Will This Kitty Have Any Claws?

With her beauty queen smile, Anne Hathaway is an odd choice to play Catwoman in the new Batman flick, Dark Knight Rises. She is too perky to be slinky, too sunny to be evil and doesn’t have a whiff of kink about her. However, it follows the trend of moving the antihero from street-wise alley cat to a domesticated pussy.

Originally the character had no back story — she was created to add some much needed sex appeal to the comic. She spent her time teasing Batman who was confused by his desire to reform her, sleep with her and thrown her in jail. And although this cat came back again and again, she proved hard for him to tame.

When her ever-changing history was revealed, it was always a strong one. In the 1950s she was an amnesiac flight attendant who turned to burglary to survive. In the 1970s she was a woman who left her husband and broke into her own safe to recover her jewels, and discovered that she rather liked it. In the 1980s she was a prostitute-dominatrix who learned martial arts to protect her sister.

However, when Catwoman made the leap onto the big screen, she went from a powerful woman to a fragile one. In both films she is a meek underling who is killed and is magically brought back to life by cats to get revenge. It is only once she dies that she is able to tap into her inner PMS. These films do not give us icons of feminine strength — they give us emotional, psychotic bitches who are spinning dangerously out of control.

So when Anne slides into the iconic black vinyl, who will she be? Will she be the powerful creature who uses sex appeal as one of many tools in her arsenal? Will she be the timid virgin whose long-ignored sexuality overwhelms her?

Her sexuality will either plunge us into the darkest reaches of the female mind, or come up a teenage boy’s wet dream. She may wear skin-tight clothes and carry a whip, but I want to know whether this cat will have claws.

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