Fellowship & Fairydust

Talking about Charles Williams and Paul Schrader together doesn’t sound like a natural combination. One of these men was a member of the Inklings, a writer whose work included supernatural thrillers, offbeat lay theology, and dense Arthurian poetry. The other is a film scholar-turned-filmmaker whose scripts include Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, and whose directed films include First Reformed and The Card Counter. Bizarrely, one of Schrader’s overlooked films from the 1980s contains a subject he and Williams both found fascinating, and parallels one of Williams’ pitfalls.

Cat People, directed by Schrader and released in 1982, was a remake of an acclaimed 1942 film about Irina, a woman who believes she comes from a line of shapeshifters. In the original, Irina is a Serbian immigrant raised on stories about witchcraft and family curses. She fears something will unleash her powers if she becomes emotionally attached to people. The “something” isn’t stated outright, but the fact she keeps separate bedrooms from her husband fills in the details. The restraint works, making it a movie about female sexuality with nothing explicit, though it also has plenty to say about ancestral memories and social isolation. When it becomes clear that Irina may really be able to shapeshift into a leopard, all the story’s implications build up to a terrifying climax.

From its first scene onward, Schrader’s remake exchanges restraint for visual flair. It opens with prehistoric tribespeople leaving a virgin sacrifice at a sacred tree in a land of blood-red sand dunes. After this folkloric beginning (which implies the shapeshifters ruled and mated with humans), the movie skips to the present. Irina, an orphaned daughter of circus animal trainers, reconnects with her long-lost brother Paul. Paul works as a pastor in New Orleans and seems obsessed with Irina. Paul keeps hinting that they have some heritage she isn’t facing and behaves more like a stalker than a brother.

When Paul disappears, Irina explores the city herself. She sees a new leopard at a zoo and meets zoo custodian Oliver. Oliver comments that he “prefers animals to people.” He doesn’t know what to think of Irina, who seems innocent but with some hidden darkness. Meanwhile, Irina manifests leopard-like urges (like stalking a rabbit in the marshes outside Oliver’s cabin). She also wonders about Paul’s references to her inability to “control the leopard” unless she mates with one of her kind.

So far, Schrader’s Cat People doesn’t sound like an Inklingsesque story. Yes, the movie talks about ancestral memories and mythopoeia. The opening scene, later referenced in one of Irina’s dreams, suggests that she is tapping into something mythic images or ideas buried inside her. Lewis wrote a lot about myth, but usually on myth as a means to understand God, Jesus as the “dying god who rises again” myth that actually happened. Schrader seems more interested in myth as archetypal images that teach people something about what lies within—he observed that Newsweek called Cat People “a movie for the Jung at heart” (Jackson 170).

One could also see Schrader’s Cat People as a werewolf story that switches felines for wolves, while exploring all the usual werewolf themes (repressed desire, etc.). That angle gives it common ground with Charles Williams’ lycanthropic poem “The Son of Lancelot.” Certainly, both are stories about someone becoming a beast, with meditations on humanity and beastliness. However, that’s a general comparison, and Williams uses his werewolf story (Lancelot becoming a werewolf after fathering Galahad) for very different purposes. As Brenton Dickieson outlines, Williams’ poem uses the idea of Lancelot becoming a wolf to reflect on his fall from grace (“An Arthurian Apocalypse”). Schrader doesn’t portray Irina becoming a beast as a fall from grace, but as her becoming what she was born to become.

However, Schrader employs some elements that resemble Williams’ work more closely. Early on, viewers see religious references, suggesting this dark dark movie about shapeshifters and eroticism has something else going on beneath. When Irina enters Paul’s house, viewers see a huge statue of two angels embracing each other by his front door. Later, viewers see that the second floor has a desk with a bust of a woman’s head, labeled “Beatrice.” When police enter Paul’s basement to investigate whether he’s connected to a black leopard roaming the streets, they find a leopard cage… several other angel statues lying around. The references to Christianity and Beatrice come together in a scene where Oliver listens to a tape of Dante’s poem “La Vita Nuova” as he goes about his work day.

Schrader’s Cat People isn’t just a movie about a woman becoming a shapeshifter: she also becomes a Beatrice figure.

Dante’s poetry, and Beatrice’s place in it, was one of Williams’ lifelong passions. Judith Kollman notes Williams had “read Dante by 1910, two years before publishing his first creative work, lectured on Dante in the nineteen twenties, and published his splendid study on Dante, The Figure of Beatrice, in 1943, two years before his death” (3). Dr. Sørina Higgins calls The Figure of Beatrice “his last, great, integrative work of theology, literary theory, and poetic vision all together” (“Reader’s Guide”).

One of Williams’ central arguments in The Figure of Beatrice is that in Dante’s poetry, Beatrice represents “The Way of Affirmation” (9). For Williams, there are two ways to approach God: the Way of Rejection and the Way of Affirmation. The Way of Rejection is “the renunciation of all images except the final one of God himself” (8). One finds God by an ascetic quest to meditate upon him only. In contrast, the Way of Affirmation is to “see God through these images” (9). One looks at images—“of food, drink, or anything else” (ibid)—and see the image of God reflected in it.

God is greater than all his creations, but his image is somehow hidden in all of them. Thus, love for images can be transmuted into agape, love for God. Thus, for Williams, the Beatrice figure shows romantic love becoming something higher.

Kollman details how Beatrice figures appear in many of Williams’ novels and poems, “young women involved in relationships of friendship or erotic love with male characters… conceived as both realistic characters and, simultaneously, as images” (3). These women may help their male friends or lovers grow, but only if both parties commit to the relationship and choose the path to salvation (Kollman 4). Some of Williams’ stories, such as Descent Into Hell, feature a woman who becomes a Beatrice figure and another who becomes an apostate Beatrice figure (Kollman 5-6).

Schrader hasn’t mentioned being influenced by Williams or any of the Inklings, which is not surprising. Raised by strict Calvinist parents who attended the Christian Reformed Church, Schrader didn’t see a movie until he was 17 (Jackson 5). He described his church as having a “strong educational background, but not a very enlightened one, particularly when it came to the arts” (Jackson 2). The Inklings’ high church Christianity and love for fantasy couldn’t have been further from Schrader’s religious upbringing. Wheaton College, not too far from Schrader’s childhood home in Grand Rapids, might have allowed him to explore the Inklings if he had been born a generation later. By the time the Marion E. Wade Center was founded in 1965, Schrader was in his first year at Calvin College and on a journey away from organized Christianity (Jackson 28).

Despite leaving organized Christianity by age 21, Schrader maintained a belief in spirituality (ibid). His rigorous religious education influenced his work in surprising ways. While studying film at UCLA, he published Transcendental Style in Film, a landmark study on film and spirituality. When Schrader transitioned from a film critic to a filmmaker, religious themes and images routinely appeared in his films.

Like Williams, Schrader has found Beatrice to be a fascinating figure he keeps depicting in his stories. For example, he has identified Beatrice imagery in his scripts for Taxi Driver and Obsession (Jackson 167, 170). In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle meets an idealistic woman who may lead him out of his social isolation but then loses her. In Obsession, a grieving widower meets a woman who looks exactly like his late wife and tries to replay his old romance.

Cat People takes these themes in a fantasy direction, where the Beatrice figure is literally what two different men want. Irina learns she is a shapeshifter who changes into a leopard after mating, but won’t revert back to being human until she kills something. She can’t control these abilities unless she mates with another shapeshifter. A mysterious moment in a bar, where a feline-looking woman called Irina “mi hermana” (Spanish for “my sister”), hints there are other shapeshifters out there besides her brother.

Sadly, Paul does not know, or perhaps does not care, whether there are other shapeshifters beside his sister. His obsession with controlling his powers has taken a dark turn: he thinks he must have Irina to be rescued from his cycle of violence. He has a twisted view of the Way of Affirmation, where perversity is the path to salvation.

“Save me. Only you can stop this killing.” — Paul in Cat People

Paul is eliminated halfway through the film, before he can harm Irina. But this still leaves Oliver. Oliver, who has always been more comfortable with animals than people. Oliver, who would normally be the hero and kill the monster at the end. Instead, he becomes more and more interested in Irina. He’s fascinated that she may be human yet animal.

In a revised ending Schrader contributed to the script, Oliver does not kill the shapeshifter. Instead, Irina decides to make love to Oliver again, and live permanently as a leopard. After a bizarre love scene at Oliver’s cabin (where Oliver restrains Irina to a bed, presumably so she won’t maul him once she shapeshifts), the movie ends at Oliver’s zoo. He goes over to one cage and feeds meat to a leopard, stroking its collar.

“The original script has a very conventional ending. There was a big dark house and the monster was killing and the house was burned down. So the big change I made was that he doesn’t kill the monster; he makes love to her and keeps her in a shrine…”— Schrader on Schrader 167

Schrader’s Cat People ends not with the hero finding his love for Beatrice has become agape, but with something closer to paganism. Williams probably would have appreciated how the ending combines Beatrice imagery with pagan overtones. After all, Williams combined Beatrice imagery and pagan imagery in at least one work. Kollman notes how one of Williams’ Arthurian poems depicts Sir Bors’ wife Elayne as a harmonious combination of “a Christian Beatrice but also pagan fertility” (Kollman 7).

Williams also would have probably appreciated how Cat People’s ending combines sexuality and spirituality in unconventional ways. The last scene in Oliver’s cabin could be seen as a tantric ritual (Oliver as priest, Irina as priestess, the bed as the altar), and indeed Schrader said the scene was “shot as a religious ceremony” (Jackson 176). Williams achieved a similar effect in his play Judgment at Chelmsford in a scene where a young woman is tied to a cross—a scene biographer Grevel Lindop describes as combining erotic, Kabbalistic, and theological overtones (294). 

Williams was a practicing Anglo-Catholic throughout his life, but no stranger to esoteric religious ideas. He joined the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross in 1917, a Rosicrucian secret society led by A.E. Waite that studied various ideas which Waite called “strictly Christian and mystical” (Lindop 59). Roughly two years later, Williams began meeting biweekly with A.H.E. Lee and D.H.S. Nicholson, members of the Stella Matutina offshoot of the Order of the Golden Dawn (Roukema 47). Their conversations explored topics like “the transformation of sexual energy for spiritual purposes” (Lindop 64), and probably led to Williams joining Stella Matutina (Roukema 47). As shall be discussed later, Williams applied some occult ideas to his own life in disturbing ways.

While Williams knew a lot about tantric occult rituals, he argued in his writings that romantic love should take another direction. Higgins notes that one of his lifelong themes is that eros can can become sacramental (“Your Wife is Jesus”), subsumed into love for God. In Outlines of Romantic Theology, Williams says, “the principles of Romantic Theology can be reduced to a single formula: which is, the identification of love with Jesus Christ, and of marriage with His life” (14). A lover is a means to know Christ. Hence, romantic love in its proper place points to Christ, not to worshipping one’s lover. Hence why Beatrice matters so deeply in Williams’ poetry.

Schrader ends his film with his hero getting the Beatrice figure, but the romance hasn’t been subsumed into anything. Oliver is still devoted to Irina, without moving onto any spiritual transformation.

Even before the ending, the way Schrader depicts Irina detracts from the Dantean idea he’s trying to convey. As noted earlier, the key to Williams’ Beatrice figures is they are equals with their male lovers. They enter relationships where both parties choose to grow. Williams’ female characters are also more than just images: they are people and ideals. In Schrader’s Cat People, the male characters’ feelings for Irina are clear, but she never becomes their equal, never more than an image. Actress Nastassja Kinski has enough charisma to make Irina believable, but as Robin Bailes observes, her character never develops any complexity (1). Schrader makes Irina an interesting symbol but never takes what Williams cited as the important step: making the character a human being as well as a symbol.

Based on Schrader’s memories of making Cat People, the problem seems rooted in how he approached the film. Interviewed by David Thomson when the film came out, Schrader described how he revised the plot and based Oliver on himself—a lonely man “looking for a woman to put on a pedestal” (49-50). In the process, Schrader added the Beatrice theme to the script, making Irina into the romanticized ideal that Oliver desires.

Things became more complicated when Schrader became romantically involved with Kinski during production. Schrader later described being “besotted,” believing his love for her would be reflected onto the audience (Jones 1). Schrader also admitted that because he was so obsessed with Kinski, he didn’t realize some of the film’s sexual material was becoming very dark (Jackson 167).

Irina’s metamorphosis from a virgin into a temptress is interesting. However, the movie employs a lot of gratuitous nudity and some bizarre sexual images along the way. Ultimately, Schrader’s own romantic idealization keeps his film from being a full-fledged exploration of the Beatrice figure.

Schrader’s idealization of Kinski oddly parallels one of Williams’ recurring problems. Women featured prominently in Williams’ creative life—women he often gave nicknames to, who served as muses for his poetry or novels. Many times he offered to spiritually mentor them—mentoring that included quasi-sexual, controlling rituals. Each became idealized, part of “the mythology that he placed around people and around his life” (Lindop 381).

Williams’ idealization was especially true when it came to Phyllis Jones, an Oxford University Press co-worker that Williams nicknamed “Celia.” Williams began having an emotional affair with Jones in 1926, and she became the model for several female characters in Williams’ novels, notably Chloe in Many Dimensions. Higgins describes Chloe as “one of the clearest examples of his idealization of both [Jones] and of their strange love” (“King Solomon’s TARDIS: ‘Many Dimensions’”).

Like his other muses, Williams’ relationship with Jones was never consummated. It did include racy letters, flirtatious behavior, and over a hundred poems about her. After Williams discovered in 1930 that Jones was having a (more conventional) affair with their coworker Gerry Hopkins, the romance more or less ended. The ideal turned out to be not enough.

Williams never fully admitted why he idealized Jones or other women. However, one of them, Lois Lang-Sims, suggested to Williams that the idealized Dantean love he talked about seemed “impersonal” (Lindop 386). Wouldn’t a human relationship be a better alternative?

Williams responded with a question. What if a man like Dante could not feel normal love: “what if his humanity were not human?” (Lindop 387). Lindop argues this was a guarded but personal statement: somehow, Williams didn’t feel human, perhaps believing that he couldn’t feel love (ibid).

“At rock bottom, a darkness has always haunted me.” — Charles Williams, quoted in The Inklings (80)

Schrader had a much more conventional affair with Kinski than Williams had with Jones. Still, Schrader reached a similar problem. Like Williams, Schrader idealized a woman he was in love with and made her into a Beatrice figure in one of his stories. Like Williams, his craving for love was twinned with a dark image of himself—detachment, loneliness, seeking an idealized love. Like Williams, Schrader found that treating someone as a poetic muse or romantic image creates issues—either in one’s personal life or in the resulting art.

While Williams’ relationship with Jones was problematic, he somehow turned his idealized view of Phyllis Jones into female characters who were believable. Schrader didn’t achieve that result in Cat People. He makes Irina an interesting cipher but not a full-fledged character.

Ultimately, Williams never broke free of his toxic cycle of making women into muse-initiates. Had he lived long enough to achieve his retirement plan of moving to Oxford (Lindop 425), he might have reached an impasse. Without a day job creating distance from his home life with his wife Michal, he may have been forced to confront his behavior instead of compartmentalize it.

It wasn’t to be. Williams died in 1945, a week after VE-Day. He was 58 years old. Friends like C.S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers later heard stories about his bizarre behavior with his muses, but couldn’t reconcile the stories with the man they knew (Dalfonzo 109-115). It wasn’t until decades later, with the publication of Lindop’s biography, that the full story became clear.

Schrader had more success breaking away from romantic obsession and idealizing women. After Cat People was released, his relationship with Kinski ended. They both went on to other projects and relationships. Kinski married film producer Ibrahim Moussa in 1984 and had two children. In 1983, Schrader married actress Mary Beth Hurt. They had two children, and Schrader credited fatherhood with leading him back to church in the 1990s (Wolfe 1). 

Beatrice figures have continued to appear in Schrader’s films, sometimes in more satisfactory ways than others. Forever Mine is an overheated romantic melodrama where the hero carries his lover’s rosary as a promise they will be reunited (and tells a child a rosary is like “a gift from God”). Light Sleeper is much more interesting, an understated crime film about a drug dealer whose ex-girlfriend may not achieve complete sobriety, but reconnecting with her leads him to a new life. First Reformed has hints of Beatrice in its story about a troubled pastor whose descent is stopped short when he bonds with a pregnant widow. At his best, and particularly in these later projects, Schrader has found ways to achieve something similar to Williams’ novels, showing the Beatrice figure in all its complexity.

Sources Cited

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Dalfonzo, Gina. Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2020.

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—. “Your Wife is Jesus: ‘Outlines of Romantic Theology,’ c. 1924.” The Oddest Inkling, 2 April 2014. theoddestinkling.wordpress.com/2014/04/02/wife-is-jesus/.

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Jones, Neal. “Paul Schrader interview on the 40th Anniversary of Cat People!” Without Your Heard, 9 January 2022. anchor.fm/withoutyourhead/episodes/Without-Your-Head-Paul-Schrader-interview-on-the-40th-Anniversary-of-Cat-People-e1cn1ej/a-a7r1e78.

Kollman, Judith. “The Figure of Beatrice in the Works of Charles Williams.” Mythlore Vol. 13: No. 2, Article 1. dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol13/iss2/1.

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Photo Credit: Image by Enrique from Pixabay