[Rainbow Christmas 2020] Christmas Otherness in The Curse of the Cat People

Marginalized identities are almost conditioned to feel othered. Social, political, and cultural constraints, as if pre-ordained from birth, routinely and with jaundice other and isolate identities that fall outside the hegemonic customs. Ostensibly safe spaces – innocuous realms like the grocery store or the laundromat – feel hostile. There is always the congenital notion that every look, every inflection or shift in tone from those around you, is tethered to your identity. Every action you take is coded by the public and, more critically, coded internally. Am I being too loud? Am I dressed in a way that might, for instance, lead someone to intuit that I am gay? It’s an exhausting, procedural process, a by-the-motions wont of enduring every moment in the public realm as an audition. It is defensive, othered living, and while some of it is self-induced – informed by years of prejudice and uncertainty – some of it is both very true and very, very frightening.

The Curse of the Cat People is the 1944 sequel to Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 original, Cat People. Starring Ann Carter, Kent Smith, and Simone Simon, it follows Amy (Carter), young girl who starts to befriend the ghost of her father’s (Smith) deceased first wife, Irena (Simon), a fashion designer who’s lineage can be traced back to the titular cat people – a special race of persons who can transform into cats. Though many of the original’s characters return, The Curse of the Cat People is, for the most part, related to the original in name only.

Ann, a “sensitive and delicately adjusted” young girl is, from the start, othered. She does not get along with her classmates, sometimes lashing out with violence, and neither of her parents understand her well. Worse, her father, Oliver can’t help but routinely compare her to Irena, his first wife, despite the two having never met. Irena, too, is othered before she even appears on screen. A Serbian immigrant occupying the peripheral space of others – she is, after all, a descendant from a race of cat persons – Irena must keep her passions and innate sexuality repressed for fear that their arousal will incite her transformation.

Irena impulsively married Oliver, an architect living in New York, and finds herself incapable of any modicum of intimacy with him. Irena, as many women and othered identities were at the time, was subsequently sent to a psychiatrist for a “cure.” This, naturally, proves unsuccessful, and Irena later dies. Irena’s otherness, including Oliver’s retroactive veneration of her womanhood and perceived maternity, is coded as outside the realms of acceptable cultural parameters. Irena’s existence in and of itself is a tacit demand that society transform itself and accommodate her identity, despite Irena’s wish being simply that she be allowed to live.

Indeed, subtext is rendered plain, conspicuous text when Amy, after having been gifted a wishing ring from a neighbor, wishes for none other than a friend, summoning Irena in a flurry of wind and garden detritus. Irena remains hidden to the other characters, appearing only when Amy needs a friend or, most critically, to save Amy’s life in the climax when Barbara Farren (Elizabeth Russell), a neighbor’s daughter, intends to murder her out of jealousy. She, too, has been othered by her own mother, labeled an “imposter” and a sinister “spy,” by the woman who gave her life. These are women who wish for nothing but to live in the world who are nonetheless recurrently denigrated and isolated, disparaged and sequestered from the systems and modalities of culture that might make life possible. They are othered and killed. They are othered and emotionally abused. They are othered and left alone in the garden with the tempests of the deceased, the only earthly forces that just might understand them.

It’s no coincidence that the dénouement of The Curse of the Cat People occurs on Christmas Day, a Pre-Christian celebration that has nonetheless be co-opted and reworked by both secular and spiritual communities and repurposed into the commercial, spiritually ebbing festival that it is today. Christmas, particularly in the West, others almost by design. It others those who exist outside the boundaries of the white, patriarchal, bourgeois culture. It others minority identities from their friends, from their families, and from their lovers. Irena, convinced that Oliver no longer loved her because she could not perform her ostensibly feminine duties. She could desire men, but she could not love them, and for that, she was driven to madness and death.

Irena is thus nothing but a specter to Amy, what scholar Barbara Creed would call a monstrous-feminine, the most monstrous, gendered qualities of womanhood incarnate. More specifically, she is the possessed monster, possessed by the lineage of the cat people and, far deeper, possessed by her coded lesbianism, a sexuality that embargos her from fulfilling Oliver’s needs and, more broadly, the needs of society in the way she should. She is killed for it, and from the outset, her presence is set to secure the same fate for Amy.

It is refreshing, then, that while monstrous to everyone else, Irena isn’t a threatening presence to Amy, but a protective one. She intuitively understands her angst and repression, and that familiarity is preservative. It keeps Amy safe, and in a roundabout way, leads to the death of Julia Farren (Julia Dean), Barbara’s mother. Though the year was 1944, The Curse of the Cat People was uncharacteristically progressive, preserving the dignity and humanity of its othered characters while inciting befittingly cruel ends for the characters who stand to promulgate their otherness. In the final moments, Irena, content that Amy can manage without her, disappears into the garden, suggestively never to be seen again. Irena, for the first time, was not only seen, but heard.

She was not othered but welcomed. She was not monstrous but wholly, unequivocally herself.