Pepper Mill and I went to see the Shape of Water this weekend, and I couldn’t help noticing that — possible spoiler, but probably not –
one cat gets killed and partly eaten. Not that long ago we watched Stranger Things II, which also gave us someone’s pet cat getting killed and eaten. What do scriptwriters have against cats? They didn’t used to be this free and easy about killing domestic felines. Heck, Ripley’s cat is one of the only two things to survive in the original Alien. (To give Guillermo del Toto his due, though, the other cats survive, and apparently make friends with his Gillman.)
Several years ago I pointed out how Cats got the short end of the stick in teleportation stories. Why cats were singled out, I don’t know. A cat gets teleported as a test in what is probably the first science fiction teleportation story, Edward Page Mitchell’s 1877 The Man Without a Body, but in the next teleportation story, only a little later, the cat gets scrambled. In George Langelaan’s the Fly a kitten is a test subject, and gets lost in teleportation. (This happens in the first movie version, too). in the original story, though, the kitten’s scrambled atoms mix with those of Andre Delambre and those of the fly (in the film, it’s just Andre and the Fly that get mixed together).
And in Michael Crichton’s Timeline, where time travel is treated like a form of teleportation, they use cats for testing (again! Don’t these people believe in white mice?), and they suffer “transcription errors”.
It seems as if cats are the animals you can kick around these days. In earlier days Edgar Allen Poe had not just one but two cats abused in his short story “The Black Cat”. And there’s Ambrose Bierce’s “The Squaw”. But those were commonplace bits of abuse. In his “Devil’s Dictionary” Bierce defined the cat as “a soft indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.” Nowadays, I guess, it’s a destructible automaton provided by scriptwriters to be eaten by the semi-sympathetic monster.
Yeah, I heard about that–it’s the reason I haven’t gone to see The Shape of Water yet, despite it by all accounts being a really good movie.
The scene in Stranger Things really got to me. I’m a cat lover (five of the little beasts share my space) and I hate seeing even fictional felines hurt or abused.
In a recent episode of The Magicians a kitten exploded. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first instance of cat killing on this show either. Why do these people hate cats so much?
There was a real issue, during the reviews of the film, Cats & Dogs back in 2001. Some reviewers were really sensitive about how the cats were portrayed. And yes, that goes back to 2001. Some dog people/cat people don’t like the other. And they will make “art” that reflects their perceptions. We all have to accept it. Because I was flabbergasted how partisan it was back in 2001, and I’m not expecting it will be improving online anytime soon.
I don’t think that people hate cats: in the two examples given, the cats are a plot device to remind the viewer that the cuddly monster is really a dangerous predator.
Cats work well for this function. If Dart/Charlie ate a rat, you’d be like, “Hey, in addition to being cuddly, he’s handy to have around the house!” If he ate a dog*, you’d be like, “Dang, dude is badass, dogs are tough!” If he ate a kid, you’d be like, “Man, fuck him, I don’t care if he’s cuddly, he’s gotta die.”
Cats have just enough sentimental value that the meal is gonna have impact, but not enough that it turns the diner into a villain.
You don’t see this so much with dogs (although, of course, there were the huskies in Carpenter’s The Thing and the dog that the T. rex ate in Jurassic Park II and the movie of I am Legend). People don’t like to see dogs get killed, so they survive in The Blob and the book I am Legend and (to be evil) A Boy and his Dog. But cats seem to get kicked around a lot.
In Heinlein’s The Door Into Summer, it’s mentioned at one point that cats were the original test subjects for the cold-sleep process, but by the time of the story, the process is sufficiently developed that neither cat nor human suffers any ill effects.
Well, the movie describes a dog that gets rabies. I wouldn’t put that in the same class. Wouldn’t put Old Yeller in there, either.
But the original Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks the Thing has sled dogs killed, too, just like the Carpenter version. Only in that film, they’re all killed by the titular Thing.
I started to watch the first episode of The End of the F*ing World last night. (High RT numbers, etc.) The male lead announces right off he’s a psychopath and proceeds to kill a cat.
I gave up half way through.
It is somehow considered a “dark comedy”. To whom?
Well, dogs die in First Blood and Mars Attacks and The Road Warrior and Rear Window and Jaws and I Am Legend and The Lost World–not to mention all the dogs who are main characters who buy it–they’ve also had a tough time of it.
Cats have menaced and killed lots of cinematic characters (e.g., Cat People, The Leopard Man, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Let the Right One In, to name but a few), so it’s not like it’s all one-sided.
And what about exploding frogs: The Nightcomers, The Reflecting Skin, Hulk (2003). Or don’t our amphibian friends matter to you?
On a more serious note, I wasn’t the least bit impressed with the (gang-banging, no less) cat-raping scene in Leolo - that cat looked genuinely messed-with.
Shitty.
Missed edit window -
Not recent - In Bad Boy Bubby, there’s a scene where a live cat is package-taped to a chair, freaking the absolute fuck out.
Um - no.
Fucking wrong.
Peter Greenaway’s Zed and Two Noughts also has some shit I’m not too crazy about.
Well, it’s an old horror movie trope that promiscuity gets you killed first, and them cats always be cattin’ around, y’know.
And, just because cats are sometimes portrayed as victims isn’t necessarily pejorative. Victims aren’t always or even often unsympathetic. The industry doesn’t hate cats.*
For emotional reasons, cats make pretty good victims: they’re cute and cuddly and people like them better than worms or frogs. For plot reasons, cats make pretty good victims: they’re worthy antagonists, fast and full of attitude and claws, and somehow still likely to be found indoors. For practical reasons, cats make pretty good victims: it’s easy to build realistic models of them, and toss them around.
Cats have been villains as often as victims, in popular culture and in real life, and the one I feed (though I really don’t like cats) has yet to complain.
*Except for the sadists who were behind The Three Lives of Thomasina. Obviously. But that was actually over a half-century ago.
