“It’s not really a cat”: art, media, and queer wildness in Cat People (1942, 1982)

Abstract

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.