Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen

15. The “Evil Medieval”: Gender, Sexuality, Miscegenation, and Assimilation in Cat People

As temporal categories go, “modernity” usually stakes a claim to progressive social mores, technological progress, and political enlightenment. As popularly the opposite of modernity, the medieval—especially when used as an adjective—tends to register the complete absence of tolerance, lawful order, progress, or enlightenment. To describe an activity, belief, or political regime as medieval is more often than not to place it outside contemporary civilized culture, caught in an apparently “primitive” time beyond the reach of progress. According to this traditional view, medieval times were evil days now replaced by the enlightened virtues of progress. And yet, as Carolyn Dinshaw has recently argued, the “medieval” can also be deployed to critique the ideologies of modern power, particularly those that police sexuality. In her fresh rereading of Foucault’s later work, Dinshaw suggests that Foucault’s complex use of the “medieval” embeds a twofold history . On the one hand, “medieval” techniques of the self (specifically, the confessional ) constitute an early version of what will eventually become a modern regularized regime of repression; yet, for Foucault, the “medieval” also recalls C H A P T E R F I F T E E N ��� The “Evil Medieval”: Gender, Sexuality, Miscegenation, and Assimilation in Cat People ALEXANDER DOTY AND PATRICIA CLARE INGHAM 225 a time outside the modern regulation of unitary normative sexuality, a time of polymorphous, and multiple, erotic surfaces. This second “medieval,” Dinshaw argues, is the one Foucault “most deeply desires”: “a time whose lack of unified sexuality is preferable to the present with its ‘fictitious unity’ of normative sexuality, a time whose sexual disaggregation is not to be feared but can for the future offer a creative, even liberatory, potential” (1999, 205). Figured in this way, the medieval signals a potential space for alternatives to contemporary gender and sexual normativity. Pleasures policed by the modern state may have been less efficiently suppressed, and less easily defined, even in the premodern confessional. What modernity marks as “outlaw” may emerge, once we “get medieval,” as the multiply ambiguous, the indeterminate , the “queer.” Cat People (1942) offers a view of this ambiguous, indeterminate “queerness ” as a phenomenon with a powerful medieval history. The film alludes to a twelfth-century sisterhood, the Cat Women of Serbia, who, through their dalliance with the Mamaluks, contest the traditional, Christian, patriarchal rule of King John. These Cat Women encode the queer space Dinshaw describes as Foucault’s “second” medieval: lacking a clearly defined sexuality, they (and their descendants) offer “a liberatory potential” beyond the confines of heterosexual patriarchy. Yet at first glance, the film seems invested in a vision of the “evil medieval,” staged both through the central icon of the film (a statue of King John of Serbia) and the unfolding of narrative events. Set in 1940s New York City, the story focuses on the difficult assimilation of Serbian émigrée Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), a woman who seeks to escape what she understands to be the savagery of her cultural history. Rooted in a legend of the medieval Serbian “good” King John, this history tells of his heroic reconquest of Irena’s village from the “evil” Mamaluks and the reestablishment there of Christian law and order. Irena hopes that her assimilation to modern U.S. culture through her marriage to Oliver Reed (Kent Smith), a self-proclaimed “good ol’ Americano,” will effect her escape from this horrifying medieval past. But her efforts to take on the role of modern American wife remain haunted by the twelfth-century history of the Cat People, “the wisest and most wicked” followers of the Mamaluks who escaped “good” King John’s sword. Among other things, Cat People deploys this trope of the “evil medieval” as an unconscious marker of American history. As E. Ann Kaplan suggests, Cat People is “America’s ‘dream’ about its own ‘dark places’” (1997, 120). And these dark places are connected with the so-called Dark Ages. The film displaces twentieth-century issues of sexuality, gender, race, and ethnicity onto medieval times through a conservative official history that identifies King John as its patriarchal cultural hero. Yet despite this apparent conservatism, the film also invites attention to a competing version of medieval history, an 226 ALEXANDER DOTY AND PATRICIA CLARE INGHAM alternative story that foregrounds the oppression of the Cat People, a queer culture driven into the hills. This is a culture that embraces multiculturalism and nonnormative gender and sexuality. From the...