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ABSTRACT
This article examines representations of cats across various media in Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) and its remake (Paul Schrader, 1982). I reorient the scholarship of these films towards issues raised by animal studies: asking what the films’ investigations into animal representations might offer for understanding depictions of women, monsters, and interspecies intimacy across different media. I argue that the two horror films repeatedly expose the inability of static representations like statues, paintings, or photographs to fully ‘capture’ animals or animality. Instead, animal affects are conveyed through shadows, montage, sexual activity, and corporeal violence. Since the cat women protagonists turn into panthers when they feel strong emotions or have sex, this concern with representing animality is intimately tied with representing sexuality. By intertwining these issues, the films suggest that queer wildness is a characteristic that transcends animals, people, and even bodies. In particular, the 1982 film embraces the posthumanist implications of this wildness by concluding with a scene of interspecies intimacy that evokes calls for queer ecological entanglements beyond visual mediation.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their comments which helped me better frame and expand this article, and I offer immense gratitude to the community in Jack Halberstam’s “Animal Studies” course where this article first began in Fall 2018.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Quoted in Nemerov (2005, 2).
2. Bernhard Siegert’s German-language essay on shape-shifting figures across history is the exception, since it foregrounds the relation of cinema’s sound/image forms and animality (citing Akira Lippit’s recent work on media) in its brief discussion of the 1942 film. Siegert (2015).
3. For example, Barbara Creed in an enumeration of unstable borders in horror films like ‘man and beast’ or ‘good and evil’ lists Cat People as on the border ‘between normal and abnormal sexual desire’ (49) and later describes it as a film centered on ‘What do women want?’ (68). Creed (1986).
4. For more on this literature as well as the role of specifically violent femme fatales, see Boozer (1999).
5. In the modern period, animals have ‘transformed into spectacle’ and ‘are always the observed’. Berger (Citation1980, 16). For more on animals as spectacle, as well as the revenge of animals, see the introduction in Gregersdotter, Höglund, and Hållén (2015).
6. One need only look at book titles about their work. For example, see Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998) and J. P. Telotte, Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). For a summary of the various shadow-related analyses of these and other Lewton films, see Jancovich (2012).
7. Quoted from a Los Angeles Times interview in Siegel (1972, 32).
8. Ibid., 32.
9. A cat is the threat in both films, but in the 1982 film, that threat is resolved not by a loud machine but by another animal, substituting a domestic dog for a wild cat.
10. Shadow puppetry even appears in a publicity still for the film. In the image, the shadow is cast on the half-open door as the young woman, afraid of the escaped leopard, tries to come back in. At that moment in the film, there is no shadow puppet, just her mother’s shadow as she comes to close the door and force her daughter to run an errand.
11. ‘Shadows are visible but at the same time they do not appear to be part of the material world, because they lack solidity and substantiality. They are both physical and ethereal, always there as inseparable companions (in the right light conditions) of solid objects that occupy our living space: trees, houses, vehicles, animals, and of course people, including ourselves’. Sadowski (Citation2018, 7).
12. ‘Panther’, Merriam-Webster.com, accessed 12 December 2018, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/panther. ‘Panther’, AHDictionary.com, accessed 12 December 2018, https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=panther.
13. Manny Farber quoted in Meehan (2011, 66).
14. ‘ … although [the cats] add an engaging element for the viewer, Goya may have intended them as a reminder of the frail boundaries that separate the child’s world from the forces of evil, or as a commentary on the fleeting nature of innocence and youth’. Extended object label from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed 12 December 2018, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436545%C2%A0.
15. Scholars have noted the presence of the Goya painting; however, their attention compares his figure to that of King John, discussing their shared ‘virility’ despite the painting being of a child. I propose both Irena and the child are seen as innocent. Fujiwara (1998, 78).
16. If we are discussing the liveliness of objects, I would be remiss not to mention that these exact animal statue props had a second life of their own, reappearing as decorations on the clock tower during the climax of Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985).
17. Quoted in Stewart (2003, 130).
18. Oliver, who works in a zoo, is called a curator, which conjures up associations of art and museums and suggests an interest in art or image-making in addition to animals – perhaps manifesting Berger’s idea of curating animal as spectacle.
19. Irena gets a job in the toy store at the zoo, and remarks ‘I like to be around the animals’. On the screen at that moment, we see a stuffed snake, monkeys, moose, dogs, and even mythical creatures including a unicorn and dragon.
20. Irena’s transformation is described as ‘a semiotic marker of her hidden rebellion against patriarchy, as indicated by her released aggression toward it and its “agents”.’ This may overlook the fact that Irena stalks Alice, a competition between two women which is perhaps very patriarchal as they fight over a man. Paige (1997, 292).
21. By comparison, in the remake, when Irena’s brother dies, he is shown as a human among panthers. Since he appears in a land reminiscent of the place where the first person-leopard sex happened, these animals are meant to be his cat person ancestors, so he presumably maintains his cat person duality in the afterlife.
22. In this final scene, Irena is fed a raw piece of meat, unlike the cat food advertised earlier in the airport, which I think makes the potential for a clear reading of domination or domestication more troubled. Additionally, Irena earlier was shown eating a rabbit, blood smeared on her face, while the bodies of women her brother ate had been shown mutilated in multiple pieces or as skeletons. The panther that Irena and Paul can become are not ‘the cats’ of Hollinger’s critique.
23. Jim Roberts proposes a similar reading of these two scenes, suggesting that the difference between the two films is about choice. ‘However, the earlier version seems to rhetorically condemn her becoming, whereas the 1982 version allows Irena to choose actively her becoming’. Roberts (1997).
24. Kim Newman suggests that the 1982 film proposes a ‘workable solution to its triangle’ that enables both Oliver and Alice to ‘care for her’. Alice, however, is not told where Oliver is going when he sneaks off to be with Irena, consequently this is a conclusion of two dyads and not a triad. Newman (2013).
25. I am here referring to zoophilia as Kathy Rudy describes it; however, a more dominatrix form of zoophilia is invoked in another scholar’s work when he notes that the end of this film suggests ‘sex is not overcome by chastity, but by even kinkier sex, i.e. by a strange combination between bondage and zoophilia, finally liberating the panther in Irena’. Grosoli (2011, 149). Paul Schrader has also referred to this scene as ‘zoophiliac bondage’. Schrader and Jackson, Schrader on Schrader, 167.
26. Irena’s transformation into a panther was done by her own volition. Logistically, also, Irena can transform back if she decides to kill a person at the zoo, something that her brother Paul as a panther was able to do through the gates at the same zoo. Thus, she not only chose to live as a panther, but is always actively choosing to remain a panther.
27. Cat People has inspired two pornographic films by John Leslie entitled The Cat Woman (1988) and The Curse of the Cat Woman (1991)–the title of which Kim Newman notes is an homage to the original film’s sequel. Newman (2013), 78–79.
28. Screenwriter Bodeen commented: ‘Some audience members read a lesbian meaning into the action. I was aware that could happen with the cafe scene, and Val got several letters after Cat People was released, congratulating him for his boldness in introducing lesbians to films in Hollywood … Actually, I rather liked the insinuation and thought it added a neat bit of interpretation to the scene. Irena’s fears about destroying a lover if she kissed him could be because she was really a lesbian who loathed being kissed by a man’. Quoted in Newman (2013, 33–34).
29. ‘For the only queerness that queer sexualities could ever hope to signify would spring from their determined opposition to this underlying structure of the political – their opposition, that is, to the governing fantasy of achieving Symbolic closure through the marriage of identity to futurity in order to realize the social subject’ (Edelman 2004, 13–14).
30. Building on Pick, Creed explicitly calls out the 1942 Cat People as having a zoomorphic perspective. Creed (2015, 52).
31. Giovanni Aloi argues that human-animal distinctions might be called into question at surface encounters: ‘taking surfaces seriously prevents the ontological reduction of animal surfaces such as fur and feathers, providing a productive discursive rupture of extreme value to an analytic framework based on human/animal studies’ Aloi (2018, 181).
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Alex Zivkovic
Alex Zivkovic is a Ph.D. candidate studying modern art and media at Columbia University. His dissertation explores nineteenth-century French greenhouses, aquariums, and gardens as imperial propaganda – examining buildings, infrastructures, impressionist paintings, early films, and illustrated magazines. Alex’s recent publications include an article on Joan Jonas’s ecological video art in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism (2022) and an essay on sculpture and ethnographic vitrines in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2023).