Robert S. Cairns
The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” In his essay, Nagel argues that if we agree that bats, like many other animals, are creatures with experiences, then there is a type of ‘batness’ to the bat that makes it distinctly itself. I could not help thinking about this while watching Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy (2025), which invites the viewer to imagine what it is like to be a dog. I also wondered to what extent a film was able to show me, even modestly, what this might be like.
Nagel understands that we cannot really know what it’s like to be a bat. We can think ourselves into some approximation of what that might mean, but we can’t really know, for example, the feeling of flying at night using sonar. Quite intelligently, director Ben Leonberg admits defeat too. We do not, for instance, see any attempts to capture some direct point-of-view experience of our canine protagonist. There is no effort to try and recreate what colors a dog might see, or the heightened sense of sound, or – rather mercifully – their keen sense of smell.
What we get instead is more impressionistic. What uncertainty might a dog experience while encountering uncertain phenomena as a dog? In the Peanuts comics and cartoons the adults are somewhere, we just never really see them. This establishes that we are in the world of children (and Snoopy), and will be focused on their child-like experiences (and Snoopy’s). In Good Boy, humans are more present, but we almost never see their faces. This establishes that we are in the world of a dog and will be focused on dog-like experiences, but nothing quite like Snoopy’s narratively detailed, quixotic daydreaming (although our story’s good boy does dream, and also finds himself on a doghouse).
Other mammals have the same basic senses calibrated at different levels. We have to take seriously the idea that this means animals may have different interpretative ‘insights’ about the same events. In the case of Good Boy, the source of horror is how the dog is seeing something terrible happening to his owner in a way that the owner just isn’t quite seeing. What we humans feel as grief or illness, for example, could take on a different aspect to an animal with different sense calibration.
This is both the scary and compassionate aspect of the film. It presents us with the idea of different haunted vistas of reality (to lift a phrase from Lovecraft). Animals in films, from the donkey Balthazar to the golden retriever Air Bud, are usually bystanders for human affairs to play out. Here, we see an animal trying to navigate and make sense of its own mode of experience. In other words, our good boy protagonist is more than just a cute face and wagging tail.
If there is some inadequacy of the natural sciences to truly unlock subjective experiences, then this potentially opens up numinous possibilities in the conscious experiences of other animals. What would Thomas Nagel make of this? Someone should ask him while he is still with us! Whatever the case, the fact that dogs can smell cancer and elephants and whales can communicate with one another certainly deepens any conviction that we can’t really know what it’s like to be a bat.
The film also gives us a glimpse into the vivid dream world of the dog as well as his spectral encounters with a mysteriously departed canine. These are imaginative leaps, to be sure, but they do not fall too far outside the realm of possibility. They are not ‘anthropomorphic’ in the way a talking dog or a dog with an internal monologue might be. It would be wise to be careful with terms like ‘anthropomorphism’ anyway, as many animals share the qualities we sometimes imagine to be uniquely our own. The talking fish or deer of Disney is a step too far, but it seems to me that conferring some mystery of consciousness to a dog is not.
I have heard people say that they don’t want to die before their dog because the thought of the dog being confused, of not knowing where they went, is too sad. Anyone who has spent considerable time with dogs will be aware of this quality of memory to some degree. We have also heard stories, from Greyfriars Bobby to Hachiko, of dogs mourning their owners with a sadness that cannot be linguistically rationalized by them. Somehow, and against all odds, Good Boy is able to capture something like this.
In another, less famous, essay titled “What We Owe a Rabbit,” Nagel presents a complicated picture of our potential obligations to other animals. Putting discussions of the capacity of animals for ‘second-order reflection’ aside, Nagel’s answer to the question of what we owe is still something rather than nothing. There is a scene in Good Boy where an old documentary plays on the television about the history of the relationship between dogs and people. If we ask what we owe a dog, is it too sentimental to say that the answer is a sympathetic film like Ben Leonberg’s, which a dog would never be able to watch like we do?
Robert S. Cairns is an independent Film Critic and ‘recovering academic’ with research interests in philosophy, theology, and conservatism in the movies. He has written previously for Horror Homeroom on Zach Cregger’s Weapons – and can be found on Substack and Twitter.
