Cat people and its two worlds.

In this essay I want to look at the film Cat People (1942), both produced (by Val Lewton: born Yalta 1904, emigrated 1909) and directed (by Jacques Tourneur: born Paris 1904, emigrated 1913, returned to Paris 1929-34) by emigres to the U.S. In addition, it is largely concerned with the difficulties of a foreign female (played by Simone Simon, whose film career began in France in 1931, but who moved to America in 1935) living in a New York in which she wants to belong, but cannot.

In order to elucidate the film, I am drawing on a new theory of cultural origins developed by the anthropologist Chris Knight in his book Blood Relations. Here he argues that all the world's magical myths and fairy-tales share a common structure. This structure derives from the social structure of an African hunter-gatherer moiety society, in which culture emerged (approximately 100,000 years ago) as a consequence of females coercing males to hunt for them by going on a sex-strike at dark moon. At this time, by pretending to be infertile (menstruating) male animals they were collectively signalling "no" ("wrong sex, wrong species, wrong time") as well as indicating to the hunters what they were wanting: bleeding (raw) animal meat brought to them. This shared fantasy creates the first human rules and agreements, especially the domain of the sacred/taboo, which is contrasted with the profane/everyday. To enable the sacred to emerge, females enact together a shared fantasy, creating--through song, dance and body paint (the first cosmetics)--a collective identity which is paradoxical, or beyond easy definition. By connecting their sacredness to the hunted animal, they prevent the hunters from eating the killed animal on the spot (the "hunter's own kill rule"). Instead, the hunters return (at full moon, the most propitious time for the climax of the hunt, when there is the maximum amount of continuous light) to the "home-base" with their kills, where the women emerge from their ritual "other world" and turn back to themselves again. The blood (and the body paint) is removed, the meat is cooked, there is feasting and the "marital" or heterosexual sex-strike is lifted.

According to this theory, metamorphosis, transformation or "skin-change" is a specifically female capacity, associated with marital disjunction. The female can, as it were, move between two worlds. In one of these worlds (the "sacred") is her blood kin or sisters, in the other (the "profane") her husband. She belongs fully to neither, since it is the fact of alternation which is crucial. In the earliest hunter-gatherer societies these two worlds are complementary; in later, agricultural and post-agricultural societies they tend to become mutually exclusive. Movement may be possible, but it may be irreversible and is in any case never unproblematic.

To see how this might relate to Cat People, let's consider its plot: Irena, a Serbian-born commercial artist living in New York, is haunted by the fear that she is descended from a race of cat-women who, when physically aroused, turn into panthers. Oliver falls in love with her and tries to convince her that her fears are groundless. They marry but Irena is afraid to consummate her marriage, begging Oliver to be patient. After a time, Oliver persuades her to visit

Dr. Judd, a psychiatrist. Judd proves to be no help. Irena grows worse, and Oliver finds solace in telling his problems to Alice, who works at his ship-designing firm. Subsequently, Alice is twice menaced by some unknown animal. Oliver tells Irena he is going to divorce her, and later that evening both he and Alice are attacked while working late at the office. Dr. Judd visits Irena and tries to make love to her. She turns into a panther and kills him. Wounded by Judd, Irena dies at Central Park Zoo while trying to free a caged panther.

The central figure of this draraa is the woman, Irena. It is upon her that the plot hinges. The "inciting incident" (the phrase comes from Robert McKee's study of screenwriting, Story) is her courtship by Oliver, which she consciously welcomes, but at a deeper level fears. This "upsets the balance of forces" in her life, but also sets the forces in motion. If the film were merely about the passing from a state of singleness through courtship to marriage it would not contain the resonance it does and probably could not be discussed in the context of Chris Knight's theory. As Robert McKee puts it, for "many stories or genres" it is sufficient that the "inciting incident" or "event"

pitches the protagonist's life out of kilter, arousing a conscious desire for something he feels will set things right, and he goes after it.

But for those protagonists we tend to admire the most, the Inciting Incident arouses not only a conscious desire, but an unconscious one as well These complex characters suffer intense inner battles because these two desires are in direct conflict with each other. No matter what the character consciously thinks he wants, the audience senses or realizes that deep inside he unconsciously wants the very opposite.

(McKee 1998: 192)

This description may not only be applied to the most interesting films (not necessarily the most coherent) but to the comments made earlier about the mutual exclusivity of the "two worlds" in agricultural societies (and beyond). Cat People may be regarded on the personal level as a conflict in a woman between a conscious and unconscious desire which appear to be incompatible; more broadly, it might be regarded as a conflict between a modern, secular age in which marriage is of supreme value and the memories and stirrings of an older social order associated with blood kinship and female solidarity. Once Irena decides she wants to go after one desire, the other, opposed desire quickly begins to assert itself in her.

Irena is European, a foreigner from an "old world" consciously trying to belong in the "new world" of America; in this sense, her ideal is Alice, Oliver's work colleague and fellow-American, who has no stirrings of allegiance to any order beyond that which is. But while this is something for which Irena strives (since it appears to be the American "norm", and thus the "natural" thing to want), something else asserts itself in her against her conscious will. It is the reason for her doubts about marriage to Oliver ("I've lived in dread of this moment", she tells him, while also revealing how she must have imagined it, at one level longed for it; but she goes on: "I've never wanted to love you. I've stayed away from people. I lived alone. I didn't want this to happen."). The "return of the repressed" is highlighted most obviously at Irena and Oliver's wedding supper. Ironically, it is the "normal" Alice who has found a Serbian restaurant in New York, of which Irena was ignorant, for the celebration. It is in this scene that the "other world" comes closest to definite articulation, although even here it still hovers on the verge of consciousness. It is crucial that it is at the occasion of Irena's consciously desired marriage that her unconscious desire against her marriage, personified by her "sister", should make itself known:

MALE GUEST: To the bride!

(They all drink a toast.)

MALE GUEST (to another): Look at that woman. Isn't she something?

SECOND MALE GUEST: Looks like a cat.

(The cat-like woman gets up from her table.)

IRENA: Thank you so much for this lovely party, Alice. I didn't know there was a Serbian restaurant.

ALICE: Anything you want to know about this city, ask me. I know all the unimportant details.

(The cat-like woman now faces Irena and Alice, and addresses Irena.)

WOMAN (in Serbian): My sister.

(Irena is afraid and does not answer.)

WOMAN (again in Serbian): My sister?

(Irena crosses herself. The woman leaves. There is a sigh of relief from everyone and the celebrating continues.)

ALICE: Well, how do you like that!

OLIVER (to Irena): What did that woman say to you, darling?

(Irena does not answer.)

OLIVER (to Irena): What did she say? Now wait a minute, it can't be that serious. Just one single word.

IRENA: She greeted me. She called me sister. You saw her, Oliver. You saw what she looked like.

OLIVER (laughs): Oh, the cat people! She looks like a cat, so she must be one of the cat people! One of King John's pets! (nudging Irena's chin) Oh, Irena, you crazy kid!

(00:16-00:18)

Instead of complementarity of worlds, we encounter here a collision of worlds. What was originally a coherent alternation is now presented as mutually exclusive alternatives. It is Irena's strength and downfall that she cannot choose between them. Their opposing claims force her to her death. None of the other characters shares her dilemma. They are either completely immersed in the "new" world of secular, "ovulatory" values (Oliver, Alice, their work colleagues) or otherwise locked into the "other" world of ritual seclusion (the woman in the restaurant, the panther in the zoo). Joel Siegel provides the interesting information that the voice of the cat-like woman--who appears only in this one scene--was dubbed by Simone Simon, who plays Irena (Siegel 1972: 103).

On a conscious level, Irena wants to dismiss the "sister" in the restaurant. By crossing herself she hopes to ward off the influence of pre-Christian ritual forces. But while the others do not take the woman seriously, Irena is much affected by her appearance. It is no accident that in the following scene, when she and Oliver go back together to his apartment, she makes her apologies for not being able to consummate the marriage:

OLIVER: What is it, darling?

IRENA: I'm going to beg ...

OLIVER: Mrs. Reed.

IRENA: It's nice to hear that. Nice. I want to be Mrs. Reed.

OLIVER: You are.

IRENA: But I want to be Mrs. Reed really. I want to be everything that name means to me. And I can't. I can't. Oliver, be kind, be patient. Let me have time. Time to get over that feeling there's something evil in me.

OLIVER: Darling, you have all the time there is in the world if you want it. And all the patience and kindness there is in me.

IRENA: Only a little time, Oliver, I don't want more than that. (Inside their apartment, Oliver knocks on her bedroom door.)

OLIVER: Goodnight, Irena.

(Irena crouches down by the door, wanting to grasp the handle and open it. But the sound of a panther in the zoo nearby prevents her from doing so, and she rests her head in resignation against the door.)

IRENA: Goodnight, Oliver.

OLIVER (quieter): Goodnight, Irena.

(Oliver moves away from the door sadly. In her room, Irena remains with her head resting against the door.)

(00:18-00:20)

Irena here expresses a conscious desire to be "Mrs. Reed", a woman who defines herself exclusively as a wife, as someone who belongs exclusively to a man (and so to the world of marriage). She is able, however, to acknowledge the presence of another world, one that she can only define as "evil", since it has nothing to do with Oliver and the sweet values of the "good plain Americano" (his self-description) which he embodies. To her this other world must be evil because it does not belong in the value-system of modern America, her and our touchstone of normality. It is defined instead only in relation to animals and other women (a "sister").

Apparently, Val Lewton, the originator of the story for Cat People, got his inspiration from contemporary fashion drawings rather than from memories of folk-tales from his eastern European origins (Siegel 1972: 102). Nevertheless, there can be no denying its similarity to numerous European folk or fairytales in which the wife is unavailable to her husband because she has been transformed into an animal. Isabel Cardigos, in her extensive study of blood symbolism and gender in Portuguese fairy-tales, In And Out Of Enchantment, mentions a number of variants on the tale of the "Swan Maiden", for example, which may have "ancient North-Eurasian shamanic origins" (Cardigos 1996: 167). Also known as stories of "The Man on a Quest for his Lost Wife", they may be summarized, according to A.T. Hatto, as follows:

A man forces a bird-maiden to become his wife by stealing her feather-robe while she is bathing, thus preventing her from flying off. The pair have children, and one day the bird-woman recovers her feather-robe and flies away with them. As a sequel, the man may pursue her to the other place to which she returned (Cardigos 1996: 167).

Cardigos goes on to say that these "Swan Maiden" tales are concerned with marriage before initiation. The man prevents the woman from being able to transform herself by stealing her clothes. Irena, living alone in New York before meeting Oliver, is someone who has not been through her initiation ritual, yet who senses its necessity for her. Oliver may be said to "steal" from her the opportunity for this initiation. For this reason the marriage cannot succeed, since for traditional societies initiation must always precede marriage. In this way, Irena refuses to consummate her marriage. The scene of Irena and Oliver together as husband and wife yet separated by a door on their wedding night, framed on either side by scenes in which the "other world" impinges itself (the "cat-woman" at the meal, the actual panther in the zoo the following morning) is symptomatic of a collision of worlds, neither of which can satisfy her exclusively. As Robin Wood remarks of the bedroom scene and the following scene at the zoo:

the door that separated Irena from Oliver is paralleled by the cage that separates her from the panther: divided between two worlds, she is barred from access to either

(Wood 1976: 216).

It may be noted that the bedroom scene bears a certain similarity to the climax of The Awful Truth (1937), defined by Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness as one of Hollywood's "comedies of remarriage". Here the door separating the man from the woman is held in place by a black cat (which he identifies too simply with female sexuality rather than with kinship or symbolic incest bonds). Unlike Cat People, and more like a companion "remarriage comedy" Bringing Up Baby (1938), the woman does not metamorphose into an animal but an animal is associated with her state of non-marital availability to the man. What is meant by "non-marital availability" is the sense that the couple, in their temporary estrangement, become "available" to each other in a way which is more closely associated with kinship than marriage, hence symbolically incestuous. In The Awful Truth the philandering husband who wishes to return to his wife is allowed to do so (she eventually shoos the cat away at the right time, just before their divorce is supposed to become legally binding, and he is able to enter her bedroom, suitably contrite). The scene is accompanied by a celebrated "same, only different" dialogue, in which marital bonds are revealed to be strengthened by having been temporarily severed. Only here, unlike in Cat People, both partners become "strangers" to each other (they suffer a divorce) before getting back together again. The wife reinvents herself to impersonate the husband's imaginary sister, a low-life singer-dancer with an erotic charge which may be connected to the fact of impersonation. Mythological elements are implied by the fact that the relationship is magically restored in Connecticut, a "world elsewhere" which "has its own laws and its entry demands a new mode, or new vehicle, of transport" (Cavell 1981:253), and which Cavell compares to the motorcycles in Cocteau's Orphee. In the realm of "comic enchantment", problems can be resolved. The marriage is set on a firmer footing since the separation has provided an equivalent to initiation, except that this initiation is an initiation into a deeper knowledge of the other partner's character, their "interestingness", rather than an initiation into kinship or blood relations (with those who are not one's marital partner).

To return to Cat People: as I mentioned, the initiation necessary here to set the marriage on "a firmer footing" is not available through any adjustment in the marriage itself. Oliver, unlike the husband in The Awful Truth, is separated from his wife by a gulf of knowledge and lacks all imagination to be able to deal with it except dismissively ("Irena, you crazy kid!"). While the couple in The Awful Truth may be said to create a gulf in order to become freshly interesting to each other, the couple in Cat People are never at any point intimate enough even to approach such a need. For Oliver, Irena's strange behaviour, while in some way the source of her fascination for him (as Susan is for David in Bringing Up Baby), is not something he can understand nor be content not to understand. He tells Alice:

I'm drawn to her. There's a warmth from her that pulls at me. I have to watch her when she's in the room. I have to touch her when she's near. But I don't really know her. In many ways we're strangers.

(00:34)

Irena, it seems--unconsciously, no doubt--exerts a hypnotic power over her husband that we might want to call "glamorous", bringing to bear that word's original meaning of a female magic spell which involves a transformation in the female's appearance. Alice, who lacks such a quality, replies: "You and I, we'll never be strangers". It is Alice who suggests a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd, to find a cure for Irena's strangeness (or otherwise to commit her to an institution if there is no cure). After listening to Irena, Judd explicitly announces the theme of metamorphosis by informing Irena that she believes she is descended from a race of "cat women (who) in jealousy or anger or out of their corrupt passions change into great cats" who are "driven to kill by (their) own evil if kissed or made love to".

Although meant to be an elucidation of Irena's problem, Judd's words actually confuse two different motives which are to engage the remainder of the film: a fundamental inability to consummate the marriage because of some deeper kinship (as seen earlier in the wedding night bedroom scene) and sexual jealousy. The fact of Irena's sexual jealousy of Alice was never previously apparent (although it is true that Irena would be at some level envious of Alice's easy negotiation of the society in which she lives), but from this point it takes over as perhaps the dominant engine of the plot. This is to be regretted, insofar as it represses the more "archetypal" theme of metamorphosis as anti-marital kin solidarity to highlight the more mundane theme of female rivalry for a banal and unimaginative man. The 1982 remake, as well as the almost identical mermaid story, Night Tide (1963), are for this reason (although not for others) to be preferred from our point of view. It might be argued, however, that the mention of "jealousy", first made by Judd, simply plants itself in Irena's mind to rationalise to herself the motive for her own metamorphoses; when in fact the underlying motive is not possible to rationalise in terms of the value system to which she consciously desires to adhere since it is itself an expression of an older value system.

Subsequently, in the film's one dream sequence, Dr. Judd appears to Irena as King John, the Christian knight who rid Serbia of its cats (an obvious variation on the St. George and the Dragon story). Here the theme of opposed forces is most discernible: for a Christian society to impose itself, it must eliminate the previous social pattern (in which animal metamorphosis would seem to have been a commonplace) as well as denounce it as evil (cf. depictions of the Devil as an animal). When Irena metamorphoses into the panther to threaten Oliver and Alice in the office, it is thus appropriate that the man and woman (symbolically at least husband and wife, since Oliver's actual wife is not at that moment of the same species) should protect themselves by holding up a T-square as a crucifix. As with the vampire (a closely connected figure), this is guaranteed to have an effect, and Irena mutates back to herself, only to mutate back to panther form soon afterwards when Dr. Judd kisses her (the knight confident enough to tame the dragon). As with the kiss at the end of Sleeping Beauty, this kiss clinches the action of the story. But while in Sleeping Beauty it returns the initiated princess to "this world" of marriage ("heterosexual polarity"), for the uninitiated Irena it precipitates her last metamorphosis, her murder of Judd, her own death and that of the caged panther in the zoo which she releases. The final quotation from John Donne's Holy Sonnets ("My world, both parts, and both parts must die") clearly foregrounds the dilemma of the incompatible worlds which its protagonist was condemned to live out until they destroyed her.

Tourneur's film conjures up an atmosphere of strange forces at work beneath the everyday, and though the supposed explanation (proffered by the generally unsympathetic Judd) of sexual jealousy may mitigate its poetic power, it does not dissipate it altogether (and is, indeed, like so much in the film, capable of several, and possibly quite opposed, interpretations). Night Tide, the 1982 remake of Cat People as well as numerous vampire films make it more plain that the dilemma of the (female) protagonist is between (human) marriage and incestuous attachment to kin (or the blood).

To confirm its resemblance to Cat People, in one crucial dialogue in Night Tide, Captain Murdock, the adopted father of Nora "the mermaid", refers to her as one of the "sea people", proceeding to outline to the naYve sailor protagonist (Johnny) the classical myth of the Sirens. The film actually combines two distinct legends, the legend of the mermaid or "merry-maid" (see The Sea Enchantress by G. Benwell and A. Waugh) who is half-woman, half-fish, of which there are numerous variants; and the specific account of the Greek sirens, who were half-human and half-bird (according to Ovid's Metamorphoses), who lived on an island and used their voices to lure sailors to their deaths. The habitation of the sea and the enchantment of song are common to both, however, and bear obvious similarities to the function of female-initiated anti-courtship ritual in Knight's model of cultural origins.

Like the unimaginative Oliver in Cat People, Johnny is from the outset drawn to a solitary, "other-wordly" woman. The first scene in the jazz club sets up the basic conflict of the film: the sailor introduces himself to a solitary woman (Mora), who is not unresponsive until the beginnings of a conversation are abruptly interrupted by the appearance of a strange-looking woman (cf. the "cat-woman" in the restaurant in Cat People) who speaks to Mora in an unknown language, causing her to leave the club at once. The man's attempt at courtship is apparently foiled by another woman, but he persists, following her to her home above a merry-go-round on a pier. She does not invite him in, but says he can come to breakfast the following morning. When he does so, he finds the room full of things collected from the ocean, and the), eat a fish breakfast: on a balcony overlooking the sea. Mora's home, perilously situated in a transitional zone between land and sea/marriage and ritual, might be compared to Irena's apartment, which is within earshot of Central Park Zoo. Like Irena, she is also an emigre from eastern Europe (in this case, Greece). Mora tells Johnny, an inexperienced sailor who has not even been to the coast before arriving in Venice, California, that she is "a mermaid: half woman, half fish". She refers to how she makes her living on the pier, as an attraction which people pay 25 cents to look at in her mermaid costume in a tank of water. The man who manages it, Captain Murdock, is an old seafarer who tells Johnny he found Mora on an island, an orphan and "a lovely siren of the deep". Johnny is intrigued, entranced, in love. At a nocturnal beach party (the beach, like her home, being another transitional zone) Mora proves herself a wonderful dancer. The foreign woman from the jazz club appears again, and Mora faints on seeing her. Johnny sees the woman too, but when he looks for her she has disappeared.

As in Cat People, the protagonist takes solace in the company of another woman, in this case the daughter of the proprietor of the merry-go-round, whose love for him (like Alice's for Oliver) is not requited whilst he is in the grip of an obsession. When Johnny questions Captain Murdock, the Captain tees him the story of the Sirens, "who in ancient days used to lure the seafaring men to their destruction". For the Captain these are not merely silly stories, since "myths spring from truth, ancient truth, living truth". The myth keeps itself alive in Mora, who is "a monster", a member of that "ancient race", just as Irena is directly descended from the cat people. As in Cat People, the myth would seem to keep itself alive in the contemporary world on a disturbingly literal level. The woman does actually change her skin to become a member of another species; again, this change involves identification with same-sex kin, not "heterosexual polarity".

For Mora, however, the change occurs not at the point when her human mate wants to make love with her (or when she is provoked by sexual jealousy), but when the tides and the moon are at their most pronounced:

MORA (looking out of her window toward the ocean): I didn't want you to know. It was right of him to tell you, but I didn't want you to know. Now I suppose I ... won't see you any more?

JOHNNY: Mora, you don't think I believed him, do you?

MORA: But it's true, Johnny. They are waiting for me to join them. You've seen one of them.

JOHNNY: Do you mean that woman?

MORA: You saw how she looked at me. How she spoke to me. She's one of them. She's one of the Sea People, and she's here to remind me of the time that I must go to them in the sea.

JOHNNY (beckoning Mora to the bed): Look Mora, I don't know how or where you got these ideas, but they're wrong. You see, these things don't happen.

MORA: Oh Johnny, if only they didn't! If only they couldn't happen! You Americans have such a simple view of the world. You think that everything can be seen and touched and weighed and measured. You think you've discovered reality but you don't even know what it is.

JOHNNY: You mean everything Sam (i.e. Captain Murdock) told me is the truth?

MORA: Almost everything.

JOHNNY: Will you just tell me how you know?

(Mora gets up from the bed and turns away from Johnny.)

MORA: Because I feel the sea-water in my veins. Because I listen to the roar of the sea and it speaks to me like a mother's voice. The tide pulls at my heart. The face of the moon fills my soul with a strange longing.

(Mora picks up a shell and returns to the bed.)

JOHNNY: Mora, I don't understand.

MORA: Try to understand, and forgive me.

JOHNNY (putting the shell to his ear): I haven't listened to one of these since I was a kid. My grandmother used to have one of these on her dresser. It does sound like the ocean, doesn't it?

MORA: When I made the voyage to this country from Greece, I carried such a shell with me over the land. In that way I kept the sea always with me. Always close. Johnny, I'm so afraid!

JOHNNY (holds her): Don't be afraid. Look, I don't know what this is all about, but I know that I'm here and we'll work this out.

(00:45-00:50)

This scene, like the first scene of the film in the jazz club, indicates that the female protagonist's dilemma is between the conscious desire for a heterosexual partner, and the unconscious desire (or compulsion) for kin solidarity; and that the two things are mutually exclusive. Unlike Irena, it seems that Mora has been to the "sea people" before. She would seem to have had her initiation, but is not able to marry permanently since the moon and tides pull at her periodically. If initiation is involved, it is the sailor's initiation into Mora's female "mysteries": the fortune-teller tells him in the following scene that he is "a young man, innocent and searching", this being indicated by the drawing of the moon-card ("a journey into the unknown"). But it remains uncertain whether Johnny is capable of initiation. Like Oliver in Cat People, he is a modern American for whom reality is simply what is "out there": as Mora tells him (oddly, perhaps, since she is also in love with him) he does not even know what reality is. His response to the shell which he, without any awareness of significance, connects to the female line of his family, is particularly banal ("It does sound like the ocean, doesn't it?"). The fortune-teller on the pier tells him that "a great awakening is possible. After the sacred mystery of death there is the glorious mystery of resurrection". But this idea of journey-and-return, intrinsic to the earliest myths, is not repeated in this modern variation. As in Cat People, the journey is one way to death for the woman. Johnny wants Mora on dry land, while she wants him to go with her into the sea (she suggests a diving trip at full moon). He escapes back to the boat, to see her next at the mermaid attraction on the pier--dead. The Captain implies that he killed her himself out of jealousy and, indeed, made up the whole story of the "sea people" to frighten other men away from Mora and make her afraid of being with them; but he denies all knowledge of any other woman being complicit with him.

The ending remains ambiguous: we are free to choose between a rational explanation which dissipates all the mystery (it was all a simple tale of possessiveness on the old captain's part) or an absence of explanation which retains the mystery (there really are people who live under the sea who can sometimes metamorphose into humans, despite a lack of scientific proof). According to Knight's model, however, originally it was the enactment of myth in periodic ritual which created a mystery or illusion (an "other world") for which no explanation was required (since it was a part of life-experience). It is only after that original social structure has changed that we begin to search for an explanation, since the earliest myths (or story structures) no longer mirror the new social structure. And "mystery" (metaphysics) and "explanation" (science) become two poles between which we must choose; unless we accept that Knight's model explains the mystery by explaining the original necessity for the mystery in symbolic deception. Thus the mystery is not explained away so much as fully elucidated.

The 1982 remake of Cat People heightens the theme of kin solidarity as the motive for Irena's inability to marry or lose her virginity, but also redundantly includes scenes from the original film which foreground her jealousy of Alice. By creating the new character of the brother (a religious fanatic), the remake improves on the original by clearly posing Irena's dilemma as a choice between kin/mate. On the other hand, it makes very little of the cat-like woman in the restaurant (here in the equivalent scene Irena is only with Alice, to whom she reveals she is a virgin, so the disruptive force of the scene in the original version is totally lost) and interprets Irena's virginity too literally as fear of sexuality (as opposed to need for autonomy from her "marital" partner). Oliver is now a zookeeper, and Alice his work colleague, Irena spends time at the zoo, attracted to the caged leopard ("Because of its history it's not meant for breeding", Oliver tells her). Her brother has temporarily disappeared, while a leopard has been on the rampage killing prostitutes (making love with anyone outside his kin initiates his metamorphoses); when he returns he tells Irena she does not really love Oliver: indeed, she cannot love him because she is not like him (not one of his kind). Irena, like her namesake in the original, is caught between the two mutually exclusive worlds of animal and human, kin solidarity and marriage, consciously desiring the latter but being dragged back to the former.

Oliver takes Irena to his coastal hideaway but she cannot make love; instead she metamorphoses into a leopard and comes back to herself with blood on her mouth. She cannot remember what has happened in the intervening period and can only think that she is going mad. Her brother later explains that she and he are the offspring of a brother and sister, teat their ancestors sacrificed children to the leopards and that the children's souls grew inside until they became human--"and they were gods". "They were incestuous, can only make love with their own, otherwise they transform--and before they can become human again they must kill." Unfortunately, this "explanation" does not explain why souls inside animals are divine; nor, indeed, the reason for the incestuousness.

By making the incest literal rather than symbolic (which it primarily must have been for original ritual "sex-strike" potency, although close bodily contact and possible non-fertile bonding may well have occurred), the film heightens the sense that only certain people (in this case apparently only a brother and sister) can metamorphose. Everyone else is excluded from this divine capacity, although (like the vampire) this capacity appears to be more a curse than a blessing. The necessity for killing before transforming back to human form is also implied in Night Tide (Mora's two previous boyfriends are dead), and may be obviously related to the "kill" at the climax of the hunt (at full moon), which signals the end of the ritual coalition and the return from kin bonds to "marital" bonds. It is this "killing", indeed, which marks the swing from the "divine/animal" (sacred) to the "human" (profane) pole in Knight's model. Thus, after finally making love with Oliver, Irena transforms into a leopard and escapes to Oliver's boathouse, where she kills the boat-owner and changes back to human form (the first time she did so, apparently, it was the blood of an animal she had on her lips; it does not seem to matter what species is killed, the fact of killing being sufficient to end the metamorphosis.). Finally, she makes love to Oliver for the last time, and is tied up so that she cannot kill anymore, and so cannot change back to her human form. Instead of dying (the only way in which the dilemma of the original Irena and Mora can be ended) this time Irena transforms into a leopard permanently, after which Oliver spends more time feeding her in her cage than being with the long-suffering, permanently human Alice. However, it may be concluded that being stuck in the "other world" is in effect no better than being dead, since there is no longer any connection with the things of "this world": the "sacred" is a caged animal, which the keeper keeps caged for its own good, knowing that if he lets it out it will only kill and be killed.

All three variants of the same story, in other words, end up highlighting the apparently unrealizable nature of their female protagonists' contradictory desires; yet I hope to have suggested that in traditional hunter-gatherer societies before the onset of agriculture and the last ice age, such desires would have been eminently capable of realization (and not "contradictory" at all) as part of a cyclical social structure in which pairing off and blood kinship were the two poles.

N.B. Quotations from the films are time-coded in hours and minutes.

Works Cited

Benwell, Gwen and Waugh, Arthur. 1961. The Sea Enchantress. London: Hutchinson.

Cardigos, Isabel. 1996. In And Out Of Enchantment: Blood Symbolism And Gender In Portuguese Fairytales. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica.

Cavell, Stanley. 1981. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of "Remarriage". Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press.

Knight, Chris. 1991. Blood Relations: Menstruation And The Origins Of Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

McKee, Robert. 1998. Story. London: Methuen.

Siegel, Joel E. 1972. Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror. London: Secker and Warburg.

Wood, Robin. 1976. Personal Views: Explorations in Film. London: Gordon Fraser.