Thanks to everybody here for your input; it actually seems to have a great deal to with the traditional cultural perception of cats as treacherous and mysterious, although Scrivener’s theory of substitute mates has something plausible in it.
When thinking about this again the other day, I found it funny that the cat is used as an accessory (so to speak) in a totally different way in Wag the Dog: The innocent, helpless girl fleeing the burning village is taking her cat with her.
I agree with you, except that I don’t think it was originally intended as humorous. IMO Before it became a cliche, the cat helped show that the villain was capable of affection and that he was a twisted individual. The villain might be planning to start world war 3, sink the continents, etc. But, he isn’t just an evil, selfish bastard. The cat is something he he truly loves and values above money, power, and possibly his own life. But, his feelings for the cat never spill over to humans. If he accidentally stepped on kitty, he’d be sad and guilty. If he firebombs an orphanage, he feels no remorse at all.
Contrast this with the tough as nails hero who (sometimes secretly) has a beloved pet. This type of hero acts hard and grizzled and world weary. They claim not to need anybody, and will not admit to having tender emotions. In this case, the pet serves as an outlet for the love and compassion that they feel but refuse to admit. The animal also serves to show the viewer that the hero is a good person, capable of compassion, empathy and love.
Two examples
Silence Of The Lambs
Buffalo Bill feels no remorse at all about abducting, killing, and skinning women. The victims beg for mercy, attempt to make him feel compassion or empathy, with no results. But, he cares about his dog a great deal. When told that the dog might have a broken leg, Bill becomes nearly hysterical with panic. He’d be perfectly willing to kill his family, his lovers, etc. He cares about his dog and nobody else.
Batman Beyond
For those unfamiliar with it, this was an animated series set a few decades in the future. Bruce Wayne has retired as the Batman. He lives alone. He has no wife or children. He rarely interacts with the outside world and is a bitter and angry man. But, he has a dog. Ace is a companion who won’t put on a mask and utility belt and run off to be killed by a supervillain. There’s no risk of business competitors manipulating Ace with bribes or blackmail. Bruce’s love of Ace and his need for the dog are the signs that he hasn’t become incapable of love. He’s just afraid of the risks. When Ace is injured, or missing, Bruce becomes upset and worries that once again he’ll lose somebody he cares about.
Re The white cat in particular
I’d say it’s a symbol of aristocracy, decadence, etc. Any family can have some mixed breed mouser that survives on whatever it can catch and the odd table scrap. The purebred white cat is a symbol of having enough resources that you can waste them on non-functional things. If you want to show that the villian is rich, or has stranger priorities for money, give them a purely decorative animal which is rare and expensive. Tough as nails heroes tend to have pets that are cheap, easily available, or which were obtained at no costy through special circumstances.
Of course, we can’t forget the nemesis of Inspector Gadget, Dr. Klaw! He always has his cat with him. And Gargamel has Azrael, of course… 
Dr Klaw had no problem lying, cheating, stealing, and killing. The only thing that stopped him from killing MAD agents who failed was the censors. But, he loves Madkat. From Madkat’s general demeanor, evil laugh, occasional mauling of MAD agents who failed at their assignments, it’s clear that Klaw has taken MadKat as a surrogate child and raised the feline in his own evil image.
Azrael is an exception. She was just a common mouser. She’s even more unnacceptable as a show piece due to her mauled ear. I think the answer here is loneliness. Gargamel has nobody. He took Azrael in because he wanted to be loved. Azrael does care for him and has learned to hunt Smurfs to please him. Gargamel is capable of using alchemy to create life. But when he creates Smurfette, she betrays him and joins the Smurfs. Presumably other experiments have had equally unsatisfactory results. But he has Azrael, a mangy outcast just like him.
Phantom 2040
There’s no way to describe this show without it sounding like crap. It is not crap, but a damn fine cartoon. The world is standard cyberpunk-megacorps, cybernetic implants, pollution, genetically modified food like substance. Rebecca Madison is head of a megacorp and has big plans. Her son, Maxwell, has many subtle gay mannerisms, and may be somewhat insane. He often expresses opinions or asks questions as though he’s just relaying information from his cat, Baudelaire. He’s never without Baudelaire. AFAIK it was never revealed whether Maxwell was insane and thought Baudelaire was talking to him, was pretending insanity as part of his own big plan, or whether the cat was somehow talking to him.
Well, you’d be seeking validation, too, if your entire body consisted of just one arm.
Baron Silas Greenback had a white fuzzy caterpillar.
I think it was white, anyway. I need to get those Danger Mouse DVDs.
A Doctor Klaw action figure was released in the late nineties. It ranked right down there with midichlorians.
Imagine the chief’s older and thinner brother. Boots. Brown pants. Black Jacket. The face we all waited so long to see was concealed by cardboard. You had to take the figure out of the package to see the head. But, looking through the top of the plastic blister, I could see something white. Curiosity will make most of you read the spoiler. Gadget fans will be much happier if they don’t. I wish I could forget the figure. Really, as bad as midichlorians.
Which turned out to be hair. Imagine a head and face that’s a mix of the Chief’s and Gadget’s. Add a white mustache. That’s it. No Doctor Doom style mask to match the hand. No hideous scar. No revelation that he’s a member of an alien race of cat people.
I wish that figure had never been made.
First, a correction: I’d described Blofeld as a “SMERSH titan,” when he was actually head of SPECTRE. :smack: His confederate Rosa Klebb (“From Russia With Love”), IIRC, held the rank of colonel in SMERSH while secretly working as a double agent for SPECTRE.
Bryan Ekers – holy crap, that is some list you put together! I probably overstated somewhat Fleming’s willingness to use homosexuality/lesbianism in characterizing his evil overlords and their key henchpersons, as your listing shows: most of the baddies were established as primarily heterosexual in their relationships. However, many of these guys were also sociopaths given to kinky expressions of the sado-masochism and voyeurism which my argument also addressed… and which your list is less concerned with. Such expressions usually didn’t involve sex acts involving the villain per se, but rather were evidenced in the way the bad guys killed, tortured, bound, or otherwise humiliated Bond and his allies (such as the women whom Bond “turned” against their villainous employer or lover).
Take a guy as seemingly normal as Emilio Largo in the movie “Thunderball”: sure, he’s heterosexual, but he’s also a sociopath who must exert total control over his trophy mistress, Domino (even ordering henchmen to beat her into confessing after she betrays him), and who relishes feeding his enemies (and even employees who fail him) to the sharks – although the shark-feeding could be either watched or hidden under a pool-cover. (In the movie “The Spy Who Loved Me,” the villain Stromberg takes pleasure in watching as his disloyal secretary is eaten by a shark in a special tank designed for voyeuristic observation, with Mozart playing in the background.)
A couple of the heterosexual villains (Le Chiffre, Goldfinger) even took pleasure in their sexual torture of Bond himself, in ways that explicitly targeted Bond’s genitals. I agree with you that Fleming’s description of Le Chiffre’s torturing Bond suggests that his methods are primarily motivated by the instrumental need to get information from Bond in as efficient a way possible, but Fleming’s prose suggests that the torture was nevertheless homoerotic and that the villain enjoyed doing it.
Fine, but these are movie characters, with at most vague similarity to Fleming’s novels (there is no “Stromberg” character in Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me, which in fact had nothing whatever to do with submarines, sharks or nuclear war).
We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one, especially on Goldfinger. The interrogation scene in that novel (Little James is in imminent danger from a circular saw, not a laser) didn’t strike me as having any particular erotic subtext, though Oddjob did have some fun softening Bond up first, through a simple but scientific beating.
After doing a google image search, I agree with you. I’ll link to it in case anyone else wants their childhood ruined.
[url="midnightsociety.com domain name is for sale. Inquire now."Here
:smack:
Could I get a mod to fix the coding, please?
The earliest screen villain I saw holding and fondling a cat while doing evil things was the murderous and corrupt Mr. Saunders portrayed by George Coulouris in Lady On A Train, from 1945.
Guy Boothby wrote a series of novels starting about 1895 (according to wikipedia) with a villian, Dr. Nikola, whose companion was a large black cat that he stroked, and who also sat on his shoulder. The books are available through project Gutenburg.
I wonder if Ian Flemming read Guy Boothby?
I stand by my 2005 catalog of literary James Bond villains and their sexual preferences, although if I rewrote it today I would fix the typos.
I don’t recall the cat being in the original novels. Maybe Albert R. Broccoli read Boothby.