It was December 2017, and I’d had three WhatsApps on the identical day asking the identical factor. “Read Cat Person yet?” I responded as I do to most issues that take up a lot air within the cultural dialog that they begin to really feel like homework: expressed a little bit of performative disinterest and resentment. But when, lastly, I did learn Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker story that had simply gone viral, I talked about it with my associates for the remainder of the week and considered it for lots longer.
Back then, Roupenian’s story had brilliantly, dazzlingly, captured the zeitgeist: simply two months earlier, sexual harassment allegations towards producer Harvey Weinstein had precipitated the #MeToo motion to erupt. For the primary time, public discourse was not simply welcoming however actively encouraging girls to discuss their experiences of being violated by males. In ”Cat Person”, the 20-year-old cinema worker Margot strikes up a textual content courtship with Robert, an older buyer, earlier than the pair go on a disastrous date and have awkward, horrible intercourse. It underlined one thing that was turning into quickly clear: that women and men may have solely totally different experiences of the identical sexual encounter.
In that early white warmth of #MeToo, “Cat Person” supercharged an already febrile discourse. “It’s not a story that involves harassment in the workplace or rape or any of those things, but it’s a story about how those lines can become fuzzy,” stated Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker who chosen Roupenian’s story for publication. Many girls knew precisely the way it felt to be Margot, recognising the emotions of disgrace and violation that even probably the most banal sexual encounters can carry and the ability males can exert. Some male readers had been disturbed and unhappy that girls felt this manner; others had been livid, arguing that Margot leads Robert on and thinks imply issues about his bare physique (at one level she is repulsed by his “belly thick and soft and covered with hair”). A Twitter account sprang up entitled “Men React to Cat Person”, as male readers declared that Robert “ultimately is the victim in this story” whereas Margot is “a borderline sociopath”.
Naturally, having written the primary quick story ever to go viral (sorry, Alice Munro), Kristen Roupenian, who was 35 on the time, rapidly grew to become flavour of the month. Prior to “Cat Person”, she’d had only one quick story printed in a print journal; now her first quick story assortment was the topic of a multimillion-dollar bidding conflict. And, after all, the movie rights to the story had been promptly snapped up.
This week, six years on, that movie adaptation arrives in cinemas, with Coda star Emilia Jones enjoying Margot and Nicholas “Cousin Greg” Braun as Robert. It’s fascinating to contemplate the place we are actually, in comparison with then: are we nonetheless trapped by the identical patterns of pondering relating to problems with energy and consent? Can we view this story from a calmer perspective? Do we even nonetheless care about this story? More considerably, it’s price asking: has something truly modified since 2017?
When the movie’s director Susanna Fogel first learn “Cat Person”, she was stunned on the inflammatory response and shocked by the extent of male anger being expressed. “It felt like it was because it dwelt in a grey area, about an encounter that people are not used to seeing elevated in that way,” she explains. “Most movies are either a love story, or – especially post-MeToo – a revenge story, or an assault story. A sort of ‘men need to take accountability for their actions as a gender’ story. Those stories are important – but I didn’t feel it was exactly that, either. So it was just bothering people.”
From web page to display: Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun in ‘Cat Person’
(Studio Canal)
Clearly, “Cat Person” was something of a Rorschach test. Everyone had their own reading and was ready to scoff at someone else’s. (I nonetheless keep in mind the chilly disdain I felt when a male colleague stated he associated extra to Margot than Robert; I puzzled if he’d ever casually anxious {that a} feminine suitor may kill him.) But it additionally marked a major cultural turning level, ushered in by #MeToo. In a New Yorker essay in 2018, author Katy Waldman described #MeToo as a “literary problem too”, writing that “decisions about who gets noticed and praised have implications for what kind of viewpoints and behaviours are enshrined as valid”. Certainly “Cat Person” benefited from this new form of decision-making. “This story pierced the zeitgeist because it was in The New Yorker, a magazine that is read by a lot of men and older people,” says Fogel. “Most times, stories about women of this age, having experiences on a campus college, are considered chick lit – so niche that men don’t ever have to deal with these narratives. But because it was in The New Yorker it got pushed it into the culture.”
Nor was “Cat Person” alone. Thanks to #MeToo, all of the sudden there was a feverish urge for food for feminine tales, significantly frank, intimate writing about dodgy sexual dynamics: books by Lisa Taddeo, Megan Nolan, Raven Leilani and Naoise Dolan led the best way. What’s extra, there was a brand new benchmark for this writing: was it “relatable”? This specific anxiousness fed into the misapprehension that Roupenian’s story was a private essay slightly than a fastidiously crafted piece of fiction; she later described the celebrity as “annihilating”. (In a weird, belated second act in 2021, a author printed an essay on Slate accusing Roupenian of utilizing particulars from her personal life as materials for the story.) After centuries of girls being culturally and creatively marginalised, there was all of the sudden an apparent – and really marketable – energy in providing them tales that mirrored their very own experiences.
Movies about feminine experiences are nonetheless thought of principally for ladies, nonetheless. And that’s simply the truth of it
Susanna Fogel
Back in 2017, Fogel felt the gear change. Suddenly to be feminine was to be sizzling property. Almost in a single day, Fogel discovered herself on loads of “female director” panels. “Pop culture had for decades been ignoring or dismissing women’s experiences, then suddenly it was elevating them in an extreme way that was dismissing or silencing or marginalising men, as a response,” she observes.
Even so, she initially had doubts about simply who the viewers for Cat Person can be. “Movies about female experiences are still considered mostly for women, still. And that’s just the reality of it.” In order to buck that truism, she drew on the uncanny, Shirley Jackson-inflected, almost camp sense of violence and foreboding that informs Roupenian’s 2019 quick story assortment, You Know You Want This. Rather than provide extra parables of recent courting, these had been bizarre, darkish, horror tales: in “Biter”, a girl strikes from job to job searching for males whose faces she will be able to sink her enamel into – actually. “As a director, I thought the biggest risk in adapting ‘Cat Person’ is that it’s going to be a small movie with an internal voiceover borrowing from Kristen’s prose, and it’s just going to be a tiny indie film that four women see, and it doesn’t connect with the people that connected with the story, or even provoke them, because they don’t go see it,” Fogel admits. “Adding those genre elements takes it out of the chick flick zone for people.”
Emilia Jones and Geraldine Viswanathan in ‘Cat Person’
(StudioCanal)
That Fogel could make these decisions feels essential; whether or not audiences are prepared to know them is one other matter. Many critics have declared themselves baffled by the variation. The Telegraph referred to as it a “tatty psychothriller” whereas Independent critic Clarisse Loughrey wrote that it “kill[s] any hope of a real conversation about modern love”. Speaking personally, I appreciated its generally surreal, generally symbolic strategy; it additionally injects a mild humour into Margot and Robert’s interactions that was exhausting to search out when the story first landed (attempt to get by way of the scene of their first kiss with out yelping in horror). But have we made progress since that point? From the place Fogel is standing, girls are definitely getting extra alternatives, “but even when we’re getting them, or we’re centring female stories, there’s still sexism in the DNA of how those stories are told”. Women are given the prospect to steer tasks that “don’t really feel like they’re fully understood by the men who are paying for them,” she says. A number of scripts she receives are about “strong female characters” – eye roll. “Most times, the way their strength is conveyed is a complete lack of vulnerability, because a group of executives – often male – think it’s not feminist to show a woman having vulnerabilities.”
Yet it’s price declaring that Fogel’s adaptation beneficial properties a few of its power from bringing alive the male perspective, too: Robert is actual – not simply in Margot’s head. “The story’s power is that it’s not Robert’s story, but the movie has to be in part because he exists physically in it,” Fogel says. “Hopefully it gives a bit of background to why people end up like him in different moments – what are the cultural influences that have given Robert reason to think his behaviour is completely normal?” We see him strive his greatest, recoil in bafflement, be tender, be embarrassing, simply as we see Margot variously upset, narcissistic, intimidated, charming and not sure. Certainly, after I look again on the frenzy across the story, what strikes me probably the most is how a lot it caught males in a second of vulnerability. Feeling excoriated, they raged on-line, retreated from the dialog, or just didn’t know easy methods to say that they felt misplaced and confused. How will male audiences react this time spherical? All I do know is, six years later, leaving the cinema, my associates and I nonetheless talked about all of it simply as a lot as we did on these first flurried, thrilling WhatsApp chats.
‘Cat Person’ is in cinemas now
