If dog abuse in movies is traumatizing you, an American website is here to help. The aptly named doesthedogdie.com (does the dog die?) lists all the movies where man’s best friend finds himself in a bad spot.
If the viewer has become almost desensitized to the death of human beings“nobody wants to see a dog die in the movies. It’s one of the deadly sinsexplains to the site Entertainment Weekly, the actor Channing Tatum, muscular hero of magic mike and especially film dog released last year. You can kill just about anyone but not the dog.” Hollywood rarely ventures there, with a few exceptions. In the action movie John Wickthe main character, a professional killer played by Keanu Reeves, slaughters dozens of gangsters to avenge the death of his dog.
Researchers at Northeastern University tested the reaction of volunteers to four fake news articles about abuse involving a child, a dog, a puppy and an adult. The reactions to the articles on the death of the dog and the puppy were almost as strong as the one on the suffering of the child, and stronger than the one on the suffering of the adult.
A user-powered anti-trauma platform
Killing a dog also defines a character. In the series House of Cards, in his first scene, the Machiavellian Frank Underwood commits this act and we immediately understand that he is mean. And conversely, during the promotion of The Mountain Between Us in which Idris Elba and Kate Winslet survive a plane crash, the producers warned on Twitter that the trailer’s dog won’t die.
A site allows you to know what happens to dogs in movies before watching them. The website doesthedogdie.com has been around since 2010. It was created by John Whipple, a software developer, at the request of his sister who couldn’t bear to see an abused dog in the movies. As he could not list all the films on his own, he made it a platform that Internet users can feed themselves. The site is consulted several tens of thousands of times per month and there would be few examples of false information to deplore. One types the name of the film and the answers “yes” and “no” appear, sometimes with comments to give details of the story. The site has inspired others. On Twitter, the account Can you pet the dog?followed by 530,000 people, indicates whether it is possible to interact with pets in a particular video game, and Dogsinmovies, a site animated by a French-speaking person, lists, as its name suggests, the presence of dogs in movies.
Dogs but also 120 other categories
The Doesthedogdie site even goes a little further than dogs or pets. In fact, it’s really become a site to verify that what can potentially traumatize you isn’t in the movie you’re about to watch. There are about 120 categories today. Let me give you a few examples: is a child’s favorite toy destroyed? Do we see razors, ghosts, clowns, vomit? Does a character have cancer? Are we witnessing cannibalism? Does anyone break a bone? Is it about abortion? Does the film depict a relationship between two characters with a big age difference? Are there scenes in which the camera moves too much? Is the ending sad? Do we learn that Santa Claus does not exist? Is there anti-Semitism?
Sometimes the answer is sometimes so obvious that no one bothered to answer, for example, to Schindler’s list. It is sometimes more ambiguous. In Armageddon notably, Bruce Willis sacrifices himself to blow up an asteroid that threatens the earth. For Internet users, it is therefore a suicide but which is not linked, specifies a comment, to depression or mental illness.