what did the coyote represent?

I had the impression that she saw her husband and the coyote as being similar. I thought that was why she was so upset when she found him dead. It was as if she had lost both of the strong and noble presences in her life. What I didn't understand was why Bo had killed him.

Along the same lines, I thought that the reason that Bo was so upset about George leaving was that she felt she had now lost both men in her life. This was before she and William had really gotten close.



Emperor: Tell me how he died.
Captain Algren: I will tell you...how he lived.

It's been a long time since I watched the DVD, but if I remember the commentary correctly, the playwright said that there had been some scenes where Bo dreams about the coyote stalking or killing her father. If my memory of these comments is correct, then I guess Bo killed the animal out of a fear that her dream would come to pass.

I really wish the director could have kept those scenes in. I was shocked and angrered by Bo's wanton killing of the coyote. Now that I've heard some background about the event, it makes more sense.

Just another bit of beauty and strength in Mom's life. Did you hear how she described the coyote? She was part Native American...it may have been her spirit animal. She appreciated its strength and beauty...

i think the coyote represented something beautiful and alive (as opposed to the usual pathetic coyotes, as the mother described him --and the situation they were living that summer), which explains why she cried so bitterly when she found him dead: because the almost only "right" thing in her life had been killed. why bo did killed him i don't fully understand, but in the logics of the narrative it seemed like a piece of necessary sacrifice, precisely because he was a perfect coyote.
somehow the coyote is in fact an element that holds together the whole story, remember he appears for the first time when the tax man arrives, and almost all the characters are like hypnotized by the animal movements.
in an usual hollywood movie, the coyote would have ended up smiling in his cave, while all the happy family would have been merrily sailing in some California bay, looking at the whales.
in the logics of natural, wild justice, on the other hand, you have to loose something while you gain some other. this is why the beautiful coyote must be killed for the whole situation to move on; somehow it's also the reason why the tax man dies after having realized that he came to the desert in order to clarify his own messy situation, and paint, while at the same time he is part of the elements necessary for the change in the family he visits.
i think god is mentioned at some point, like implying that everything comes together somehow, like there is a secret design that finally adjusts the picture.
i hope this wasn't too confuse, i think it is an understanding that comes intuitively more than rationally... at least for me.

Bo didn't seem to express any anger toward animals so I believe she killed the coyote to make a statement.

Perhaps she felt bottled up and unable to express her originality in the way the adults, especially her mother, viewed her. So Bo went and did something she wouldn't ordinarily do which the adults would have to take notice of.

Because of Bo's constant railings against her surroundings, she must have felt that her mother took more heed to the natural surroundings in which the family chose to confine itself than to Bo's imminent launch into adulthood, represented by her fascination with the outside world.

(I find this ironic because the lifestyle choice of Bo's family seem to typify the kind someone like Bo's individualistic character ultimately would choose to settle on. Nonetheless, growth and separation rather than politics seem to be the bigger message here)

I personally believe the coyote represented the idea of Bo the juvenile which she put to death as a self-declared rite of passage.

I like the previous poster's idea of the coyote as a sacrifice Bo had to make. Such motivations obviously don't happen on a conscious level, but it makes sense in relation to what happens later in the film - that she and her mom went back to the woods and her mom made her lay her hands on the coyote's head, and she says that she felt the weight of that summer drain out of her hands and into the coyote. So it was a necessary sacrifice of sorts that she had to make, as a part of the shifts that the important people in her life were undergoing at that time, internally and externally. And I think it also makes sense of why Joan Allen's character, who was ordinarily so unflappable, practically goes into hysterics when she finds the coyote - it represents her realization that her daughter has become something she can no longer comprehend (someone capable of killing an animal for no purpose, on the surface, other than sport), and who has irreversibly begun the separation process that will culminate, as we see, in the daughter as an adult living in a high rise in the middle of some city while the parents choose to stay and live out the rest of their lives in their rural cabin.


I just saw this for the first time last night and was really impressed - what a lovely movie!