*** SPOILER ALERT!!!***
“Bruce, I would love to live with you in your castle, forever just like in a fairy tale…But I just couldn’t live with myself! So don’t pretend this is a happy ending!”
– Catwoman, Batman Returns (1992)
Before evil millionaire Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) pushes his secretary Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer) out of his office window to her death in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992), he has found her working hard late at night, compiling material for his forthcoming meeting with Bruce Wayne. His violent reaction reveals his severe distaste for her over-zealous desire to work after hours. Indeed, he seems to think she was doing her job ‘too well’. That is, unlike regular secretaries, she didn’t turn a blind eye Shreck’s restricted documents; she didn’t dismiss them as ‘men’s business’. Dressed in baggy clothing that not only conceals her body but seems to constrict her posture, her faced dwarfed by large thick-rimmed glasses, Selina, with genuine interest, recounts to Shreck his plan to drain Gotham of all its energy. Soon it becomes clear to Selina that she has overstepped her boundaries; while she works in Shreck’s office, she is not nor ever will be his or any other man’s business partner. Shreck begins to back Selina into the office window threatening her life; “What did curiosity do the cat?” he asks her. A terrified Selina responds: “I’m no cat, I’m just an assistant” no not even that, she corrects herself; she tells him that she is in an even lowlier and more gendered place“…a secretary”. But he doesn't stop. Selina attempts to reason with Shreck, insisting that she will keep the plan a secret. Yet he continues to walk toward her; we don't know if he will hit her or kiss her. Finally, with her back against the window, she tries to stand up for herself: “How can you be so mean to someone so meaningless?,” she asks desperately, “ Okay, go ahead, bully me if it makes you feel big. It’s not like you can just kill me.” Then she is violently pushed from the window and she falls until we see her body splayed on the snowy pavement. As if in response to Shreck’s threatening riddle, dozens of alley cat swarm her body, gnawing at her fingers, initiating her transformation into Catwoman. When she returns home, even her domestic space is transformed; she sees it anew. As she sighs, “Honey I’m home, oh yeah I’m not married” her single status no longer signifies the overpowering defeat it once had. She’s is now empowered by her detachment and begins to destroy all that she feels oppresses her. She smashes her phone because of her voice messages – her mother again and a perfume advertisement that purports to help women seduce their male bosses. And she grinds her girly and infantilizing stuffed-animals in the garbage disposal. And she busts up with place with a cast iron skillet, a common kitchen utensil. Words can't come close to describing the scene -- the colors, the music, the gendered signifiers. Do yourself a favor and watch the epigraph video I posted above.
No, Max Shreck, curiosity did not the kill the cat, it made her. The transition from Selina Kyle to Catwoman in Burton’s movie has a purpose; her costume and her new self is carefully crafted –evidenced by the visible seams that Selina sews into her vinyl costume. These seams hold together Selina and Catwoman in one performance. Selina, in an all-pink, stuff animal adorned apartment. Selina, who has no lovers. Selina, who only gets phone calls from her mom. Selina, whose only companion is a cat -- “Crazy, cat lady” -- Selina, who feels undesirable. Yet Selina, when she constructs and puts on her ears and tail, showing all us that that we have 9 lives or more, is a playful, moody, cunning, unapologetically destructive cat. Literally. She licks Batman’s face, purrs, meows, eats birds, grooms herself. She drips with comic-booky hyper-femme sexuality complete with a whip and heels. Her sexuality is so deliberately excessive that is borders on sarcastic. Thoughtfully and deliberately campy, curiosity motivates this cat.
From Selina to Catwoman, Pfeiffer’s character comes to represent a hodgepodge of female selves and female stereotypes. Gender, Burton’s Catwoman reminds us, is an important and powerful construction that governs, well, everything. Catwoman illustrates the ways in which the very philosophical concept of 'justice' and its close concept 'chivalry' – which is repeatedly questioned and never given stiff definition in the Batman series – is wrapped up in constructions that pertain to the body . What does it mean for a woman to “be good”? How is the question of “goodness” different when it pertains to a man?
It was with this Catwoman in mind that I went to see Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012). My loving account of Burton’s film already betrays the bias I had while watching Nolan’s film, but I gave the film the benefit of the doubt. “I do love Anne Hathaway,” I thought. I also thought that the issue of gender might be even more in the foreground – as it has been 20 years since Burton’s film. I like to think we’ve made some strides in representations of women in blockbuster feature films. Turns out, pyrotechnics and technically advanced filming methods aside, a viewer 50 years from now may wonder which film came first.
The first time viewers of The Dark Knight Rises see Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) dressed as a cat, her story is in medias res. We have no back story about how she came to choose the cat costume or character. And I'll grant, for sake of consistency in character, that she may not want us or Batman to know; she does insist on her desire to erase her past. I think this reading is stretching things a bit, but I’ll give it her. However, I will say her obsession with a “clean slate” seems more poignant in the Batman comic book as the past she longs to forget is a marriage fraught with domestic abuse, and, in another strain of stories, a prostitute. Knowing this detail while watching Nolan’s film, I can’t help but wonder, what’s so terrible and traumatic about stealing some necklaces that you feel the need to wipe your entire past clean? This "clean slate" is for what, exactly? What we do learn from the film is that she acquired her master thieving skills from a life of poverty; as she says repeatedly, “a girl’s gotta eat!” Her choice in career reflects, in some ways, a political stance which echoes that of the 99% of Occupy Wall St. Soon, she believes, the rich will fall from their stature and the poor will get what they deserve. “A storm is coming,” she warns Bruce Wayne. But what do these sentiments have to do with her costume? Her cat suit doesn’t really illustrate a movement back-and-forth between a ‘before and after’ of various identities; it does not represent anything about her. She doesn’t even act like a cat. We don’t even get one meow. She is more convincing when she’s acting like a maid so to steal Mother Wayne’s pearls, or, as helpless victim when she frames the congressman, or as a wife so to steal Bruce Wayne’s car; these performances reflect her trade and, to an extent, her political motivations. But her cat costume serves no political or philosophical purpose. It doesn’t even serve the plot which was the original conception of the character. Despite their own misogynist motives, Kane and Finger created Catwoman to highlight gender difference through animal representation; they understood cats to be the “antithesis of bats”. Viewing Nolan’s film, I never felt as if Selina Kyle threw Batman into any sort of crisis that would mark them as antithetical or different; it may seem progressive that the male and female characters in the film are not so different in brains and brawn, but the opposite of 'different' in Nolan's film is still not 'equal.' This cat-burglar poses no real threat to Batman or his ideas because for the most part, she agrees with him. She does shack up with him in the end after all (stifling any homoerotic charge she has with Holly who says to her while overlooking the chaotic Gotham, "isn't this what we wanted?") So much for “the 99%”. I suppose, then, the Catwoman costume in Nolan’s film is just for us to unquestioningly admire Hathaway’s extraordinary body in tight latex and get a better look at her large dewy eyes and plumped red lips framed by a black mask? That is, the get-up adds no commentary on her character and only reduces her to eye candy.
I admit, I've been overstating. Nolan's Selina Kyle does not purport to be Catwoman. That is, she is never referred to as Catwoman in the film. (Despite the fact Hathaway is discussing a "Catwoman" spin off with producers and merchandise for the film uses that moniker.) The costume is therefore metonymic for me; it recalls a Catwoman for whom gender norms themselves are the source of trauma. My reading is probably my own desperate desire to see that character again, 20 year later -- for as I watch the recent push to regulate abortion that marks the slow overturning of Roe vs. Wade, I know that she is needed. Nevertheless, my point about Selina's representation still stands. That is, a choice was made to depict her character in a certain way. For Batman film-watchers of my generation, Catwoman is emblematic of gender rebellion and the first two of Nolan's films have been reservedly sexist. And he chose to, with The Dark Knight Night Rises, keep it that way. That terrifyingly narcissistic "I do whatever I please mentality" only seems to be reserved for the male bodied Joker (while he's quite queer, perhaps in 'love' with Batman, he still does not of course signify 'female' subversion); why can't a female bodied character get in on destruction for no reason other than to destruct? I'd venture to say that it's because our bodies are for the service of life; a female bodies signifies child bearing. The female body in cat suit, though, signifies the female body's own life -- lives, 9. This includes all the ways in which the alley cat signifies, too, gang-bangs and illegitimate offspring. So to deprive the body that wears the cat suit from this importantly gendered comic book genealogy, is in fact, a choice taken. Selina's transformation in Nolan's film was not depicted as woman to cat and all that the human-animal hybrid implies as in Burton's film, but rather from an advocate of lawlessness and revolution to trophy-girlfriend of the arbiter of law and justice himself, who never really took her politics seriously anyway. We the audience, like Batman, seem to know that we can count on Selina to to do the 'right' thing.
Because Selina Kyle doesn’t need to be a cat for Nolan's film to ‘work,’ the costume -- all the costumes -- seem rather pointless. Indeed, it seems like all the characters know that Bruce Wayne is Batman. Nobody is really surprised to find out that Bruce Wayne's hiding coincides with the Batman's. So what is the point of even the bat costume? It seems like Nolan knows that the once-important animal-drag that gives the series its title is now of no real consequence; Batman tells John Blake (soon-to-be-Robin) who is trying to save Gotham’s citizens without the aid of the police force, “If you’re going to do this alone, make sure you wear a mask…to protect those around you.” Wait. What? I thought the mask also marked the threshold into another identity? Isn’t that what dress-up is all about? Did it not help Batman to overcome childhood trauma? If it serves no other purpose, why not just wear any mask? Maybe Bruce Wayne could continue to wear the ski mask that he wore in the hospital to visit Commissioner Gordon in next one? Tim Burton’s Batman films are often dismissed as too campy or too over the top. But what’s the point of the fictional comic world that have hybrid humans, these grown adults who, to cope with trauma, dress like bats and cats and jokers and coins and penguins if there is no actual fantasy? These costumes, performances, cross-dressing, and transitions don't only hide identities, they beget identities...and alternative worlds and ways of living in them.
This leads me to that important female character in The Dark Knight Rises whose lack of a campy costume is more revealing than an animal mask, Miranda Tate. And so the twist. The whole film, we are focused on Bane, the machine-man warlord who for the more Right Wing audience members exemplifies the outcome of rhetoric that exalts “the people” and “revolution” as bringing to mind communism and terrorism; for the Left Bane signifies precisely the Right’s staunch opinion of what would happen if there came a day, revolution. This meta-filmmaking was most compelling to me. For instance, when Bane storms the Market, he’s told, “This is the stock exchange, there is no money here.” To which he retorts: “Then why are you here?!” Tate’s costume is, in this context, quite brilliant as she disguises herself as a rich neo-liberal woman with hopes to find cures for ecological and environmental ills. We find out, rather, Bane is her lackey and the story we ascribed to Bane is actually hers. She is the one fulfilling her father’s wishes. So, you’re thinking: Rebecca! What’s the problem?! You still have your sneaky female villain. Do I? How feminine is her villainy? Her project is not even her own. Like waiting Hamlet, haunted by the ghost’s “Remember!” Talia al Ghul has daddy issues. Like a good girl, she’s just doing what daddy says, continuing the patriarchal project.
Catwoman’s relationship with Batman remains *importantly* unresolved in Batman Returns as it reflects the unresolved nature of gender politics. The ending of Burton’s film may be to some rather anticlimactic. Alfred (Michael Gough) is driving Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) through an alley and Bruce tells Alfred to stop the car because he thinks he had just seen the shadow of Catwoman’s costume flickering against a brick wall. When he gets out of the car to investigate, Catwoman is nowhere to be found; instead Bruce sees a real stray cat. Bruce takes this cat back to the car with him and as the gentlemen drive away , the Bat-signal shines in the night sky and the silhouette of Catwoman is seen gazing at it. She has one more life. In Burton’s film Catwoman is both hero and villain, loved and spurned, ‘good’ girl and ‘bad’ girl, human and animal. While many of Batman’s foes die, she lives – because, the movie suggests, she and Batman have unfinished business. In Batman Returns, the question of gender is, in my mind, as explosive as any nuclear bomb. Burton’s Catwoman confuses Batman in ways that force him to question his position as an upholder of norms and laws. In Nolan’s film, on the other hand, these gendered issues are too nicely resolved. While Catwoman/ Selina in The Dark Knight Rises has moved into her next life, it is quite the normative lifestyle; the Robin Hood-esque ‘steal from the rich’ thief with revolutionary tendencies is found honey-mooning with richest man in Gotham. The film does not highlight enough ambiguity in her character to suggest that her next life, if she has one, will be different than the cozy one she now enjoys with Bruce Wayne. Catwoman caged? Euthanized? She would have had to be a cat in the first place for those metaphors to even work, I suppose. (I hold on to the idea that when they have sex, they at least do it in costume.) I almost wish that Selina’s domesticity with Bruce Wayne was even more emphasized – as if it was fully developed and deliberate idea of Nolan’s. Unfortunately, it seems to me a default ending. The movie is indifferent to the representation of Catwoman. She’s there; she’s in the movie; that is enough. Who cares about her costume and what it signifies? She’s now only the action hero’s newest romantic interest. A Bond girl.
This indifference toward an iconic hyper-femme, female bodied character speaks to a larger indifference toward the ways in which gender intersects with the state; gender pushes justice, order, and rights to their limits. Who saved Catwoman in Batman #62 from her abusive husband? Not the state and not Batman because domestic abuse is too private, too intimate, too tied up in the domestic space that has been, for so long, synonymous with womanhood. While Silena Kyle was able to negotiate her marriage, life of prostitution, bewilderment with oppressive gender norms by herself, some of us are not empowered enough, brave enough to become a Catwoman. And we certainly can’t become one if even pop culture comic book fantasy doesn’t allow her to exist, policing even the boundaries of camp.
In the wake of the Aurora killings, we are inclined to call this massacre an anomaly. We try to find a reason that has little to do with the intersection of gender and politics. We will blame James Holmes's actions on the movies he watches or the music he listens to. Or we dismiss his actions as those of “just a psycho," another “mass killer.” But, with Burton’s Catwoman in mind, even those identity categories are gendered.
