Sadism, Not Toughness: Kristi Noem's Deliriously Misguided Puppy-Killing Anecdotes
There’s a terrific subplot in What Just Happened: Barry Levinson’s sly, underrated adaptation of Art Linson’s memoir of the same name.
In the film Robert De Niro plays the Linson surrogate, a show-business veteran at a tricky crossroads in his personal and professional life. On the professional front, he needs to deal with Bruce Willis showing up for work bearded, burly, and belligerent and his new Sean Penn vehicle flopping with test audiences.
The fictional Sean Penn movie is flopping for a very specific, very understandable reason. The movie ends with the murder of Penn’s character and his dog.
Audiences can handle the death of a lead character. What they can not handle are the unnecessary deaths of dogs and cats.
There’s a reason Blake Snyder's Save the Cat is one of the most popular and influential screenwriting guides. Snyder clearly knew what he was talking about because of the extraordinary success he himself experienced as the screenwriter of instant classics like Stop or My Mom Will Shoot! and Blank Check—and, well, those are literally his only screenwriting credits.
He is yet another example of the old adage that those who can do, while those who can’t write popular screenwriting manuals.
One of the tips in Save the Cat is to have a protagonist do something heroic immediately to get the audience on their side. His example was Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley saving the cat Jonesy at the very beginning of Alien.
Audiences have an emotional connection to cute dogs and cats that they do not necessarily have with human beings, who are far more complicated to deal with than animals and generally much less cute as well.
In the Meg movies, for example, a teacup yorkie appears for maybe five minutes. That is the only character I cared about in either film.
I suspect that they brought back the cute little dog for the sequel because test screenings went apeshit over the li’l canine.
I have a teacup Yorkie, so I was particularly invested in the outcome of a random dog that has a cameo in two different spectacularly stupid motion pictures.
I am writing this because South Dakota governor Kristi Noem has written a book, tellingly titled No Going Back, where she shares what she apparently sees as a fun story about a fourteen-month-old puppy named Cricket who incited the sociopathic governor’s murderous rage by screwing up one of her hunting trips.
The poorly behaved pup apparently ate some chickens, which is what dogs do BECAUSE THEY’RE DOGS.
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes in her memoir about the puppy she assassinated for society’s sake.
She goes on to write, “It was not a pleasant job (murdering a puppy), but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
Then she dragged an unruly goat she also fucking hated because it was “nasty and mean” (unlike Noem’s god Donald Trump) as well as“disgusting, musky, rancid,” all because it resisted being castrated, into her family’s gravel pit of death and then pumped lead into its brain.
Not since Kanye West eagerly volunteered on The Alex Jones Show that he was an Adolf Hitler super-fan who thought the Nazis were great and super misunderstood has a public figure illustrated such staggeringly poor judgment in what they choose to share with the world.
The only explanation for Noem’s decision to willingly volunteer that she’s killed multiple animals with a world that loves dogs more than it loves people (particularly POC and immigrants) is that she was trying to impress Donald Trump and illustrate that she’s not just tough and willing to do whatever it is that needs to be done: she will not hesitate to end another life if she thinks the occasion calls for it.
There’s toughness, and then there’s cruelty. Noem’s anecdotes, which, again, she chose to share with the world, are about cruelty, not toughness.
Being a horrible person, Donald Trump famously does not like dogs. Along with James K. Polk and Andrew Jackson (whom Trump loves on account of all of the genocide he wrought and his cruel war on Native Americans), he is the only president not to have a pet while in office.
As Blake Snyder would be happy to tell you if he were not dead, having a cute dog or cat makes a president more likable and relatable. Not having one makes them less likable and relatable. Murdering a dog or goat or horse (Noem has killed all three and will “grudgingly” do so again if ever afforded another chance to do so) makes someone seem like a monster who does not value life and takes unseemly delight in discussing the animals they’ve killed.
The cruelty is the point. Noem’s stories of animal murder take the American cult of toughness and self-reliance to psychotic, psychopathic extremes.
Noem wants the world to know that she’s not afraid of making tough choices and that she will do whatever she has to do, no matter how distasteful. She posits her home as the ultimate Unsafe Space, where if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do and misbehave, a bullet in the head is your reward.
I’m shocked that Noem would include stories about killing poorly behaved animals in her memoir. I’m even more surprised that an editor read those passages and didn’t shoot her an email along the lines of, “If you don’t want your political career to end and for people to hate you, edit out the parts where you kill animals.”
There is no such thing as shame in MAGAville, however, so it is perhaps unsurprising that, instead of apologizing, Noem doubled down.
In a defiant tweet, she sneered at people who would dare to judge her just because of all the animals she’s killed, “If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping, preorder “No Going Back.”
I can only imagine what kind of other “real, honest, and politically INcorrect” stories Noem shares in the book. Possibilities include:
*Punching Jimmy Carter in the face because he looked at her funny
*Kicking her husband in the nuts every time he displeases her.
*Making her children pay rent for the honor of living in their home
Noem went too far, even for MAGA maniacs. We can tolerate just about anything, with the exception of killing animals.
It turns out that there is such a thing as too cruel even for MAGA sadists, and Noem revealed herself to be that rare, seemingly mythical creature in her staggeringly misguided ode to self/unintentional-professional suicide attempt.
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