What Alice Does
"Looking Otherwise at "The Cat People
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8904993 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Berks (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1992 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 26-26 |
| Publication date | 1992-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cinema Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0009-7101 • E-ISSN: 1527-2087 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1225860 |
| OpenAlex | W2323668755 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 5 |
To psychoanalyze or not to psychoanalyze, that seems to be the question in criticism addressing Jacques Tourneur's and Val Lewton's The Cat People (RKO, 1942). Critical writing on this film consistently addresses this question (albeit at times only peripherally), and even those critics who reject psychoanalysis or find fault with its basic problematic seem to take it as a given that their own readings must differentiate themselves from a psychoanalytic one. Something in the film's narrative or imagery seems to activate a dazzling hermeneutic forcefield that ineluctably shapes subsequent readings by compelling either acquiescence or active (though not necessarily acknowledged) resistance to a psychoanalytic method. This forcefield has produced some stimulating readings; but it has also proved limiting, causing a certain blindness in those caught between its magnetic poles. A metacritique of writings on the film may help us see what generates this dazzling field of attractive and repelling forces (what invites and what resists in the film, to paraphrase Shoshana Felman), and how these readings are thereby restricted to a common critical orbit. The first part of this essay attempts to provide this metacritique, while the second part concerns how a shift in focus (a decentering of the orbit) may uncover a previously occluded or ignored strata of meaning
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Criticism · Epistemology · Literature · Meaning (existential · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Resistance (ecology · Unconscious mind · Cinema and Media Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · South Asian Cinema and Culture
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,09 |
| Citation span | 2004 - 2021 (18) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |