Disability is in Everything (Including our Villains): CAT PEOPLE

Warning: HARK! There are spoilers here, traveler. Take the road less littered with thought.

TW: Mentions of xenophobia, mentions of antisemitism, mentions of racism, homophobia, bigotry, mentions of psychiatric abuse, mentions of sexual abuse, death, mentions of cheating.

Did we all enjoy Shudder's Queer For Fear (2022)? I sure did. All my favs gathered in the same place to dissect their favorite things and invite us to play detective alongside them. What a treat. After the series finished, I noticed I had a pretty hefty list of new movies I needed to see; at the top of the list was Cat People(1942)(dr. Jacques Tourneur). Obviously what enticed me to the movie was its un-subtle queerness, and perhaps getting to watch some dubious plotting in one the most glamorous apartments I've ever seen on screen, However, I ended up falling in love with Cat People for a rather surprising reason: The obvious "villain" of the movie timely changes within the eras. Making it simultaneously historical as it is current.

The Serbian cat woman herself, Irena (Simone Simon) is no doubt the supposed catalyst who jealously thwarts a "normal" couple's attempts to be together. Yet, when the movie is brought out from the 1940's explicit xenophobic climate, along with some other anxieties expressed around fears of "the other" secretly infiltrating American society (I.e. antisemitism, bigotry against interracial marriages, communists, and people seen as morally "impure" for their queerness, sexual history, etc.) suddenly, Irena's actions are nowhere near the villainy Cat People tries to suggest. In fact, it quickly becomes a story about a man, growing impatient with his wife's low sexual trust in the marriage, who partners up with another woman and weaponizes the legal status of husbandry to institutionalize her. Interesting. It's hard for me to imagine anyone today (and truthfully back then too) not sympathizing with Irena, especially when the agented agenda of others' evil is so clearly splayed out for the audience to see! And it should have been obvious to me then, after finishing the movie, that the Irena's of the world are not, and sometimes still not, granted empathy when they are purposefully posed as a threat to patriotic cut-outs of illusionary, poster-board heroism.

Let's start with a question that's been bothering me since watching the movie: was Alice (played by Jane Randolph) always infatuated with Irena's husband? To me, it was obvious from the beginning that both Irena and he were co-habitually living together as just roommates, posing as a straight couple. And truthfully, the husband doesn't seem at all displeased with their situation (alluding to his own queerness) until someone, like Alice, threatens to question their dynamic. Although to us, it is obvious that Alice's observation about their passionless marriage, comes from her own sexual feelings, and it perhaps could have not only been unclear to him, but still motivated Irena's husband to find another, "better" woman to keep up the delusion. Oh shit, the gig is up! panic, if you will. Alice, I noticed, even has to talk him into seeing her as a viable wife by constantly comparing her's and Irena's behavior; wouldn't a real unsatisfied lover pick up on that, naturally? Yet, as out of left field as their affair feels, it truly does match the sense of urgency expressed in his original marriage with Irena. A sort of rush.

With Alice noticing Irena's and his strange agreement, the motivation to distance himself from Irena's perceived strangeness is immediately prioritized. Irena's suffering (the cats prodding her brain at night, feelings that her emotions are not under her own "control", etc) is genuinely very real and I don't think Irena's husband suggested her going to a psychiatrist to be diabolical. Yet, the solution on how to get rid of Irena did co-inspire with that same desire wanting her to be "cured". Why? Well, since the beginning of Freud's reign, psychology's surveilling gaze was routinely used as a way to control vulnerable members of society, including the wives that did not perform "well enough" during sex. Hysteria and with-holding sexual intimacies were not only blamed solely on the wives within these corporal marriages, but the burden of literally having it beaten, traumatized, or lobotomized out of them, where even the threat of "sending them away" could evoke a certain level of control - now imagined how disabled people felt! People who had threats followed quickly with life-sentencing promises and there was no "going back home" into the arms of, an abusive, but still, a human, instead of a cell. Even Irena expresses that her "catness" is disabling, meaning that she lives In a society that does not openly celebrate or accommodate cat people, and it is interesting that Cat People's ending seems to say the solution is death. Making Irena's story complimentary to monster movies, as well as any other unempathetic, eugenic-centered story.

There is not one person in Cat People who tried to aid Irena's discomfort without transactional bedding; I think the fact that Irena visits the local zoo, over and over again, is a fascinating peek into her own, limiting options. The awareness she has about her options within her xenophobic, ableist universe is beautifully metaphor-ed by Irena's fixation on specifically the panther, who perhaps could be a cat sister, similar to (or perhaps is) the Cat woman who spotted her amidst her wedding dinner, making the panther and Irena equally voyeurs of each other's caged existence! Witnesses to each other's queer, disabled, and cultural suppressions, with Irena showing agented solidarity when she throws the dead bird through the bars. As well as eventually opening up those iron gates.

I am an Irena sympathizer! Justice for her symbolic death! Solidarity with others who mirror it!