Val Lewton’s Curse of The Cat People (1944) “God should use a Rose Amber Spot!” Seeing the darkness thru the ‘Fearing Child’ and ‘The Monstrous Feminine’ Part II

Begin ‘The Bagheeta’: Val Lewton’s fantasy/ reality world of Curse of The Cat People: fearing the female/feline monster and the engendering child. Part I

This post continues from Part 1 at the link above!

And now, Part II

FANTASY as REALITY, REALTY as FANTASY – From page 112, Chapter 7, J.P Telotte Dreams of Darkness

The Curse of the Cat People (1944)

The child per se makes us uneasy, ambivalent ; we are anxious about the human propensities concentrated by the child symbol. It evokes too much of what has been left out or is unknown, becoming easily associated with the primitive, mad and mystical. – James Hillman ” Abandoning the Child” in Loose Ends.

To continue with this blog post about one of Lewton’s very precious stories, less dark than his others, and dealing with childhood, the fears of and by children.

All of Lewton’s works dealt with subject matters that forced us to push the boundaries of ‘the familiar.’ They challenged us to face a darker, more mysterious reality of the natural world and the incomprehensible landscape of the human psyche.

Curse of the Cat People (1944) acts as a cinematic continuum to Lewton’s Cat People 1942, featuring Simone Simon once again as the alluring and sensual Irena Dubrovna Reed, who may or may not have belonged to a race of beings that could shapeshift into the physical form of a large cat or black panther when sexually aroused.

The symbol of Irena synthesized the fear of women’s sexuality, sexual freedom, the women’s body, and often the correlation that is made with women’s emotional existence and madness. What is engendered in Cat People (1942) is far less about a woman who can morph into a predatory feline and more about the collective fear of ‘The Monstrous Feminine.’

While Amy is not Irena’s biological daughter, Amy is truly more of a progeny to Irena and the mystique she embodies because they are both alienated figures who are frustrated and misunderstood. Who stand outside the social community which is pumped from the veins of ‘rational’, normative thoughts and behaviors. Amy is the figure of ‘The Fearing Child,’ an innocent who not only has ‘power’ but can wreak havoc in our ‘normal’ world.

Both characters are imaginative and rely on their senses. They are more connected to the natural world, to the darkness, which is associated with feminine energy, and less intellectual, which is considered a masculine marker. They are considered emotional, irrational, and dangerously unpredictable. The character of Oliver Reed is just as frightened and, moreover, threatened by his six-year-old little girl as he was of his beautiful and tragic wife Irena, who was more a victim than ever, the ‘monster’ she was perceived to be.

In Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Leopard Man, The 7th Victim, and Isle of The Dead, there aren’t concrete Monsters as in Universal films, as in Frankenstein’s creation, Dracula, or The Wolf Man.

RKO studio heads had a mistrust of Lewton’s creative vision, his unconventional approach to some esoteric subject matter, or volatile subjects such as a woman’s sexual desires. Lewton, rather than using literal lumbering, fanged, or hairy monsters, used the powers of suggestion and shadow to tell the story.

Lewton disliked mask-like faces that were hardly human, the kinds of images that were expected from the horror genre he was infiltrating. Lewton liked to reveal the monsters that were lurking in the subconscious primitive recesses of our own imaginations. Shadows become the monster in these films, they are the mysterious layer that surfaces in world that only makes sense in the light of day. And Amy draws the shadows to her…

They do not have scary faces, they are quite human and in fact ordinary. He takes the ‘familiar’ and inverts it, subverts it, rattles the soundness of an accepted experience, and turns it into either an illusion, a nightmare, or a fit of paranoia. He taps into our childhood fears and sets those fears on the frightened characters in his shadow plays. Usually, the thing they fear is uprooting their own personal desires and the fear of coming face to face with them.

Oliver couldn’t handle Irena’s sexual desires, nor her desirability; it triggered too much of his own primal urges, and so he demonized her, a fragile girl in a foreign country who believed in folklore from her very ancient set of beliefs handed down for centuries.

A story which quite often itself was ambiguous as to whether the threat was real or imagined. RKO wanted to be in competition with Universal, so they added footage of a menacing Panther, which was inserted into several scenes of Cat People.

In Curse of The Cat People, as in Cat People, there isn’t any clear evidence of a malevolent force. What operates is mostly that which is evoked in the characters’ own minds, how they perceive and react to the film’s protagonist, Amy, and the fervid memory/ghost of Irena that still haunts Oliver and Alice’s marriage. In fact Irena is not the mysteriously predatory cat women in this film, here she is more like a fairy Queen from an ethereal plane.

Is Irena truly a ghost? Or is Amy creating a friend? It isn’t essential to the story, but both are true.

In this way, Lewton’s films are very reflexive. The imagery plays off the subconscious mind and extracts the primitive fears that lie within our own psyches.

As Curtis Harrington stated in –“Ghoulies and Ghosties”, The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television 7 (1952-53),195.

Lewton observed that the power of the camera as an instrument to generate suspense in an audience lies not in it’s power to reveal but it’s power to suggest; that what takes place just off screen in the audience ‘s imagination, the terror of waiting for the final revelation, not the seeing of it, is the most powerful dramatic stimulus toward tension and fright.

Robert Wise, who stepped out of the editing booth and directed Curse of The Cat People, himself utilized this philosophy when he went on to direct his own masterpiece in 1963. His adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s book The Haunting of Hill House. Wise’s The Haunting 1963, in my view, even surpasses the author’s book, with its own powerful use of the camera as a tool to suggest, distort, and defy what the audience can see or not see or thinks it sees. It’s this premise that makes all of Lewton’s work, or The Haunting 1963 and Jack Clayton’s The Innocents 1961, such potent theatrical chimeras.

What Curse of The Cat People and its companion, Cat People, shows us is that Val Lewton and directors like Robert Wise, Mark Robson, and, in particular, Jacques Tourneur understood the fundamental relationship between our perceptions of the world and our conceptions of its nature.

Citing James Hillman at the beginning of this post, I felt was relevant to the concept of fear of children; Hillman contends that while engaging our imaginations as an audience, the absence or holes that are marked by DARK spaces informs us of the fundamental and conflicting relationship between people and the world they inhabit. It is representational of a black hole, a vacancy of any meaning in the physical realm. While we struggle through our desire to fill in those dark spaces with rational, conscious thought and reach out to find its significance, it’s a constant that remains open for us. A darkness that will forever lurk…

The audience and the film’s inhabitants struggle to make sense of the unknown, to clarify the ambiguities plaguing the human psyche and the corporeal realm.

Joel Siegel describes this aspect of Lewton’s films as “‘Symbolic Displacement of ‘drives and desires’ presumably too dreadful to be shown directly.” – from Tourneur Remembers- Cinefantastique 2 no.4 (1973) 24-25

However, such drives and desires, especially Irena’s fear of possession by an evil spirit (The Bagheeta) and her growing sense, as in Rilke’s poem about The Panther, create an environment where she is trapped in a world with bars between her and reality.

Much of the dialogue in Cat People is concerned with whether Irena is lying or if her anxieties are a form of hysterics or mental illness. She confides in her husband Oliver, yet he betrays Irena and turns her into a world that will demonize her, analyze her, and question the legitimacy of her fears and folk stories. Amy is also deemed a liar who fantasizes too much, again evoking worry in Oliver that he must admonish and subdue her, as he did with Irena.

To tame the child and cage or forestall the coming of age of The Female Monster.

We try to destroy what we don’t understand, thus causing us fear and anxiety. Oliver has no empathy for either his ex-wife or his young female child.

This stems from the basis that we can’t make sense of those ‘peculiar’ impulses. The ‘dark places’ that intrude on the everyday world and forewarn us that something might be absent or missing deep in the core of our being is what we ultimately project onto the world we inhabit. Oliver’s lack of awareness is just as problematic as Irena’s consuming fixation on her ancient familial folk beliefs in Cat People.

Oliver has limited experience, he also denies not only the female desire that Irena possesses but also her cultural background that he just doesn’t understand, or ever tries to embrace.

Again, what is foreign is equated with the unknown, with a shadow world of mysticism and unorthodoxy. Oliver is an All-American who will only embrace what is acceptable, what is known and verifiable, like blueprints to one of his ships; he can calculate the measurements. So, aside from Oliver’s fear of Irena’s dynamic sexual life force, Oliver is guilty of being ethnocentric.

The shadows that intrude are symbolic of female power, the presence as unknown, the presence as unable to control -and thus, must put bars around it, again, like Rilke’s Panther.

Amy’s symbolic displacement, desires, and drives emerge as she pushes away the playing children in a collective group and runs to embrace the butterfly. The butterfly = transformation, change, puberty, eventual sexual awakening, an openness to the preternatural world. Freedom of movement in the world.

The experiences and emotions of childhood and their proclivities for fantasizing play a role in a child’s development in the understanding of her world and herself.

Curse of The Cat People (1944) also emphasizes motifs of Initiation and Parent/Child relationships—disparate points of view and conformity. Oliver’s disturbing prosecution of what is supposed normal in his little world is in drastic conflict with Amy’s world.

From Hillman- Re-Visioning Psychology, p.23- Experience the fantasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy: Source

Hillman notes the image of the child evokes ambiguity and even secret anxiety in the adult realm. The figure of the child reflects many of the fears and insecurities humans have managed to dispel or block out with the concrete concerns of their daily existence.

As Henry James demonstrated, one could provoke the fantastic imagination into a sense of horror or uneasiness by playing upon a perception of innocence, what he termed ‘The Exposure’ The helpless plasticity of childhood that isn’t dear or sacred to somebody.” – Quoted from James’ letter to Dr. Waldenstein in The Letters of Henry James ed. Percy Lubbock (New York Scribner’s 1920).1:297

Lewton’s threats from cats, zombies, Satanists, or leopard men show us that it’s man himself who is the true thing to be feared. Men and women grasp at their faith under the guise of normalcy, especially in the daily goings on of day-to-day life. Children represent a certain naivete, which Lewton illustrates as a metaphor. Through the symbolic use of a child, a very common human emotion can be evoked, but they really hint at an adult world that is, at times, fragile, lacks a clear sense of order, and is limited in self-awareness.

The metaphoric use of the child raises another bit of dis-ease. The presence of the need for self-satisfaction and safety makes the adult characters in these films REALLY uncomfortable. The complex symbol of the child plays upon our own deep-seated, often denied feelings of security and doubt of the ability to cope with what is unknown.

Mother Alice and Mrs. Callahan see Amy’s ‘active imagination’ as an attribute! Oliver fears the effects and says, “Amy has too many fantasies and too few friends, and it worries me.”

So Oliver tries to force Amy into the mold of ‘normalcy’ at the risk of alienating her and, worse, crushing her beautiful spirit. Like the little boy who crushes the butterfly, the symbolism and foretelling are not lost as the story unfolds.

Amy hasn’t undergone her limitations set forth in stone yet, but through her adult guardians, the socialization process shifts the real and imagined realms to coincide for her.

Freud notes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. “Fantasizing impulse is one of the child’s basic methods of ordering {his} environment and constructing a meaningful world for.”

Freud points out the marked difference between the archetypal approach of Jung and Hillman, and Freud’s primary concern is what is termed the ‘Dayworld.’ He believed that it was essential for children to play using a repetition of real experiences whereby –

“They abreact (release an emotion) the strength of the impression and, as one might put it, make themselves master of their situation.” (page 11)

from THE DREAD OF DIFFERENCE -Grant pg.61

Female fetishism is clearly represented within many horror texts-as instances of patriarchal signifying practices, but only in relation to male fears and anxieties about women and the question of “WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?“

In the 40s, women did not speak about their fetishistic desires within popular cinema. Irena feared her own sexual desires, and the Cat was the fetish symbol. The feline prowling, hunting, devouring, clawing, flesh-eating. Oliver was afraid of Irena’s sexual desires; he might have struggled with the fear of not being able to satisfy those desires. Instead, he demoralized her, allowed her own fears to consume her, and ultimately allowed her to self-destruct.

In Cat People (1942) Alice played by Jane Randolph finds her robe torn to shreds, by the claws of a large cat. The destructive force behind it divulges a crime of passion.

What is shown is the forceful expression of the female threat to the male or “The Female Monster” as defying the usual filmic avenues of disavowal and expressing a threat beyond narrative control” (pg.303)

In contrast, Paul Schrader’s 1982 Cat People remake film clearly demonstrates that the female monster can be controlled by a strong, even brutal, evocation of phallic power. Schrader’s film is assertively obvious, while Tourneur’s version was subtle, visually, and thematically suggestive, eschewing the visual narrative on purpose.

Another interesting thing to consider is the fact that Alice offers Oliver a safe sexual relationship while she undermines Irena at every turn in Cat People. Alice exudes a very asexual persona. She acts more like a friend than a sexual mate to Oliver.

To deal with Irena’s sexual dynamism, the only way to deal with Irena’s sexual threat for the film to conclude, it was necessary for the story to annihilate Irena, thereby destroying her sexual desires that were never brought under control by Dr. Judd. She is left to destroy herself. This she does, again symbolically, by opening up the panther cage and allowing herself to be torn to pieces. She is devouring herself and the core of her identity, which frightens and alienates her and Oliver. Exposing herself directly to that DESIRE/PANTHER by embracing the very thing she has longed for, the thing she wants most, she ultimately has to die.

Acting in accord with the patriarchal standards that she has tried to assimilate and internalize, in this way she is punishing herself for her sexual nature. A nature that she comes to believe is evil.