The Solar Power of the Dog

“DO NOT LOOK AWAY. Do not avert your gaze. Do not turn aside.” These words met me a few weeks ago via ecologist Joanna Macy’s ever-relevant book World as Lover, World as Self. I love these words, even though their charge is not an easy one. Looking at what is, without turning away, without aversion, takes incredible strength of will, especially in a culture that banks on our inability to pay attention or handle despair. Nonetheless, for Macy, the illumination of sustainable futures is impossible without first facing our grief. Which brings me, in an extremely roundabout way, to Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog and Lorde’s 2021 album Solar Power.

The Power of the Dog is based on a 1967 book of the same name and follows the complex relationship between two rancher brothers—the cruel older one and the other, victimized by this cruelty. When the younger brother gets married, the film becomes a study in psychological distress, told in close-ups and uneasy strings. Phil, the eldest, may be a sadist who takes pleasure in humiliating others, but his sadism stems from an inability to truly look at and accept himself and his own desires. He runs from his grief; he looks away; he averts his gaze from his own heart. In the end, his fear costs him dearly. There are limits, it seems, to what can be illuminated, to what we can bear to bring to light.

In Lorde’s Solar Power, on the other hand, everything is coming up salty skin, Céline designer wear, and sun kisses. Moving on from the baroque, well, drama of her previous album, Melodrama, Solar Power shines by virtue of its simultaneous investment in and detachment from star power. Lorde sheds her status as pop culture prophet to say that couture notwithstanding, perhaps the best things in life can’t be owned: the feeling of being with someone you love, ocean sparkles, the joys of a “blue day.”

When I first heard the album, my initial response was ambivalence. Where was the chaos? Where were the sharp edges? I didn’t want wry lyrics. I wanted a battle cry. Now my tune, as it were, has changed. It’s too easy to see Macy’s call to radical attention, borrowed from her Buddhist practice, as an exhortation to immerse the spirit in life’s uglier facets. Making peace with Lorde’s album was a way of making peace with the fact that life doesn’t always have to be hard. Suffering is not the only thing there is to see. Not turning aside also applies to that which makes our souls spark with gratitude.

Strange bedfellows though they are, there’s something compelling about Solar Power and The Power of the Dog sitting side by side. When I consider these pieces, I think about revelation, of what can only be revealed through time, like the nature of Phil’s longings or the wisdom Lorde collected in the four-year period between Melodrama and Solar Power. Look away and you’ll miss it: joy, sorrow, despair, and the sun that gazes over us all.