Once I'd selected Paul Schrader's film and rented it from iTunes, though, I realized it had also been the occasion for me to contemplate the consequences of the removal of an arm, at an age when I was too young to fully process such violence.
The two couldn't be more different in tone or in outcome, of course. The knight in Holy Grail seems destined to live a productive, if immobile, life after not only losing one arm -- "it's just a flesh wound" -- but also the other, and then both legs. Like if someone wheeled a cart up to him and put him on it, he'd just carry on from there. It's all very funny.
Ed Begley Jr.'s zookeeper in Cat People, on the other hand, has his left arm torn from its socket by a furious black leopard -- a man transformed into a black leopard, but he doesn't know that -- and proceeds to bleed out on the ground, his blood spattering on the shoes of our protagonist and running down the drain.
Even at that age I remember thinking "You can survive the loss of an arm, can't you? I see people missing arms all the time."
Not if you lose it in this gruesome fashion, I guess.
So what age was that, exactly?
It's hard to say. Cat People was a movie my mom taped off of The Movie Channel sometime around 1985, when we had that cable channel for a very short time, a year or two max. Pretty much every movie we had was from 1982, 1983 or 1984. Cat People is in the first group.
I wouldn't have watched it in 1985, I don't think. That would have been too early. I spent most of 1985 being 11 years old, turning 12 in October.
But at some point probably no later than 1987, I made a habit of secretly watching parts of this movie, at some point watching all the parts, if not in one sitting then over multiple sittings. One sitting would have been hard because my parents can't have condoned me watching this. Certainly not my dad, but even my mother, the one who described to me what happened in The Exorcist and Jaws when I was way too young to learn these things, wouldn't have allowed me to watch this movie in good conscience.
It wasn't just the violence. It was the sex, or really, the nudity. Which may have been the real reason I was watching it.
I counted four different sets of bared breasts in the movie when I was watching it Saturday night. Two prostitutes -- although I suppose the second might not technically be a prostitute -- and also our two main female characters, played by Nastassja Kinski and Annette O'Toole. The Kinski nudity was certainly story-related, but the O'Toole nudity was just plain gratuitous.
I guess that was 1982 for you.
I remember Kinski's nudity having a profound affect on the young me. It wasn't like it was the first nude woman I had seen in a movie -- I'm pretty sure I had already seen Revenge of the Nerds by this point, and stayed up late to catch a glimpse of Cinemax during sleepovers at my friend's house -- but I think it was the first time I remembered seeing what I considered to be the protagonist of the movie without a stitch of clothing. I thought nudity was only for cheap throwaway side characters, not the lead.
But here was Kinski, naked as the day she was born, stalking a rabbit through the woods late at night.
I'm not sure why that scene was the one I remember watching, since Kinski is naked at least two other times in this film (and at all times does not wear a bra, which I guess was also more common back then). Maybe it speaks to how few times I actually saw it all the way through. Or maybe it's that this nudity was not intermingled with violence, as it was with the prostitute who gets her leg mauled by the leopard, or the woman I earlier called a prostitute just because she goes to bed so quickly with Malcolm McDowell's character, and then acts very much like a prostitute trying to arouse a john when she's in bed with him. Oh, she does kill that rabbit, but it's entirely off screen.
In any case, it was the violence I came here to talk about today, not the titillation. (Nor to call anyone a prostitute who isn't a prostitute.)
Although a number of scenes from this movie linger with me from those young days, as does David Bowie's haunting theme song, it's the scene where Begley's character dies that had the biggest impact on me.
The tearing of his arm from its shoulder is rendered very realistically. We see bone and organic connective tissue as the arm separates from the body, both on the departing arm and on the stump it leaves behind. Then there's the look of wordless shock and horror on his face as he falls to the ground and blinks while his blood gushes out in torrents. When something that sudden and traumatic occurs to you, there are no words, and maybe you don't even have the energy to scream as the life leaves your body.
I think it's probably realistic, too, that this would be a killer injury. We go through our young lives as budding cinephiles trying to figure out which injuries are life-threatening and which are not. Like, by the time you're 13, you probably know exactly where in the body a gunshot wound will kill you and where it won't, even if you are only using the flawed standards of movies that are only making the most minimal stabs at realism.
So by the time I saw Cat People I already thought that the loss of an arm was one of those things you could survive. He'd be back up and at it, hobbled but not broken, just like the prostitute with the mauled leg.
Nope.
As I was watching Saturday night, I even wondered aloud whether this had actually killed him. Schrader cuts out of the scene when John Heard's curator tells someone to call a paramedic, and I immediately wondered if I might have misremembered that the character is killed by this injury. But subsequent scenes confirmed it.
I suppose if your arm had been torn out of its socket by a black leopard while you were both in a hospital setting, there would be some chance doctors could stop the bleeding in time to save you. But not when you're at the zoo, and not when a doctor is going to see you 15 minutes later in the very best of circumstances.
It really contributes to the lethality of the cat to have him kill the zookeeper in this scene. Even in a cage, even when you are taking precautions, this thing can kill you.
My only quibble about the scene was not whether the loss of the arm would have killed him -- I'm quite convinced of that now -- but why he needed to stick his arm in the cage in the first place. He's trying to subdue the leopard with some electric prod, but I wasn't clear why the leopard even needed subduing at this point. They weren't trying to move him or anything, just trying to get him to stop freaking out. Easier just to walk away and let him sleep it off.
In any case, the death of Ed Begley's character really did stick with me for a long time. I don't think I was worried about a black leopard killing me, the way you might become irrationally worried about a shark after the aforementioned Jaws.
No, this scene in Cat People affected me more profoundly and more abstractly. It made me confront the possible suddenness of death. One minute this guy is whistling a happy tune, hosing down cages and feeding ornery animals their nightly hunk of meat. He hasn't a care in the world. The next minute he's on the floor, blinking the last blinks of his life as he uses his dying thoughts to ponder the abrupt change in his circumstances.
I really enjoyed my rewatch of Cat People, probably the first time I'd seen it since the early 1990s. I'd never seen it other than on that VHS tape we owned, and since I was gone off to college by 1991, perhaps I hadn't seen it since the 1980s. And in fact perhaps that was the only time I saw it, since I haven't given myself credit for multiple viewings on my list of movies I've seen more than once. Though that was developed retroactively within the last 20 years, so it is not infallible.
It was also useful to watch it within the context of Schrader's career, a career I was not familiar with at all back then. (As Taxi Driver was definitely too grown-up for me to have watched by then -- plus my mom never taped it off The Movie Channel.)
It's interesting to ponder that this is the same man who directed First Reformed and The Card Counter. He's had a varied career, but both types of film seem to speak to something essential about him. It might take a little while longer for me to ponder what that is.
Cat People is also one of those films that benefits immeasurably from its period score, rather than being hamstrung by it. The Bowie song -- which first appears to us as an ominous synth background during the opening sacrifice scene, accompanied by drumming and his ethereal humming -- is just one example. Giorgio Moroder's score is a haunting masterpiece, as was pretty much everything Moroder created for the movies. (He's still alive, and possibly still working?)
The music sets a tone that is probably the thing that lingers most for me about Cat People -- even more than poor Mr. Begley and the arm he will not see again until they both get to heaven.
In the case of poor Mr. Begley, that's just a few minutes from now.
No comments:
Post a Comment