So Much Yummier
Inspired by Aries, the 7th House, Death, Marriage, and Womanhood
Content Warning: Suicide
Live Fast, Die Young, Bad Girls Do It Well:
In Batman Returns (1992), Michelle Pfeiffer defies expectations as Selina Kyle. Her performance depicts a remarkable transformation; ravaged by homicide, an industrious damsel-in-distress devolves into the deathless anti-heroine Catwoman. The leather-clad femme fatale brandishes a bullwhip and lashes out against her power-hungry employer. Motivated by desire, retribution, and destruction, she strikes him with a ruby-tased kiss and rids her city of a corporate depraved megalomanic. Pfeiffer’s Catwoman rejects normative feminity and resists heroic ideals. Her timelessness relies on shadow feminism to reach its death-defying heights.
Jack Halberstam, a queer theorist, proffers a question that shatters the bio-essential sentiments burrowed in second-wave feminism. “If we refuse to become women, one might ask, what happens to feminism?” It’s a thought-provoking quandary that yearns to articulate womanhood beyond physical attributes. Halberstam quests the essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” for answers. Its author, literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, invokes a non-normative feminist that refuses to reproduce themselves through heroism, dominance, and erasure.
Halberstam describes such a figure as a shadow feminist. Unlike their predecessors and contemporaries, shadow feminists wield self-destructive masochistic language and radically strip themselves of the legacy that womanhood affords: namely, the mother-daughter bond: a relationship predicated on reproductive labor. If we abrade ourselves of the womanly roles afforded to women, one might ask, what other roles are left? An anti-heroine perhaps.
It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a . . . Cat-woman?:
Michelle Pfeiffer deviates from the comic book canon and delivers a fiendishly alternative Catwoman. Her performance reifies the anti-heroine, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as, “a female central character in a story, film, or drama who lacks conventional heroic attributes.” Selina Kyle exchanges gallantry and selflessness for death and destruction. By effacing cultural objects associated with matrilineality (stuffed animals, dollhouses, kitchen utensils, family portraits, sewing machines, catsuits, etc.), she divests from the damsel and reemerges as a shadow feminist. Revived and reformed, Catwoman prowls aloft the sky-scraping identities of hero, mother, daughter, wife, and villain. She leers at you below.
How to Turn One Life into Nine:
Fall into your couch and point the remote at the television set. Click. Peppered static lightly shocks the living room awake. Grimace at the sound, grimace at the light. Switch the set’s input from TV to HDMI. Click. Snowfall clumsily cascades on the black screen and menacing city. Your eye disregards the menu’s montage until the words: PLAY, SCENES, FEATURES, and LANGUAGES burn a bright orange. Turn the dial till you rest on the word “PLAY.” Click. The disc, Batman Returns (1992), refuses to play. Rented from the video store down the street, it’s popular and certainly scratched up. Skip ahead until the screen floods the room in bright pink.
Attentively, watch. Selina unlocks the door to her rosy apartment and drops the stray she carried there. She calls out to you in the void: “Honey, I’m home." Lean back in your seat and smirk. “Oh wait, I’m not married.” A hearty laugh escapes from your throat. She toses her keys onto the floor and drags her feet down the end of the blushing hall. Stare into her blank and vacant face until you feel blank and vacant yourself. She flicks on the table lamp before knocking it onto the floor. Howl. You jump with a start as she pulls off her jacket and leaves it behind in a crumpled heap. The black stray strides toward the ivory drinking dishes patiently waiting for milk. Meow. Selina saunters to the fridge and frees a chill trapped behind the door. She lifts a carton of milk from the shelf and pours torrents into the bowls then into her mouth. Purr. Stretch out your legs to dry the sweat behind your knees. The musical score floats through your apartment like a buoy. She ambles toward the answering machine and hits play.
Goadingly, the answering machine recounts. Beep. “Selina, this is your mother, call me.” Beep. “Selina, this is your mother. Why haven’t you called me back?” Beep. An automated voice sterilizes the air. Check your text messages. Quick. Then, remind yourself you’re ignoring your mother too. “Hell-o, Se-li-na Kyle.” Casually reread your last message. “We’re just call-ing to make sure you’ve tried Gotham Lady Perfume.” Exhale sharply. “One whiff of this at the office and you’re boss will be asking you to stay after work for a candlelight staff meeting for two.” You inhale but the air isn’t filling your lungs. Your chest tightens. Selina turns round, shaking. “Gotham Lady Perfume, exclusively at Sheck’s Department Store.” Mom’s getting married . . . again. A scream rushes the room and jostles your attention back to the film.
Ghostlike, flushed, ethereal, your eyes watch wide as Selina hurls the milk carton at the telephone. Crash. Ripping cords, she smashes the answering machine until her eyes fall on a cloud of fluffy stuffed animals. She throttles their necks and dumps them into the sink. Thud. Move to the edge of your seat and turn your cell phone over. Grab the remote and turn up the volume. The sweeping score floods the room before brushing up against your ears. Selina paws a wooden mixing spoon and shoves the animals down the drain. Grind. Bits of fluff escape from the garbage disposal’s thrashing throat. A wide devious smile slinks across her face. Place your elbows on your knees and let your jaw fall. The scene continues.
Overproud and content, Selina snatches the cold, cast-iron skillet off the stove and pummels a mother-daughter portrait hanging on the salmon-colored wall. It slams to the ground replaced by a menacing crater. She swings the skillet loose from her hands. It flies into mirrored shelves; snowglobes and wedding cake toppers tumble to the floor. Your phone vibrates as Selina rummages through a drawer throwing junk asunder. Turn it back over. Read the text again: “Call out of work on the 5th. You and your brother are giving me away at the altar.” Shhhhh. Snear as Selina drags a line of black spray paint clear across the hall. Coming to the closet, she desecrates the rouge doors and flings them free. A pink t-shirt cheerily depicts a cuddly cat and kitten. She blots out their faces with paint and tears the shirt from the hanger. Flip the phone over and lean against the back of the couch.
Tilt your head to the side and frown. Selina frantically looks through her clothes until she happens upon a black leather coat. Realize you’re cold and throw a blanket over yourself. Buzz. Your cell phone begs for your attention. “Hello There:” she leaves the closet smashing a neon sign as she stalks down the hall. A powder pink bed fills the frame. Selina points the can and sprays the bed with choking fumes and whooshing rage. Black subsumes the bedroom. She drives the can into the bed and destroys the entire coral-covered dollhouse. Your phone waits patiently, beckons your hand under the throw. Selina wipes the dollhouse onto the floor and empties a sewing kit onto the table. Cross your arms and yawn. A chowder of cats watches as a pair of scissors finds their way into her hands.
Snip. Selina shears and rearranges the coat. A new pattern emerges. Mom’s getting married . . . again. You and your brother will give her away to a man you’ve never met. Snip. The meowing strays call from outside the apartment window. Selina takes the bone-white thread, slowly spools, and completes the pattern. Snip. She punctures the piece with her sewing machine and finishes making a glove. You watch as she hectically searches for something: a pin, a thimble, a needle, some thread. She puts on the glove and adorns the tip of her finger with a seam ripping claw. The stray cats yowl triumphantly as the broken neon sign continues to glow. It shines: “Hell here.” Dressed in a skin-tight, stiched-white catsuit, Selina calls to you again: “I don’t know about you miss kitty but I feel . . . so much yummier.” You see the text which reads: “Hello?” Pick up the phone. Tell your mother your brother will give her away.
Till Death Do Us Part:
Oh, traditional marriage vows. “I take thee to be my lawfully wedded wife.” A government-sanctioned kidnapping. “To have and to hold” boldly objectifies the bride and then groom. A lawyer must’ve drafted the next part. “From this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish.” A list of terms and conditions with nary a loophole insight. The vows end with a killing blow: “till death do us part.” Boom. Before Middle English turned Modern, the phrase used to read “till death us depart.” How . . . finite. Together till the bitter end.
Fuck Your Happy Ending:
At the film’s completion, Catwoman catches her prey with the spirited twitch of a whip. Max Scheck, her former employer, offers her money, jewels, and even a ball of string in exchange for his life. Dissatisfied, Selina counters his offer and demands a half-pint of his blood. Batman swoops in and intervenes. Catwoman flicks her whip again insisting that the law doesn’t apply to heroes, damsels, or villains. Batman presents her with two alternatives: partnership and justice. “Let’s just take him to the police then we can go home . . . together.” Selina flicks her whip a third time. Still, he approaches, asserting that they are one and the same. Tearing off his mask, Batman reveals his true identity as billionaire love-interest Bruce Wayne. Catwoman tears up longingly. “Bruce, I would love to live with you, in your castle, forever, just like in a fairytale.” He grazes her cheek with his hand. “I just couldn’t live with myself.” Selina claws his cheek. “So, don’t pretend this is a happy ending.” He stares at her in bloody disbelief. Sheck whips out a pistol and fires a shot at them both. Batman collapses as Catwoman staggers toward Scheck. “You killed me, the Penguin killed me, Batman killed me. That’s three lives down. Got enough in there to finish me off!?” Sheck empties the chamber into her stomach. One life left at point-blank range. “How about a kiss Anti-Claus?” Selina lifts the white popping taser to her lips. She pushes Sheck against a firing generator and gives him a sparkling kiss. They’re both killed in an electrifying flash. Meow.
If Nothing’s Going Right, Go Left:
In 2015, the year same-sex marriage became legal in the United States, Michael Cobb wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times called “Supreme Court’s Lonely Hearts Club.” He rightly scrutinizes the judicial opinions of Justice Andrew M. Kennedy regarding marriage equality. Justice Kennedy wrote that “[n]o union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family.” It’s an alarming sentiment that infers a hierarchy of relationships placing marriage at the top and every other union at the bottom. He continues by saying “[i]n forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.” Well, according to him, prior to getting married, people are superficial, less, and single. Then, his commentary takes an unprecedented turn: “their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions.” Add lonely to the list if you already haven’t.
Surprisingly, I agree with his use of the word excluded. If you’re having state-sanctioned sex with your significant other, you’re afforded a litany of benefits that improve your quality of life: access to healthcare, joint filing, bequeathed inheritances, etc. Gay rights! If you’re having sex that isn’t state-sanctioned, you’re unironically fucked and unironically excluded. Also, gay rights! Justice Kennedy concludes by saying “[t]hey ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.” Fascinating. As an unpartnered person, I am lonely, less, superficial, single, and undignified simply because I am not married. Cobb suggests that activists should’ve aimed higher by “challenging the need for sexual scrutiny by the state, and the constellation of benefits that belong to marriage.” It’s a shame they didn’t. If they had, they might have toppled the relationship hierarchy and demanded a redistribution of marital benefits to everyone. A faggy cat-lady can dream.
So Much Yummier:
When Catwoman struck pallid, trumpish Sheck, Batman interceded with a promise of incessant fidelity. She refused him immediately and opted to kill herself (and Sheck) instead. Why? Halberstam might reason that she “refuses to resist in the terms mandated by the structure that interpellates her.” Spivak might argue that the “construction of gender keeps the male dominant” therefore as “a female [she] is even more deeply in shadow.” I would like to proffer Catwoman’s own choice words: “Every woman you try to save ends up dead . . . or deeply resentful. Maybe you should retire?” Maybe we should. Or, maybe, we should pay closer attention.
Naw, You’re Stuck With Me Forever:
David Buckel, a trans rights and marriage equality lawyer, dedicated himself to directing and composting at the Red Hook Community Farm in Brooklyn. He even wrote a primer, Guidelines for Urban Community Composting, for free. On April 14th, 2018, at 5:55 AM, he sent a suicide note to several news organizations. He told them: “My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.” Buckel left his ID, business card, and apology for the police to find. He kindly assured them: “I apologize to you for the mess.” A husband, father, son, lawyer, and environmentalist stood inside a perfect ring of earth and lit himself on fire. Cause of death? Fossil fuels. He chose a neglected bit of lawn on the shoulder of the road. He chose to catch fire, sight unseen, moments before daybreak. He chose to stand in a circle of soil so the fire wouldn’t spread. His final words: “Here is a hope that giving a life might bring some attention to the need for expanded action.” Domingo Morales, Buckel’s assistant, recalls receiving instructions from him regarding the management of Red Hook weeks prior. Morales jokingly asked, “What, you going to retire on me?” Buckel responded, “Naw, you’re stuck with me forever.” His language and actions freely resound.
For David, our sibling-in-community:
“Bear him as a fallen hero / with solemn honor and dignitity. But bear him to a greening meadow / let spring itself be / his eulogy. Though spring means rebirth, though each flower dies, / the seeds fall to earth, take root, and rise. / So, lay him in / a field of flowers / and flowers will bloom / where / he / lies.”
Field of Flowers by Thomas Tierney (Music) and Ted Dracham (Lyrics)