White God Finale

In White God, Hagen finds the men who bought and tortured him, and with his canine army, kills them one by one. He even kills the neighbor who reported him to animal control. Police retaliate violently, shooting and killing dogs as they run wild throughout Budapest. Hagen continues his revenge plot, searching out and finding Lili’s father’s slaughterhouse workplace. Lili is there, though, and tries to bring back the pet she loves. She first tries playing fetch with him, but he bares his teeth instead. Yet when Lili plays her trumpet, Hagen and the remaining pack members stop barking and lie down. Lili lies down with Hagen, and her father joins her, bringing the film back to its opening Rilke quote. Made terrible by eco-traumas and the horrific behaviors they have caused, Hagen and his pack need love and respect and seem to find it with Lili and her trumpet.

Many reviewers agree with the production notes’ argument that White God serves as a “metaphor for the political and cultural tensions sweeping contemporary Europe.” Anthony Lane asserts, “you can hardly stage an insurrection, of whatever species, on the streets of Budapest without raising the ghost of the uprising there against Soviet rule, in 1956.” Rene Rodriguez suggests director Mundruczo

is up to something far grander and more ambitious than putting the viewer through the wringer. Although the allegory may seem facile, White God pulls off the difficult trick of exploring the consequences of exploiting the lower classes by using cute dogs as symbols for the oppressed and downtrodden.

For these reviewers, Hagen and his pack represent oppressed humans rather than dogs suffering from real environmental trauma.

For us, though, Hagen moves beyond symbol. As a companion species whose pleasure and pain align with our own, Hagen stands in only for himself, a dog who, as Donna Haraway asserts, is a “full partner in worlding, in becoming with” (301). Manohla Dargis sees White God as a parable about how “a faithful animal, separated from its loving owner, endures, suffers, struggles and resists while trying to transcend its brutal fate.” Hagen is certainly a loving dog who endures and resists, but he is also Lili’s companion species. Together they are “messmates at table, eating together, whether we know how to eat well or not” (Haraway 301). Haraway’s parting assertion regarding messmates is one “with a longing that it might be said of me someday what good agility players say of those whose runs they admire, ‘She has met her dog’” (301). By both disrupting and affirming that possibility, White God reveals the consequences of eco-trauma while offering a solution to its violent repercussions: a mutual longing between species.