Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen (Cultural Studies Cinema

by Murray Pomerance (editor)

Murray Pomerance is Professor and Chair in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University. He is the editor of Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century , also published by SUNY Press, and Enfant Terrible!: Jerry Lewis in American Film .

Genres: Nonfiction, Film

375 pages, Paperback

First published November 20, 2003

About the author

Murray Pomerance is a Canadian film scholar, author, and professor who teaches in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University and in the joint program in communication and culture at Ryerson University and York University. He has written extensively on film, cinematic experience, and performance. Most recently he authored The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect, Tomorrow, Alfred Hitchcock's America, Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema and Edith Valmaine and is a co-editor of Hollywood's Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2012). Pomerance is the editor and co-editor of more than a dozen books and the editor of several book series on film at Rutgers University Press and at the State University of New York Press.

Reviews

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I didn't enjoy Cat People (1942), but the chapter about it is spot on in it's most part. One of the reasons I didn't like the movie that much is because it kinda reinforces the things it wants to shine a light on, which is sexual repression. On the other hand, the only thing I could debate about the analysis is the comparison with the cat and the panther. I think the authors understimate the power the cat has in refusing it's own "domestication" and the queer symbol it has been. Pointing out the fact that the zookeeper calls it "him" while Irena views it as a "woman screaming" is a lame attempt by the film to directly tells us the shape-shifting nature of the panther, when in reality all felines are shape-shifters. In this quote: "the men (...) uses a slew of cat associations (...) to position Irena and her Serbian sisters within the conventionally feminine and domestic", the authors try to impply that the cat is the conventional feminine and domestic, which this, in popular culture is not the case. Which brings me to my first point, the film reinforces the same stereotypes it tries to debate, since the men making it clearly don't know what they are talking about. Is not the fact that the cat represents the conventional feminine and domestic while the panther represents the queer, is the fact that society has deemed everything feline related to femininity and shaping it to their convenience.