When a person's entire cognition of the world comes only from unified narratives created by one or a few people, he/she lives under the authority of the "creators". In the movie, the living space of the children is confined to the home, and they cannot go out to contact people other than the parents and the people arranged by the parents. Their world is totally framed by the parents' narratives. And usually under the dominant and the hegemonic, the controlled people has a strong dependence and trust on the controller. In the movie, the director expresses this dependence with several similar plots: when children discover unfamiliar words, they will ask their parents for answers. The strongest part that shows this trait is when Christina mentioned to the son that he was in her dream as a zombie. The son didn't know the meaning of zombies, but he pretended that he understood and left “teaching right“ to his mother. At the same time, I am thinking about whether this kind of trust and dependence will be affected by the amount of benefits received. The son is obviously more trusting and dependent on his parents than the eldest daughter. He is the biggest beneficiary of this hegemonic family: the parents will find someone to solve his sexual needs, and even let the daughters satisfy him in the later part. On the contrary, the eldest daughter got a lot of "new things" from Christina, and her dependent and trust was shaken by Christina.
At the end of the film, the director left a lot of blank space: Did the eldest daughter escape successfully, or did she die in the trunk? If she escapes, will the eldest daughter be able to survive in a "new world"? Will parental authority be more restrained after being challenged? Will the younger daughter start to rebel if she becomes the son's "sex tool"? But what we can foresee is that this hegemony will not end, because the mother is gestating new "pups."
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Family‘s barking:
This is one of the most typical moments that I think sustains the 'dominant and hegemonic' of the family narrative. Faced with a cat that came in unexpectedly from the outside world, Dad thought it was an excellent opportunity to tell the children about the outside world danger. He described cats as "terrible enemies" and fabricated the death of his "eldest son". Parents maintain their hegemony with narratives. The metaphor of the children barking and practicing resisting the "enemy" well expresses the central idea and corresponds to the name of the movie. In this deformed family, children are like dogs raised by their parents. They cannot violate their parents' ideas and rules.
See the “new world”:
The key point of subverting hegemony is the moment when the eldest daughter secretly watches the discs she got from Christina behind her parents' back at night. Her worldview is disrupted by the new narrative in the film. I think the use of light here strengthens the expression of the film. The light source is a metaphor for the source of the information: the TV light and the lights in the home. When the light is turned on by the father, the eldest daughter returns to the family's narratives.
Relationship between two scene and whole story:
We can observe the change in the state of the eldest daughter. In the first clip, the three children showed a very positive response to the father's training, compared with the mother's perfunctory performance. This clip is a key point of "strengthening hegemony" in the film. However, in the second clip, the eldest daughter's cognition is shaken by the film's narratives. This is the most critical turning point in the film. After that, the eldest daughter began to question and challenge the authority: secretly went to the parents' room to make a phone call, broke the "dog teeth" by herself, and escaped from the house. At the same time, after this scene, the parents completely cut off the contact between the children and the outside world, and used the daughter as a tool for the son to relieve his sexual desire. I think the eldest daughter's involuntary dedication also intensified her determination to broke her "Dog Teeth".
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Favorite cinematography: