The viral short story ‘Cat Person’ hits the big screen
Nicholas Rowan
Right after I saw the new film adaptation of “Cat Person,” I dug up the issue of the New Yorker in which Kristen Roupenian’s short story first appeared. Although the cover date is only Dec. 11, 2017, the magazine reads like a time capsule from a long lost age, filled with arcane references to minor players in Russiagate, vague prognostications about a future dominated by fake news, and, odd as it seems now, Jeffrey Toobin’s byline. And, of course, there’s “Cat Person” itself, a strange little story that swallowed the internet when it appeared at exactly the right time during the #MeToo movement. It is still the most-read piece of fiction on the New Yorker’s website.
Like everything else, “Cat Person” is very much of its time. It was published about three months after the magazine dropped Ronan Farrow’s exposé about Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual abuse. That story, along with a similar one published in the New York Times, set a news cycle for more than a year. #MeToo burned through every area of life, and it prompted a national debate about sexual etiquette in politics, media, and business. “Cat Person” inserted itself — or rather, was inserted — into that conversation because it examines the topic of a woman’s consent, particularly when she’s not in the mood.
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The story follows Margot, a 20-year-old sophomore in college, who meets Robert, an aimless 34-year-old man, at a movie theater where she works. They exchange numbers and soon are texting each other obsessively. Eventually, they go on one date. Their night out is nothing exceptional, but Margot senses Robert wants to get her in bed. She suspects the experience won’t be to her taste: “Probably it would be like that bad kiss, clumsy and excessive.” She goes along anyway, not wanting to seem rude, and it is just as bad as she imagined. At one point, he queues up “sex” music. In the film, the song is “Enjoy the Silence” by Depeche Mode. After some excuses, the two part ways, never to speak again, until one night, Robert sends Margot a series of drunken texts, ending with the accusation, “Whore.” It’s the last word of the story.
The film version adds a little bit more plot. The director, Susanna Fogel, felt that leaving the audience with one final jab from a “toxic” man would not be nearly so provocative on the screen as it was in print. So, along with her screenwriter, Michelle Ashford, Fogel added a third act, in which Margot (Emilia Jones) and Robert (Nicholas Braun) are forced to face each other again and work through their differences. It plays out in a series of escalations that ends with the two physically assaulting each other in Robert’s house, tumbling down his basement stairs, and inadvertently setting the house on fire. Trapped in the basement, Margot and Robert only survive by squatting together in a dugout beneath the floor. The house burns down around them. At last, they share a real experience, but it’s too late for a relationship to follow. The film ends with Robert cutting himself off completely from Margot, leaving her (and the audience) to wonder what exactly any of it meant. If this all sounds a bit tacked on, that’s because it is.
But that’s all in the spirit of the story. “Cat Person,” like any viral phenomenon, continues to survive because it mutates. First, there was the short story, followed by its reception, the personal testimonies from its fans as well as its haters, and the general misconception that “Cat Person” was in fact a “diary entry.” “Everyone wanted me to come on the air and talk about my story,” Roupenian recalled later. “Emphasis on my.” Then, there was the revelation years later that it was essentially a diary entry — just not from Roupenian’s diary. “‘Cat Person’ was about me,” Alexis Nowicki wrote in a story for Slate in which she presented her correspondence with Roupenian, who all but admitted to having ripped many of the story’s details from Nowicki’s social media accounts.
Even now, the story continues to mutate. When many people walk into the theater, they think of “Cat Person,” if they knew it beforehand at all, as a confessional essay by a 20-something college student. I saw the movie at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute with Fogel in attendance. Outside, the people working the concession stand were discussing the short story, but they kept calling it “the article.” So did the couple sitting in front of me, who evidently had come there on a date. In the Q&A session afterward, Fogel admitted that throughout the production of the film, people around her often had a hard time seeing the source material as anything other than a personal essay. “It’s one of those stories that everyone refers to as an ‘article,’” she said. “To this day, everyone’s like, ‘This article is this journal entry that this girl wrote.’”
But for her part, Fogel prefers to treat “Cat Person” as raw material for a seminar class rather than as a short story or a personal essay. Especially because of the added third act, the film plays like a critical study of Roupenian, in which the viewer is invited to participate. It even begins like a logical proof with a proposition, attributed to Margaret Atwood — “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” — and then attempts to demonstrate the proposition’s veracity.
Everything amusing and wry about the short story is stripped out in favor of overplayed, telling details about the sorry state of sex relations these days: Margot nervously apologizes to every man she meets. Robert bristles at any kind of criticism from a woman. Both hate and are utterly dependent on their smartphones. Both allude to watching a lot of pornography. And so on.
Fogel makes no secret that Cat Person is not exactly meant to be entertaining. When she walked into the theater, she looked up at those of us sitting in the back. “I hope you are prepared to be uncomfortable,” she smirked.
Later, she explained that she made the film in this way because, if she were to attempt a more straightforward adaptation, the end product would be as dated as Roupenian’s version. “When the story came out in 2017, it was riding this wave of early conversations around #MeToo and Time’s Up and all of that,” Fogel said, breezing past those tumultuous days. “By the time this movie was ready to get made, it felt like we were ready for the next installment in the conversation.”
In all of this, there’s more than a tinge of regret for how #MeToo played out. Weinstein was convicted in the end, and many other abusers were brought to heel as well. But the collateral damage nearly outweighed most of the good accomplished. In Fogel’s view, after the initial wave of righteous anger, all that remained was a vague sense that from this point on, there is an “impossible gulf” between the sexes. In “Cat Person,” she saw an uncomfortably familiar story that could be, if nothing else, a way to get men and women talking honestly about their fears and desires. “I think that having conversations,” Fogel said, “that having more stories and movies that talk about the gray areas, is one of the only ways we can push through.”
That is a commendable proposal, even if a little overstated. That said, the movie is still a whiff. Its interest in its subject is too pedantic to start much conversation. If “Cat Person” is to have another life, it won’t be in the theater. If anything, it will be as a period piece.
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Nic Rowan is the managing editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal.