Not to be confused with White God, another film centering on a dog.
White Dog contains examples of:
- Adaptational Heroism: In the original book, the Black trainer intentionally conditions the dog to attack white people as a form of revenge. In the film, Keys is much more benevolent in his motivations, genuinely trying to pacify the dog through extensive training so that he can discourage the creation of any more white dogs. The dog becoming murderously anti-white is instead an accident that horrifies Keys rather than the result of deliberate conditioning.
- As Herself: Martine Dawson, who works at the animal sanctuary where the training scenes were filmed, makes a brief appearance in which she gives Julie directions while petting a lion.
- Attempted Rape: Shortly after Julie takes in the dog, a man breaks into her house and attempts to rape her. The dog fights him off.
- Berserk Button: The dog is calm, friendly, and well-behaved, until he sees a black person.
- Beware of Vicious Dog: The dog was trained to kill black people. Keys' attempts to retrain him only result in him turning against white people instead.
- Dartboard of Hate: Keys' coworker Carruthers plays darts with a cutout of R2D2 because he fears the special effects industry will put him out of work.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The dog and how characters interact with it serve as an open-faced allegory on white supremacy. The dog acts as a loving source of protection for Julie, but the moment it lays eyes on a Black person, it goes ballistic and tries to kill them, paralleling white supremacists' veneer of friendliness and civility that masks their viciousness towards non-white people. Julie sees the dog's violence as a shocking surprise, while Keys and other Black characters see it and other white dogs as an uncomfortable fact of life, as they live their entire lives constantly surrounded by direct and indirect acts of racism and racial violence towards them. The ending where the dog's training is accidentally reversed to make it kill white people instead thus acts as a Hard Truth Aesop that racism is learned, but hatred is incurable.
- Downer Ending: Keys' training, for all the hope he placed in it, didn't get rid of the dog's murderous impulses, he just changed them so the dog targets white people instead. The film ends with Keys angrily stumbling away from the dog he had to put down instantly once he killed his first white man, and Julie standing there in shock.
- Driving a Desk: Julie plays a small role in a movie that involves sitting in a gondola while footage of the canals of Venice plays on a screen behind her.
- Escaped Animal Rampage: The dog manages to chew through his wire cage and runs off into the city. By the time Keys finds him, he's chased a black man into a church and killed him.
- "Friends" Rent Control: Despite being a struggling actress who mostly gets bit parts, Julie lives in a large house in the hills with a beautiful view.
- Gory Discretion Shot: As the dog kills his first victim, the camera pans across the walls of the church while the man screams.
- Hard Truth Aesop: The film sends the message that racism is a learned system of belief and behavior, but the hatred that it instills can never be undone; trying to undo it will, at best simply change who gets targeted, as exemplified by the dog turning on Keys' white employer at the end of the film, which forces Keys to shoot it dead.
- Hope Spot: After a very long Training Montage, Keys apparently was able to get the dog to adapt and doesn't attack black people. But then a white man enters the training area and the dog tears him apart. Turns out that now the dog attacks white people instead. Keys has to shoot the poor beast.
- Humans Are Bastards: Much as the dog is vicious and deadly toward black people, it is only so because it was trained, conditioned and brutalized to be that way by its owner, who finally appears near the end to claim it. After initially acting as a kindly grandfather - while accompanied by his two granddaughters, no less - he quickly drops the mask and shows his true colors as a hateful bigot.
- Instant Sedation: When Keys shoots the dog with a tranquilizer dart, he collapses immediately.
- Super Window Jump: The dog jumps from a second-story window, complete with Soft Glass, in order to tackle Julie's attacker.
- They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: After speculation throughout the film as to the dog's owner and the things they did to make the dog behave as it does, the owner, a man named Wilber Hull, finally appears outside Julie's house to claim the dog. Accompanied by his grandchildren, Hull initially comes across as a kindly grandfather, before he reveals himself as the hateful, racist monster that he is, causing Julie to denounce him in front of the children, who until then had only known the dog as a loving pet. Veteran actor Parley Baer, who played Hull, remarked that "Often racism, like true evil, presents itself with a smile and a handshake".
