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.

The Curse of the Cat People

The Curse of the Cat People. Robert Wise and Gunther V. Fritsch, 1944.
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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 70 minutes.

Summary: Children’s “playtime” of animal violence.

Details:
1) Beginning at 2:11 is a 3-second sequence of young boys pretending to shoot at a black cat in a tree. In context, a teacher has just told her class that they can have some time to play in a park. These two boys represent healthy, normal children, and as such they immediately begin pantomimed murder of animals.
2) The star character in the film, little Amy Reed, tries to befriend a butterfly during this same playtime. From 3:25 through 3:32 her inept gentility is interrupted/corrected by a more normal child who kills and crushes the butterfly in an attempt to capture it.

Additional comments:
The Curse of the Cat People often is dismissed as a bumbling illogical failure compared to Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1943). I disagree, and in fact am impressed by the clever coherency between these two films by different directors. The theme of oafish professional culture’s inability to understand (or unwillingness to acknowledge) anything of The Invisible World, is revisited with more focus and with increased bravery by placing the blame for emotional trauma, childhood or female, where it belongs: squarely on the shoulders of complacently smug middle-American culture.

There is no ‘curse’ in The Curse of the Cat People. There is only intervening salvation from the ghost of Irena who died in the first film, and now returns to nurture and comfort young Amy. Irena brings lessons of smiling tolerance, gifts of gentle magic, and the comforts of true friendship that existed in Irena’s Old World matriarchal culture but are sneeringly prohibited in 20th-century America.

See also Cat People.

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