ABSTRACT

This article examines representations of cats across various media in Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) and its remake (Paul Schrader, 1982). I reorient the scholarship of these films towards issues raised by animal studies: asking what the films’ investigations into animal representations might offer for understanding depictions of women, monsters, and interspecies intimacy across different media. I argue that the two horror films repeatedly expose the inability of static representations like statues, paintings, or photographs to fully ‘capture’ animals or animality. Instead, animal affects are conveyed through shadows, montage, sexual activity, and corporeal violence. Since the cat women protagonists turn into panthers when they feel strong emotions or have sex, this concern with representing animality is intimately tied with representing sexuality. By intertwining these issues, the films suggest that queer wildness is a characteristic that transcends animals, people, and even bodies. In particular, the 1982 film embraces the posthumanist implications of this wildness by concluding with a scene of interspecies intimacy that evokes calls for queer ecological entanglements beyond visual mediation.

摘要

本文探讨了《猫人》中猫在各种媒体上的表现（Jacques Tourneur，1942）及其翻拍版（Paul Schrader，1982）。我将这些电影的学术方向重新定位于动物研究提出的问题：询问电影对动物表征的调查可能为理解不同媒体对女性、怪物和物种间亲密关系的描述提供什么帮助。我认为这两部恐怖电影反复暴露了雕像、绘画或照片等静态表现形式无法完全“捕捉”动物或动物性。相反，动物的情感是通过阴影、蒙太奇、性活动和肉体暴力来传达的。由于猫女主角在感受到强烈情绪或发生性行为时会变成黑豹，因此这种对表现动物性的关注与表现性密切相关。通过将这些问题交织在一起，这些电影表明，酷儿狂野是一种超越动物、人类甚至身体的特征。特别是，这部 1982 年的电影以一个物种间亲密的场景作为结尾，体现了这种荒野的后人类主义含义，唤起了人们对超越视觉调解的酷儿生态纠葛的呼声。