Cat People · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman is alone in a small tiled pool room with the lights off. The water throws its shivering net of light up the walls and across the ceiling, and the light moves the way a coat moves on an animal. Something growls. She stays out in the middle of the water, turning, and turning, with one stairway out and nothing on her but a bathing suit. The camera never shows her what she is afraid of. It doesn't have to. The room is doing it.

That sequence is the invention, and to see how it works it helps to borrow a distinction Deleuze makes about the edge of the frame.

Everything a shot leaves out is off-screen, but not all of it is left out the same way. Some of it is out-of-field-relative: the corridor, the next room, the dark just past the lamp. Space you could walk to, space the film can cut to whenever it likes. The rest is out-of-field-absolute: a sense of something outside that has no address, that isn't waiting in an adjacent room because it isn't in the geography at all.

Horror before Tourneur ran almost entirely on the relative kind. The creature is off-screen because it is behind that door, and in a moment the door opens. Cat People keeps performing a quiet migration from one to the other. Follow Alice's walk through Central Park. First there are footsteps behind her, matching hers: someone is there, a few yards back, somewhere you could point at. Then the heels go soft, then padded, then the sound stops, and the thing that was behind her is no longer anywhere. Lamplight, blackness, lamplight. The cutting rhythm carries the pursuit and the frame carries nothing.

This is not a fancy word for "suggestion." It names the exact thing Paul Schrader gave away in 1982 by showing the transformation: once the panther has a body, it has a location, and once it has a location it has a size. A monster you can measure is a monster you can survive. The 1942 film never lets you take that measurement.

Meanwhile the frames are built as cages. Banisters, doorframes, the bars of the zoo enclosure segment the image and put Irena inside geometries she cannot leave. Deleuze would call this a frame in the strict sense, a closed set: composition treated as a system with its own walls. The tighter the film shuts that set around her, the less locatable the outside becomes. A closed set is not reassuring. It advertises that something is not in it.

The shadow itself has a life. Deleuze's name for the tradition Nicholas Musuraca inherited is expressionism: light and dark handled as a gradient charged with a non-organic life, so the dark seems animate without any creature in it. Musuraca lights with one hard motivated source and lets everything else fall to real black, no fill. Those pool caustics are the pure case, an image that is threatening without containing a threat. Worth noting what he does not borrow. German expressionism warped the sets; here the rooms stay honestly proportioned and only the light is deformed. That restraint is also, at RKO in 1942, the birth of the noir look.

Simone Simon is photographed with one eye in shadow again and again. Deleuze's affection-image is a feeling that registers on a face without discharging into action, and its calmest form he calls a qualisign: an immobile reflecting face expressing one quality and doing nothing about it. Simon plays Irena on that setting for the whole picture, gentle and precise and unreadable, never once signaling monstrousness. Which means the suspicion is ours. We manufacture it and then blame her for it. Roy Webb's score, a lullaby figure rather than brass and tremolo, sides with her while the images turn against her.

Then the bus. Deleuze's relation-image is meaning we assemble out of habits we bring into the theater. A mark is an object that means by its customary chain: growl, therefore animal. A demark is the anomaly that snaps the chain and forces interpretation. Mark Robson's bus is the most copied demark in the genre, and it is usually copied badly, because what gets dropped is the second beat: the false alarm is immediately followed by torn sheep and animal tracks that become a woman's footprints. You are punished for your relief, not merely startled.

And look at what those tracks are. The same evidence fits two incompatible situations, a curse or a delusional woman and an ordinary killing. Deleuze's term, from the small-form action-image, is the index-of-equivocity: a gesture that could belong to either of two worlds. DeWitt Bodeen's script is made of them, end to end, which is why the film lands exactly where Todorov would later locate the fantastic, in a hesitation that never resolves. The Production Code helped. The sexual matter could only exist unstated, so the film learned to make the unstated load-bearing.

There is a third reading available besides "she is cursed" and "she is ill," and Deleuze supplies it. Between the close-up's feelings and the action film's deeds he places the impulse-image: naturalism, where a civilized milieu turns out to be the thin skin over an originary-world of drives, and people are dragged down a slope they did not choose. Cat People has that architecture precisely. The milieu is Manhattan, a drafting office and a good apartment and a marriage. The originary world is the village of the King John legend, and its outpost in the city is the zoo cage the film keeps returning to. Between them sit the objects that mark the drive: the sketch of a panther impaled by a sword on Irena's wall, the caged bird that dies from her nearness. The line-of-slope runs one way only. Wounded, she opens the cage and dies with the animal. The plot finishes without the question closing.

Almost every element here has a documented source, which is what makes the synthesis so startling. Lang's M had already staged its killing entirely off-screen, the ball rolling to a stop, the balloon snagged in the wires, and had already handed the event over to sound. Dreyer's Vampyr let shadows detach from their owners and kept the supernatural permanently unverified, as atmosphere; Tourneur builds a plot out of that uncertainty instead of a mood. Dracula's Daughter supplied the template of a monstrous woman who submits to a male psychiatrist for a cure and is destroyed in his consulting room, Dr. Garth before Dr. Judd, seduction included. Musuraca had already run this lighting plot at RKO on Stranger on the Third Floor and carried it into Irena's apartment intact. Citizen Kane made underexposed ceilinged interiors acceptable house style and then left its standing sets and lighting units behind for a B-unit to recycle, which is how darkness became a budget line as well as an aesthetic. And The Wolf Man gave Tourneur the thing to invert: keep the folk curse, keep the sympathy for the afflicted, delete Jack Pierce's lap dissolve. The one element everybody believed horror was for, he cut.

He restated the method himself in Night of the Demon, where the studio insisted on showing the demon and proved his case by counterexample. Robert Wise, trained inside the unit, made The Haunting out of a bulging door and a pounding that advances down a corridor. Clayton's The Innocents placed figures at the far edge of a widescreen frame where you cannot be certain they are there. Halloween turned the bus into a rhythm, false scare buying the real one, and held the Shape in soft focus at the frame's edge inside Tourneur's doorway and window cages. Alien withheld its creature in steam and cutting for most of its length and used a cat, literally, as the false alarm.

What this film did to the art is easy to say and was hard to do. It turned the edge of the frame into an instrument rather than a limit, and it made the soundtrack a place where a film's most important events could happen. It demonstrated that an audience will build a better monster than any effects department, provided you supply the materials and then decline to finish the job. Bosley Crowther reviewed a programmer. He was watching the wrong part of the screen.

So watch it again and keep track of where your eyes actually go. For long stretches you will be staring hard at a patch of black that contains nothing, in a normally proportioned room, in a city with buses in it. The panther was never on the negative. And the question the film leaves standing is not whether the curse is real. It is why a woman surrounded by a husband who cannot understand her and a doctor who assaults her needed a curse at all to be destroyed.