Response #3--Cat People and Some Uncanny Camera Work

Val Lewton’s Cat People (1942) explores notions of shifting gender roles and the anxiety surrounding them in its depiction of Irena. Given the era in which the film was made—in the midst of WWII—and the rapidly shifting notions of gender, it is hardly surprising that the film articulates this in the omniscient threat posed by the figure of a foreign woman who resists assimilation to the apple pie Americana ideal in her very embodiment. This resistance is achieved by framing shots of Irena alongside particular objects at certain instances in the film, and is supported by observations made by Rick Worland, and Sigmund Freud himself, who explores the notion of the uncanny in The Uncanny—the unsettling phenomenon undergirding the entire film, which leads the audience to recognize it as belonging to the horror genre.

            The first notable instance of purposeful camera work is in the scene in Irena’s apartment that Worland says, in any other film at this time, would have “subtly implied the couple had just had a satisfying sexual encounter;” the statue of King John spearing a cat is silhouetted against the moonlit window as Irena “dreamily [hums],” gazing out of it (Worland, 180). Given that the two are so obviously framed together in this shot, coupled with the multiplicity of feline images throughout the apartment, it is clear that, especially given Irena’s subsequent disclosure that King John killed the witches and devil-worshipers in her village, that Irena, the figure of John, and the feline motif are intimately connected. In a sense, it foreshadows the film’s climax, when Tom Conway (who plays Doctor Judd, and also King John in Irena’s dream sequence) fatally stabs Irena through the chest. This framing of Irena alongside this foreign figure lends itself to other her in terms of her nationality, as well as in terms of her uncanniness, when this figure reappears later in the film. While not immediately interpreted as something strange and frightening (as outlined by Freud on page 195 of his essay), it becomes so when it recurs later in the film in the manner I have described because it is wedded to uncertainty and supernatural elements.

            The other instance of purposeful camera framing I would like to note in the film is at the museum, when Irena begins to descend a flight of stairs upon being excluded from the camaraderie between Alice and Oliver, and comes to a pause next to a black statue of Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of the afterlife. The camera seems to very intentionally hesitate on this shot. In doing so, this framing posits that Irena is foreign, Other, a figure that demands respect and fear. Like Anubis, she symbolizes death, and represents the uncanny doubling of the identity—both are human yet not human, animal and yet not animal. In other words, there is something strange and frightening within them that is nonetheless recognizable (Freud, 195). This shot may also pay tribute to Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941), as Worland notes that Cat People “shows indebtedness” to this film, illustrating the similarities between them while juxtaposing the masculine figure against the femme-fatale of Cat People (Worland, 179). Like The Wolf Man, a monstrous figure permeates the film, while employing a more suggestive means of conveying this idea, as well as “[floating] artfully between clinical and occult explanations for Irena’s fears” (Worland, 179). This shot illustrates such a departure from overt manifestations of monsters, such as Anubis, to more covert and perhaps more complex and insidious ones, as embodied by Irena.