Heads Up, Ears Down

This blog accurately identifies depictions of violence and cruelty toward animals in films. The purpose is to provide viewers with a reliable guide so that such depictions do not come as unwelcome surprises. Films will be accurately notated, providing a time cue for each incident along with a concise description of the scene and perhaps relevant context surrounding the incident. In order to serve as a useful reference tool, films having no depictions of violence to animals will be included, with an indication that there are no such scenes. This is confirmation that the films have been watched with the stated purpose in mind.


Note that the word depictions figures prominently in the objective. It is a travesty that discussions about cruelty in film usually are derailed by the largely unrelated assertion that no animals really were hurt (true only in some films, dependent upon many factors), and that all this concern is just over a simulation. Not the point, whether true or false. We do not smugly dismiss depictions of five-year-olds being raped because those scenes are only simulations. No, we are appalled that such images are even staged, and we are appropriately horrified that the notion now has been planted into the minds of the weak and cruel.


Depictions of violence or harm to animals are assessed in keeping with our dominant culture, with physical abuse, harmful neglect, and similar mistreatment serving as a base line. This blog does not address extended issues of animal welfare, and as such does not identify scenes of people eating meat or mules pulling plows. The goal is to itemize images that might cause a disturbance in a compassionate household.


These notes provide a heads-up but do not necessarily discourage watching a film because of depicted cruelty. Consuming a piece of art does not make you a supporter of the ideas presented. Your ethical self is created by your public rhetoric and your private actions, not by your willingness to sit through a filmed act of violence.

Cat People (Tourneur)

Cat People. Jacques Tourneur, 1943.
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Edition screened: Included on Warner “Val Lewton Horror Double Feature” Cat People/The Curse of the Cat People DVD, first released 2005, also packaged in “The Val Lewton Horror Collection” 6-DVD box set, released 2008. English language. Runtime approximately 73 minutes.

Summary: Various animal deaths and a general meanness toward animals.

Details:
1) Young bride Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) snatches at her pet canary at 22:40 in a way that is intended to convey cat behavior. The bird dies from the stress at 22:55, and Irena goes to the city zoo and throws the dead canary into the panther’s cage.
2) The zookeeper finds several dead sheep in their pen at 45:00, and kicks at them to make sure they are good and dead.
3) Simon opens the panther’s cage at 1:11:15 and stands in front of the cage door as a means of suicide. The panther lunges, she falls, and her death comes through a combination of that act and an impaling wound she received earlier. Tires screech and of course the panther has been run over by a car.

Additional comments:
Cat People is an extremely popular film. Praise usually focuses on the style and clout of producer Val Lewton, or on two famous sequences that beautifully convey genuine escalating terror. Both of these scenes concern Simon’s pursuit of her female rival, first while walking down a dark shadowy street, the second time in an indoor swimming pool.

The specific nature of Cat People allows watchers to vent hatred of animals in a novel way. Simon’s character has recently immigrated from Serbia and allegedly descends from a clan of witch/cat shape-shifters. The film provides myriad interpersonal and psychological conflicts that ultimately can be traced to those dang animals, and/or the failure to conform to wartime-ethics intolerant of cerebral passion or romanticism. And in proper mid-20th-century fashion, male characters show arrogant tolerance of animals at best, save the repulsively inept zoo keeper whose outright contempt for his wards establishes him as the real salt o’ the earth type, complete with a well-timed bible verse here and there.

Cat People is marginally interesting viewed as a noir variant that confronts psychological instability. The film gains enormous depth and interest when viewed as an examination of an outlaw female character trying to function within a male dominated world that enforces smiling compliance to oafish control. I strongly recommend the analysis of Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People in Tony Williams’ Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film, which can be previewed here as of the time of this writing.


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