Here’s what I came up with: the dogs are the souls of their owners.
Octavio’s dog starts out scrappy and becomes a vicious killer, just like Octavio. And then, after the accident, they are both severely chastened but still vital. Valeria’s dog – light, fluffy, easy on the eyes – suddenly finds itself in a dark place and isolated, just like Valeria. El Chivo is a mass of ragged impulses that merely survive without much purpose, much like…his pack of wild dogs. That is, until he takes on Octavio’s dog after the car accident. It seems like at this point, Octavio’s dog/soul becomes El Chivo’s, since the dog, after recovering from the accident, turns out to be a killer without any particular will to kill, again, just like El Chivo.
I’m not even sure I don’t believe this theory, even though I made it up just to satisfy the question of what the dogs were all about.
On another note, according to wikipedia, Amores Perros is an example of “hyperlink” cinema. Here’s how Roger Ebert describes the phenomenon in his review of another hyperlink movie, Syriana:
A recent blog item coined a term like "hyperlink movie" to describe plots like this. (I would quote the exact term, but irony of ironies, I've lost the link.) The term describes movies in which the characters inhabit separate stories, but we gradually discover how those in one story are connected to those in another...In a hyperlink movie the motives of one character may have to be reinterpreted after we meet another one.If the characters of Amores Perros had be “reinterpreted” or if my feeling/opinion of one of the characters changed after Amores Perros shifted its attention to another character, then the film would have been more interesting, indeed.
But the movie doesn’t really do that; the characters don’t seem to have much of an interconnection at all, other than their contrasts – they are from different classes and they are concerned with different objectives. Octavio is a reckless dreamer; Valeria is a woman visited by disaster; El Chivo is a hesitant killer. What’s their connection? Nothing, so far as I can see.
There are both good and bad effects stemming from this kind of storytelling.
Let’s start with the good: by throwing the lives of three very disparate people together in one movie, there seems to be a broader view of life. As the post-modernists say, what you leave out of art is often as important as what you put in. I feel like if a director doesn’t leave anything out, he’s making us feel the full weight and complexity of life even more than if we just followed one story.
The trade-off is that any given character’s story isn’t as well developed, if only because they don’t have as much screen time. And looking at this movie, you see the consequences: it’s hard to grasp anything substantive about any of the three dog owners, and I’m left feeling, as a viewer, as though I haven’t seen them thoroughly.
