Response 3: Cat People

“I am a little world made cunningly”: Animation of the Nerves in Cat People

In response to the question of the role Irena’s art, by falling in line with the film’s psychoanalytic focus, we can explain Irena’s creation as related to repressed impulses. As in any creative act, Irena’s sketching is an exercise in constraint, in release, and control. We see that clearly in the ripped drawings and crumpled paper (a typical painting of the frustrated creator),  

and her navigating how to take hold of her craft. She often makes a point of framing her art as something professional, as would have been encouraged by her economic environment.

Irena’s outward insistence on not being an artist exists literally (i.e. when she says it) and subterraneously (e.g. in the ways that she retracts her own control). In human form, when pawing at a caged bird and accidentally killing it, she later explains that “it died of fright when I tried to take it into my hand.” This is easily a metaphor for repression and control, and a free-floating anxiety in relation to her own agency. Throughout the film, Irena grapples with what she can and cannot touch, what she can create, and how she can exercise control—this regarding permission, and not capacity. Even while specific power dynamics are offered in every scene, it can be argued that Irena censors herself as much as anyone else tries to. Her dance between mastery and surrender is internal.

To play on those grossly reduced gender types, the female presence and struggle are often internal, they are inner, they are void. This is played up in the film between the main co-stars: we have drawing for her and drafting for him. Oliver plays the engineer, the level-headed breadwinner. His is a business that is technical, measured, and careful. And despite her protests that she is simply a designer, not an artist, Irena’s art is a venture that is contrastingly impractical, fantastic, and unrestrained. Both characters’ professions meddle in prediction and creation, though one seems involved in some darker magic (noting here, too, the woman ever being the proverbial “dark continent”).

This same dark spread is seen specifically during the dream scene in which Irena’s head (the locus of the mind) is lit up in a sea of black. As we move into another level of consciousness with(in) her, the scene becomes wholly animated; it is the only fully illustrated part of the film itself. Cats are seen clawing toward the camera and out to the edges of the frame, a nod perhaps to a Rorschach inkblot in its movement and shape. We can also assume the illustration is hers, if only present in some psychical/suppressed dream. (And yet we’re there to see it.)

The display and diagnosis of nervousness in this film is a precarious one. There is honesty in the portrayal of psychological trauma, and of its dismissal, but the way that it’s brushed off throughout the film—excuse the awful pun—gets on my nerves. Irena’s amplified role of the romantic woman, as a keeper of a curse, her constant anxiety about her part/position in her population makes her a fractured and fractal person—none of which is acknowledged nor cared for until the very end of the narrative. The last-ditch redemption in the final scene, that “she never lied to us,”—that she was all these parts, at some point, truthfully—what is that line supposed to do? Is this an assurance? an entreaty? an absolution? It’s further complicated, I think, by John Donne’s postscript, in that Irena has been all these parts in her own world, “—and now both parts must die.”