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Cat People
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A particular type of movie purist cannot bear to see their favourite Old Hollywood classics remade. This type experienced mounting suffering throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. Paul Schrader was truly stepping on the toes of the Purist when he, via scriptwriter Alan Ormsby (frequent collaborator of Bob Clark), dared to update (post-modernise?) Cat People, the 1942 Jacques Tourneur/Val Lewton masterpiece of the same name. Offence is offered at every turn. Not only does this version rejig the moral values of the original and wallow in gory, violent special effects unthinkable in the ‘40s (cue the cult of suggestion overvalued by many nostalgia buffs); the very premise the story is radically altered. In a fascinating 1986 essay cheekily titled “A Certain Tendency of American Cinema” (Cahiers du cinéma, no. 382, April 1986), screenwriter-critic-director Pascal Bonitzer looked back and found this remake by Schrader (“not the stupidest of Hollywood directors”, he nicely concedes) to be “so impersonal, so vulgar” – as distinct from the magic worked by the 1942 film, which depended upon a “crucial secret, containing all the ambiguities and the things that cannot be spoken aloud” to generate a “strong intersubjectivity”. (His interpretation of what that secret exactly is – the “feminine homosexuality” of Simone Simon’s character, generating rivalries and jealousies among the various women – is something I disagree with.) Schrader’s sin, for Bonitzer, is to expose every undercurrent of the tale (whatever we take those undercurrents to be) and represent them right on the surface of the film (explicit depictions with gross special effects) and its plot (underlying themes made manifest) – precisely the type of generalised obscenity that Jean Baudrillard philosophically theorised in the po-mo years. Bonitzer mocks what he sees as the ersatz “depth psychology” of Schrader’s take; the “permissive Californian ideology” of free, open, uninhibited sexuality (in desperate need of any remaining taboo to fire it up) has clearly led him astray. I approach this argument differently. If we interpret the original Cat People to be about the murderousness of human desire and the repressive timidity of so-called normal behaviour, then we must concede that Schrader’s version begins from another idea altogether, and develops it both logically and well. Cat People in ‘82 deals with the pact of understanding that has to be struck between two separate, distinct worlds – the incestuous world of the cat people (Nastassia Kinski as Irena and Malcolm McDowell as Paul) and the human world (John Heard as Oliver and Annette O’Toole as Alice). Schrader, in his handling of this material, is unafraid (as ever) to court charges of vulgarity, over-artifice and kitsch; finding one’s identity (whether as human or animal) is always a florid, heated, even deliberately awkward and embarrassing process in his work. But that’s his chosen style-and-sensibility turf, and he works it admirably here. He deserves our critical respect. Besides, his Cat People boasts one of the most memorably kinky love scenes in all mainstream cinema (if nothing else, Schrader sometimes succeeds in testing the limits of the Hollywood system). Putting out the fire with gasoline (as the Bowie/Moroder theme song proposes), indeed! MORE Schrader: Affliction, Auto Focus, Blue Collar, The Comfort of Strangers, Touch, Light of Day, Patty Hearst © Adrian Martin 1 October 1991 |
