wall of flames. The orange inferno is frighteningly close to the viewer, and it roars on the soundtrack. The forest is combusting into smoke. “Smoke” is in fact the title of the episode, as we’ve already learnt. The engulfed, beyond-helping trees tremble and groan and keel over. This is intercut with a tracking shot of men digging a ditch to contain the flames. Curiously, young saplings can be seen in these shots, perilously close to the desperately plunging shovel spades. Is this the future of the forest they’re fighting for? Or are these vulnerable young trees in the shovels’ way a counterpoint to the angry, towering fire the men are fixated on: the unnoticed fragility of the seemingly-indomitable Nature they're sweatily straining to delimit? We know of course that fires are good for young trees’ growth. It might be crucial to “Smoke” that we're never told whether the forest fire that resonates throughout the episode was started by people, or by purely natural forces. Or maybe it doesn’t matter at all. “Nature is a myth,” Steven J. Gould said. It's fitting how a show that interrogates the liminal space between human and not-human would begin with an episode about the combustible struggle to live with, and apart from, Nature.  

Of course, the fire isn’t exactly the first thing we see, as it comes after the intro titles. “Maybe Tomorrow,” the iconic theme song that kicks everything off, is now what most people retain about the show. (But what is the voice that keeps on calling him? We will discuss the theme song, and how it might help us understand the show’s central questions, in a future post). The Littlest Hobo is a Canadian TV series that aired on CTV from October 11, 1979, to March 7, 1985. It was a revival or remake of an earlier series of 1963-1965, which was itself based on a 1958 American feature film. What makes TLH stand out from other Hero Dog stories like Lassie and Rin Tin Tin is the concept of a an “ownerless dog,” as well as (in the newer series under discussion) more adult subject matter, free of pandering or cloying material. The connecting tissue that joins the different Hobo iterations together is the clever dogs trained by the fascinating Charles “Chuck” P. Eisenmann.  

The opening credits of TLH announce the series as “Starring London,” a reference to the dog actor from the original ’58 Hobo film. In fact, multiple dogs were used (older dogs for serious acting, younger dogs for athletic stunts). But they were all trained by Chuck Eisenmann, trainer of the original London, and they were all “reverse-mask” German Shepherds who, at least in many cases, could trace their lineage back to Chuck’s original star pupil. Eisenmann’s peculiar training methods involved entirely verbal directions, and he believed his dogs could understand spoken instructions about as well as an eight-year-old human. He taught his dogs English, German, and French. Some of his eccentric training books include “A Dog’s Day in Court,” which imagines training from the dog’s perspective, and “Stop! Sit! And Think.”

“Smoke” is the name that our human hero this episode, Ray, a park ranger played by Monte Markham, gives to the dog he encounters. This is because, “that’s how he appeared, in a puff of smoke.” In his very first appearance in the series, the otherwise-nameless Hobo is immediately associated with the forest's combustion, with the billowing outcome of the conflicted border between men and wild. This fiery spectacle, the ranger’s dialogue makes clear, has seemingly produced this figure, somehow caused him to “appear,” as if burst out of the burning soil the way Ancient Greeks once thought worms and mice could be spontaneously produced by the interaction of the elements.  

It’s worth pointing out, as a parenthetical, that the name “Smoke” will not stick beyond this episode, nor will any other name. Like the hero in a spaghetti Western, The Hobo will bear many nicknames, but will never have a “true” name. Which is interesting in the context of our relationship with dogs. For people (especially children) naming a dog is essential to the process of binding the dog to us, becoming its owner. Hacking (easily) into the dog’s innate (because it was bred that way) need to rely on one person or small group of people to satisfy its servile impulses to cultivate endless love, and a sense of meaning in the defense of, and identification with, this “master,” having the dog answer to a name we have chosen is the beginning of the dog’s identity as our property, and the end of its free life as its own independent creature. It’s a process not without cruelty, and maybe totally built of cruelty, and this is something that should be discussed more in relation to other episodes. But it’s important to highlight here that The Hobo, the “ownerless dog,” has no “slave name” that would bind him to a master. In dog terms, he is radically free.

This burning forest manifests no divine voice, but rather a voiceless dog carrying, in its mouth, a young cougar cub. Then another cougar cub. The dog, now named “Smoke,” has presented the cubs to Ray. Perhaps to see his work through, Smoke accompanies Ray back to his station. A bond has been instantly formed between the resolutely good human, and the benevolent Smoke, who, as an obviously domesticated animal, straddles the line between the world of humans and that of natural forces.

We meet the villain of the piece, Cal Rooker, a provisioner who is selling animal traps and rat poison to the citizens of this small town (a town which may be located within a national park, or just otherwise deep in the woods). It seems that the fire has sent the confused and newly-homeless creatures of the forest wandering into town. Rooker has been preying on the paranoia of the townsfolks who are afraid these wild animals will endanger their household pets, their livestock, or even their children. He‘s making a brisk sale in death.

What is nature to these hale Canadians who live among it? Probably different things at different times, but when its active participants inch into their ordered sense of humanity, it becomes something they mistrust and fear. A mouse is cute in a photograph, but when you see one scurrying across your hardwood floor, unreally fast and with beady eyes betraying a life lived in constant, horrible stress... the thing is loathsome and ruins your sleep. The solid walls of our homes, made of straight lines unlike anything in the wild, reveal themselves as our defenses at these times, defenses psychological as much as physical, built upon thousands of generations of separating our conception of Us from our surroundings.  

Rooker’s profiteering begins to bend sinister in a couple of ways. First, we see a cougar with its leg caught in a trap. The ranger instantly surmises, while saving the frightened beast, that it must be the mother of the two cubs Smoke rescued from the flames.

But the cat in the trap was merely a prelude to the true crisis. Dastardly Rooker has chosen to bait his own store, placing raw hamburger laced with rat poison in a dog bowl outside his door. Will it be Smoke who ingests the deadly meal? We’re teased with the possibility, but no. A small child toddles into frame and pokes some tainted beef in his unsuspecting mealy maw.  

Every attempt to attack Nature ends up as an attack on ourselves. As our planet shows us, in a thousand tragic ways, we have been pathetically unable to control our effects on this world we would tame. And as the globe becomes poisoned, we’ve been forced to confront the fact that we are still living on it, still among the brambles and beasts, we remain inseparable from Nature, and we have poisoned ourselves. The death Rooker dealt has come for a human child.

Or has it? While there’s no antidote in town, and the bridge to the hospital has naturally been burned down, there might just be a solution. Ray takes off in a small aircraft, with Smoke at his side, to retrieve the nearest doctor with the antidote. A storm lays in, perhaps provoked by the smoke’s effect on the sky. “Of all the rotten luck,” Ray snarls. With the airstrip invisible, Ray asks the doctor if he can fly the plane while he (Ray) parachutes into town. No luck; the useless doctor has never flown. Ray decides he has no choice but to entrust Smoke with parachuting down, with the antidote tied to the dog’s throat. But he doesn’t seem worried, as he can sense the abnormally intelligent creature’s confidence and capability, while strapping him into the parachute.

Maybe the only thing wrong with having The Hobo parachute out of an airplane in the opening episode, is that you wonder how future episodes could possibly top it. It’s pretty fucking cool. You also wonder how Hobo pulled the cord, but presumably he managed to do it with his mouth.

Smoke doesn’t fail, the child is saved, and Rooker repents. The cougar cubs are in good health. Ray proposes marriage to his girlfriend.

As Smoke wanders off, our hero’s motives and thoughts remain inscrutable. It will be our task for the rest of the series to try and decipher this radically free (or is he?) non-human's intentions and desires. The Hobo wanders back into the woods among the beasts, but we must suspect that the voice that is always calling him speaks in a human tongue. Until tomorrow.

3.5 stars