As a journalist, I’m plugged into all kinds of internet discourse, but as a writer, I’m particularly interested in literary discourse. In 2017, the internet was briefly possessed with an obsession over Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker short story Cat Person, which ignited conversations about gender, sex, and privilege in relationships. It was one of the first pieces of short fiction to truly go viral.

In the story, a 20-year-old college student working at a theatre concession stand begins dating Robert, an older man who’d bought Red Vines from her as a movie snack. 34-year-old Robert is an awkward, insecure guy who is a “shockingly bad” kisser and worse in bed, and quite frankly, isn’t very nice to her. Margot, the student, doesn’t know how to end the relationship and lets it go on longer than she should have, and when her roommate finally facilitates a breakup by sending him a mean text from Margot’s phone, he shows up at the bar she hangs out at. She leaves, and he texts her a series of increasingly desperate messages, the last of them calling her a whore. It’s a very interesting story that had people warring over who the villain was, if there was a villain at all, why it resonated with so many people, whether the protagonist was fat-shaming Robert… the discourse went on and on, fuelled by the #MeToo movement.

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There’s more to the story that extended its notoriety – in 2021, a woman named Alexis Nowicki wrote an article for Slate that revealed Roupenian had drawn inspiration from Nowicki’s life experience, despite never having met Roupenian in her life. This started an entirely new debate about the ethics of fictionalising someone else’s life, authorial voice, and keeping integrity. The film doesn’t touch on any of this, but it’s important to note that the continued discussion about the story well past its initial publication has turned it into something of a cultural touchpoint, which is why the story has staying power. Just a month before Nowicki’s piece was published, it was announced that the short story would be adapted into a psychological thriller starring Coda’s Emilia Jones and Succession’s Nicholas Braun. The trailer is out now, and I have mixed feelings about it, to say the least.

Most of the story seems to follow Roupenian’s story quite closely – a young woman working at a theatre concession stand meets an older man named Robert, who kisses her in a very gross way. They have awkward, uncomfortable sex, which Margot regrets. He goes to the bar where he knows she might be, and texts her repeatedly. This is where the movie departs, showing Robert waiting for Margot outside her workplace, making her increasingly paranoid to the point where she feels she has to buy a weapon for self-defence. At some point in the trailer, Margot says, “One of us has to die”, and Robert is shown dying in multiple ways.

It’s a clear switch of tone, shifting from a story that is ambiguous to one that heavily emphasises the threat of male violence. In doing this, it’s lost much of the nuance of the original story, making it much more of a thriller pulsing with the threat of danger than a story about crossed wires, bad communication and power dynamics. Reviews of the film’s premiere at Sundance have been mixed, with some calling it powerful and provocative, and others calling it disjointed and obvious, saying that it misses the point of the source material.

Cat Person won’t reach theatres till October 6, and it’s hard to judge its treatment of the original material from the trailer and reviews alone. But the point of the story was that dating is complicated, especially when you’re a young woman still getting to understand yourself and your boundaries, and when you’ve been taught not to hurt men’s feelings for fear of retaliation. People can be shitty at communicating with each other, and the knowledge that crossed wires can lead to anger and the threat of violence is scary and realistic enough without having to cross into all-out stalking. Taking the nuance and ambiguity out of the story does it no favours, and right now, it looks like Cat Person did exactly that.

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