Five Things Writers Can Learn By Watching Catwoman

So, let’s be clear: there are good superhero films, and there are okay superhero films, and there are atrocious superhero films. And then there is Green Lantern. The the Generation X telemovie and the first attempt to do a Justice League film in the nineties, and the version of Nick Fury, Agent of Shield staring David Hasselhoff. And then, somewhere at the tail end of that list, trashing Halle Berry’s career not long after she picked up a mother-fucking Oscar, there is Catwoman.

For me, the quality of the film doesn’t matter. I love comic books, I love superheros. To convince me that I should not only avoid such films, you basically have to attach Zack Snyder as a director and fuck things up for everybody by ignoring…well, basically anything that resembles a film.

In the realm of trashy movies, Catwoman is kind of glorious: a movie so goddamn bad that Halle Berry showed up at the Razzies to accept her award in person and hang some shit on the studio that made it. Because of this, I will sit down and watch it more often than is actually sane, and because I am a waste-not, want-not kind of guy, I will start looking for reasons to justify putting myself through this particular cinematic experience.

And, weirdly, if you pay close attention to Catwoman, there is actually some useful lessons for a writer to pull out of it. It’s like a cinematic what-not-do-do that hammers home some oft-repeated writing advice in a very visual, obvious way.

ONE: DON’T CHASE THE MARKET

Sam Raimi’s Spiderman hit cinemas in 2002 and basically blew away people’s perceptions of what a superhero film could be. Sure, there had been hits in the genre before, courtesy of the X-Men franchise, but for the most part pre-2002 movies featuring superheroes were…well, cheesy and often hampered by the limits of special effects. Also, slightly embarrassed by their source material.

But Raimi? Raimi hit it out the park, making the first-ever film to clear $100 million dollars in its opening weekend and earning a fair amount of crucial success.

Two years later, Catwoman hits cinemas and…well, let’s just say that if you watch Catwoman and Sam Raimi’s Spiderman back-to-back, you’re going to notice a lot of familiar narrative beats and set-ups.

Consider the respective plot-lines.

In Spiderman, Peter Parker is a shy, nerdy high-school student who is given superpowers by a genetically engineered super-spider, and must stop millionaire industrialist Norman Osborn after Osborn is given powers (and driven mad) by some experimental chemicals. Along the way, Peter discovers his true feelings for the girl-next-door and learns some bitter lessons about the responsible use of powers.

In Catwoman, Patience Phillips is a meek, slightly geeky type working for a cosmetic company who gains mystic cat-powers, and must stop cosmetic millionaire Laurel Hadare who has been given powers (and driven mad) by some experimental cosmetics. Along the way, Patience discovers her true feelings for the neighbourhood cop and…well, learns some lessons about the responsible use of powers. Kind of. As best you can, when you’re also meant to be an amoral catburglar.

I’m playing fast-and-loose with details here, but the similarities really do stack up as the films progress. You can literally hear Catwoman’s producers in the background screaming MORE LIKE SPIDERMAN, THAT SHIT MADE MONEY.

And they do it regardless of whether it makes any sense for the character of Catwoman, or the story that is being told. Beats from Spiderman are more-or-less shoehorned in for the sake of having them, and what works well in a coming-of-age story about a teenage geek doesn’t work anywhere near as well here.

Catwoman utterly fails to capture the success of Spiderman. And because it’s trying to hard to do so, it also utterly fails to be the interesting film that it could have been if someone had actually set out to make a Catwoman film.

Don’t chase the market just because something hit it big. Tell the story that makes sense for the character you’re writing about, and do the things that will make the story yours.

TWO: RESPECT THE AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS

If you were at all familiar with Catwoman from the comics, you were probably baffled by the Catwoman film. The same is true if you were familiar with Catwoman from the Adam West Batman TV show, or Batman: The Animated Series, or Tim Burton’s Batman Returns take of the character from 1992.

Basically, Catwoman was a character who had been around for a while, in various incarnations, and the basic strokes were pretty-well established: amoral cat-burglar who flirts with Batman, wears a lot of leather, and uses a whip. She might not have the cultural cache of Superman, Batman, or Spiderman in terms of sitting in the public consciousness, but Catwoman was a character who had fans and expectations.

And while you don’t have to meet those expectations, it can behove any creator working with a particular established character or genre to figure out what it was people actually liked about said character/genre, and what they expect from a movie.

This is a particular talent, among writers. And somewhere, in an alternate universe, the folks who made the Catwoman movie probably did something sensible when they decided to reboot the character. They recognised that comics and superheroes weren’t a genre unto itself, but characters that fit into specific types of genre, and they worked accordingly. Let’s do a heist film, they said. Or let’s do a super-powered film-noir homage.

Essentially, let’s tell stories that fits with people’s core expectations about the character, because Catwoman is a pretty terrible character to use for a coming-of-age story, what with being, you know, adult. More specifically, an amoral adult that has a tendency to be highly sexualised, which just gets weird in a coming-of-age superhero narrative where you basically learn that with great power comes great responsibility.

If you’re going to tell a story, respect the expectations the audience is bring to it. We are attracted to certain types of stories because they deliver a particular experience, and audiences react poorly when the experience doesn’t mesh with their expectations.

It can take an otherwise good film (I’m looking at you, Die Hard with a Vengeance) and kill it dead because your ordinary-guy-against-the-world story has just gone all buddy cop. It can take an utterly atrocious film (I’m looking at you, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra) and make it considerably worse, ’cause you’re not only bored, you’re feeling vaguely insulted.

Respect the audience expectations, even if you’re going to subvert them. Hell, especially if you’re going to subvert them. You don’t need to slavishly meet every audience demand when it comes to casting and narrative, but don’t cheat people of the experience they think they’re going to get.

Catwoman basically riffs off the Burton Batman films rather than the comics, in terms of it’s mythology, and that mythology worked fine in Burton’s films despite being utterly weird and insane, largely because the spirit of the character still came through. Catwoman was amoral. She was possibly insane. She was an anti-hero, in the end, and a natural counterpoint to Batman as a character driven by revenge.

The Catwoman in this movie is, theoretically, driven by the same revenge…were it not for the fact that she’s much more interested in getting into the pants of the male lead, despite the fact that someone killed her and mystic cats licked her back to life.

It’s…not a particularly satisfying take on the character, even with Benjamin Bratt doing his damnedest to be a credible Mary-Jane Watson.

THREE: AN UN-BUILT METAPHOR MEANS FUCK-ALL

There is the potential for an absolutely beautiful finale to Catwoman – one that could have been a great set-piece fight-scene that redeemed everything.

The set-up is simple: Catwoman confronts the villain of the film, Laurel Hedare, in the penthouse space where the old Hadare Cosmetics advertisements are stored in what I presume is meant to be a towering monument to her vanity.

I presume this, because they’re not actually something you see at any other point of the film. They’re just…there for the final fight, in this location we haven’t visited yet. If you’re really curious, and don’t want to watch the film, YouTube has you covered:

And I can totally see the metaphor they’re striving for. Laurel Hadare was the face of Hadare Cosmetics in all those old billboards, until she got older and turned to experimental cosmetics to try and preserve her beauty, only to discover that they turned her into a super-strong, indestructible monster instead.  Catwoman confronts her and the two women fight among those old billboards, destroying these giant replicas of Hadare’s face as they brawl, talking about identity and masks as they go.

It should have been brilliant. Loaded with meaning and metaphor. The indestructible woman, who has been retreating from her humanity all film, destroying all these reminders of who she used to be. A hero who has been unnoticed in her ordinary life, and hiding her identity all film, finally getting the cathartic reveal of being seen.

It should have been a moment where we peeled back the onion skin layers of the character, via the medium of an action sequence. A real moment of tragedy when we empathise with the villain, even if we don’t like her.

Instead, it’s just…there. They fight amid old billboards that no-one has seen prior to this point in the film, and they trash them in an attempt to create meaning that no-one is willing to buy. The fight choreography is stale, and we’re reminded again that action means nothing without purpose and meaning behind it.

If you want to use a metaphor like this, you need to build it up for the audience. Given them a few scenes to register its importance before you start pulling it apart. There is the old rule we inherit from Chekhov: the gun that’s fired in the third act must appear on the mantle in the first.

The same applies to your big metaphors: put them in early, so that they mean something when you change them at the tail end of the story.

FOUR: SPEAKING OF VILLAINS…

Oh, Catwoman, no. Dear god, no. Laurel Hadare is a godawful villain. She is so cartoonishly evil she should be twirling a moustache. Poor Sharon Stone should be laughing maniacally and tying people to train tracks, not applying evil facial cream and trying to shoot people with a gun.

Partially this is because the story never commits to which painful stereotype they’re asking Stone to embody. She starts as the amoral corporate villain, releasing a dangerous anti-aging cosmetic for sale despite warnings about its dangerous side-effects; she becomes a jilted woman, murdering her husband after he abandons her as both the face of Hadare cosmetics and takes up with her replacement; she’s then…psychotic? Driven mad by her own use of the dangerous cosmetics? Terrified as her own disintegrating beauty?

Honestly, by the time we get there, I have so little faith in any scene that Hadare appears in that I am basically praying for the quick release of death. This is not the stuff great villains are made of.

I’m not taking aim at any of these stereotypes – any one of them could have been built into something with depth, if they had given Hadare screen-time to do anything more than deliver a line of god-awful dialogue.

It could have been made better by picking one core motivation and sticking with it, letting everything else stem from that single, fatal flaw that the film revolves around.

Consider, for example, Darth Vader in Star Wars – one of the great movie villains.  He comes on screen with a single flaw that drives everything he does – arrogance – and this is reflected in every other named villain in the movie.

Imperial bad guys are arrogantly confident about their battle stations, their plans, their methods of control. They are the minor-league Vaders, giving us little object lessons about what happens when that arrogance meets a more powerful force (hint: it involves being force-choked), so that when Luke and Vader finally square off, we subconsciously know what’s going to happen.

Even better, Vader’s fatal flaw in the film is the thing Luke is struggling with. He wants to run away from his moisture farm and be great, a hero just like his father. He gets that opportunity – literally, running away to become a knight – and there’s scene after scene where his confidence is tested and he’s told to embrace humility. At every step he is humbled – in his training sequence aboard the falcon, when his eyes are covered; when he shoots his first tie fighter, and Solo warns him not to get cocky – and when he accepts that, and follows his mentor’s advice, he is rewarded with victory.

All this sets us up for the final moment of the film, so that when he finally embraces it for good and listens to Ben Kenobi’s whispered advice to trust the force instead of himself, we feel the hero triumphing over the boyish dream that was seeded way back in act one.

Vader and Skywalker are mirrors of one another – two men who need to learn the same lesson, and it’s the one who learns it who ends the movie victorious and the one who doesn’t that’s sent tumbling into space in a damaged tie fighter.

There is no mirroring between Catwoman and Hadare, although there could be with a little work (and, to be fair, there were plenty of writers who knew their shit on this film – I suspect it was there, at one stage, and got written out by the next draft).

Instead, the film is too busy trying to set up Catwoman’s love interest and hang the meaningful exchanges off him, using him as the mirror. could have been made to work, were it not for the fact that he’s not driving the plot, and so the attention is split again and again. There’s the ghost of the old idea interfering with the new focus.

And this is what’s really the problem with Catwoman: it’s villain feels too small. Hadare’s motivations are too pat and on-the-nose. We are told everything, and shown nothing. There is no mysteries to lure us forward, through the story, in the hopes of figuring out why they are like they are.

Similarly, using Bratt’s detective Lone as a foil is similarly weak, ’cause the moment you start a superhero film with the with great power riff, there is no tension is teasing that the hero won’t learn that lesson unless it’s done exceptionally well.

Depth matters, in an antagonist. It can be the dividing line between a good bad movie, and…well, Catwoman.

FIVE: AVOID THE LOW-HANGING FRUIT

If you are attempting to launch a female-lead comic book franchise, do not build your story around evil cosmetics and beauty without any apparent sense of irony.

The conversation about feminism and fandom wasn’t anywhere near as advanced back in 2004, but even then, I sat there thinking no, you’re fucking shitting me. This is what you came up with?

It’s not that you can’t do something interesting with that set-up, but it’s the most obvious of low-hanging fruit, which means you need to fucking surprise the hell out of the audience with every other aspect of your movie. You need to be on top of your fucking game. You can do anything if you’re smart about things, but that’s not this film.

If you’re not going to be on top of your game, at least pick an idea that won’t make everyone in the theatre roll their eyes at the obviousness.

At the very least, when you fuck up, people can respect the attempt.