Controversial story now a Hollywood movie

When the short story Cat Person was published in The New Yorker in December 2017, it kicked off a furious debate in most corners of the internet.

The piece, written by Kristen Roupenian, told the story of 20-year-old university student Margot who meets older man Robert, 34, at the cinema where she works. They start flirting over text, meet up a few times, before their fledging courtship culminated in a bad date with even worse sex.

Roupenian’s 7200-word piece hit a raw nerve in a culture reckoning with the revelations of sexual abuse, harassment and misconduct. Only two months earlier, reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times and Ronan Farrow writing for The New Yorker had published exposes about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s criminal behaviour, supercharging the MeToo movement.

But Cat Person’s dating story wasn’t so clear-cut. Its ambiguity – or, at least, its perceived ambiguity –made for ferocious disagreement. Was Robert another predatory man? Was Margot the arsehole for ghosting him? Everyone had an opinion.

American writer and director Susanna Fogel heard about Cat Person a week after it was published. “By the time I entered the conversation, it was already so heated,” she told PerthNow over zoom.

“There’s a whole moment around it. The story’s incredible, and I was so thrilled that it was in The New Yorker, not the kind of publication that would usually centre a young woman’s journey.

“What was as interesting as the story is how triggering it was for people and how much of a Rorschach test it was for people’s own psychological issues and experiences. This is clearly not a topic that people are done talking about. In fact, they needed someone to open the floodgates with a story, with an ambiguous enough story that they could opine about.

“To me, that was really exciting. We have love stories and then we have assault stories or revenge stories. It’s pretty binary who’s bad and who’s good. But actually, most experiences I think are in the grey area, when you’re trying to psych yourself into something but that’s not the same as not consenting.”

Fogel, who had previously directed comedic caper The Spy Who Dumped Me with Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon and co-wrote the hilarious and sweet coming-of-age movie Booksmart, resonated strongly with the intimacy and verisimilitude of Roupenian’s tale, but struggled to see how it could be turned into a film.

“I thought someone’s going to adapt this and they’re going to f**k it up,” she said. “But then I read Michelle Ashford’s script and I really loved what she did.”

Ashford leant into the story’s thriller elements, the paranoid scenarios that would penetrate Margot’s mind as she sat in the car of a virtual stranger. Seeing those nightmare fantasies realised on screen in the movie Fogel would go on to direct with CODA’s Emilia Jones and Succession’s Nicholas Braun, taps into the very real fears many women have had – “Is he going to murder me?”

Fogel’s film is more expansive than Roupenian’s story which presents everything from Margot’s viewpoint. For it to work as a movie, Fogel had to extend a perspective to Robert, and added a third act.

“[In the short story], the window into Robert is in that final text message, and that’s what people go off and talk about what they think it means. But for a movie, you have to contend with a real-life person [Braun] who’s playing Robert and he’s asking questions about Robert’s psychology, and you have to answer them.

“So, you have to get much more empathetic and interior with Robert’s life.”

But more just the practicality of filmmaking and directing an actor, by giving Robert a perspective, Fogel is in conversation with that intense discourse which followed the story’s publication.

“The story is so debated and debatable in terms of what it means. Even Kristen, who’s very much [subscribed] to the ‘death of the author’ [idea] had said, ‘When I wrote that story and published it, it ceased to be my story, it doesn’t matter what I think, the world can debate it’.”

Fogel added the addition of the third act is in response to that cultural conversation. She said, “It’s the act that acknowledges the discussion and fervour around the story. So, there’s a lot of male anger about the story or men are aggrieved about X, Y or Z. Let’s have that. If that’s Robert’s psychology, let’s hear from him. It was self-aware about the reaction to the story.”

She also wanted to recapture the effect of some people defending Margot and some people defending Robert. And she didn’t want to make Robert too much of a villain, “because then he’s just easily dismissed by a male audience, I wanted them to see their own behaviour in him, even if they’re good guys.”

One month after Cat Person came out, in January 2018, actor, filmmaker and comedian Aziz Ansari was the subject of an article detailing a young woman’s experience on a date with him. The 23-year-old woman said he pressured her into sex and had missed her non-verbal cues she wasn’t comfortable, but she didn’t tell him to stop.

His alleged behaviour wasn’t misconduct per se, but it sparked a similar conversation to Cat Person which delved into the power imbalance between men and women even in consensual encounters.

Fogel said when the Ansari piece came out, she had many conversations with friends about the thorniness of the story. “People would whisper, ‘I think that was a nuanced situation. Can we talk about how this actually has some layers?’ or ‘Can we talk about how much we all relate to being that woman?’

“So, being that woman and also not feeling that we were assaulted though we had that experience.”

Fogel’s Cat Person movie is releasing at a very different time and cultural moment to Roupenian’s Cat Person short story.

Fogel argued that at the height of the MeToo movement, there was a lot of anger that had come out once the flood gates had opened on decades and centuries of abuse and oppression.

“Women were finally being heard. It was the era of strong female characters kicking arse, kicking men’s arses, taking what’s theirs, holding men accountable. All of that is important and valid, but it’s not the only story.

“People are ready for a more nuanced take because we’ve had the pendulum swing back to ‘now’s the time for us to speak and to listen’. People want to talk about what’s authentically real.

“People want to talk about the grey areas because that is most of our experiences. Most of us have no experienced a Bridgerton-sized love or an assault. We’re in the middle, navigating or questioning or trying to label experiences we’ve had.

“Now that we have the language to talk about the extreme stuff, we can talk about the nuanced stuff, and we can draw from that more extreme language if it applies. But we’re not stuck in that rut of only talking about things in polarity.”

Cat Person is in cinemas now