Claws of the Catwoman

Hathaway's burgeoning career is doubtless a carefully strategised affair, so the decision to fix her in pop-culture history as Catwoman cannot have been taken lightly. And what the Catwoman brand denotes is that doe-eyed little Annie is all grown up and ready to pose a sexual threat. Indeed, if she hadn't climbed into this particular catsuit, she might well have slipped on another. At one stage the unstoppable Hollywood rumour mill suggested that Hathaway was deliberating between DC Comics' Catwoman, and a turn in Marvel's The Amazing Spider-Man as Felicia Hardy/Black Cat – an ambiguously-intentioned lady cat burglar who hasn't, in the end, shown up in the Spider-Man film, perhaps to evade the indignity of a public catfight.

Catwoman first surfaced in 1940, conceived by Batman creator Bob Kane to add glamour to his new comic book and to draw female readers. Batman was the crime-fighting alter ego of solitary billionaire orphan Bruce Wayne, compelled to clean up corrupt Gotham City in order to exorcise the trauma of his parents' brutal murder. Catwoman, or The Cat as she first appeared, was one of Gotham City's criminal underclass, a jewel-thief known in her civilian guise as Selina Kyle.

Selina/Catwoman would morph in future versions of the Batman comic book from nemesis to ally to love interest and back again; she would also shuffle through numerous alternative back stories that saw her as a prostitute, a single mother, a government operative and a bounty hunter.

The elements that have filtered into broader popular culture via TV and film include criminal tendencies, a clingy suit and some approximation of pussycat ears, with Selina's biography open to reinvention every time. Clearly, she also represents sexual possibility to Batman, whose romantic affairs tend to be stymied by his demanding schedule and the machinations of super-villains, but true inter-species bliss between Bat and Cat can never be, for she is out for herself and cannot be trusted.

Largely reduced to a campy caricature in the 1960s Batman TV series, and an intermittent presence in the Batman comic books over the years, Catwoman made a forceful comeback 20 years ago in Tim Burton's Batman Returns. She was played by Michelle Pfeiffer, whose shiny latex suit and whip made the character's fetishistic trappings more overt than ever, and it became one of modern cinema's most recognisable costumes. So why, as Anne Hathaway strives to assert herself as an abiding Hollywood acting talent, does a pre-feminist geek-boy pin-up in rubberwear resonate with her as a career choice? And why do modern women tend to respond positively to a character whose persona embodies the climate of fear over female autonomy which predominated during the 1940s when the character originated?

"I felt that women were feline creatures and men were more like dogs," Kane said in 1989. "While dogs are faithful and friendly, cats are cool, detached, and unreliable - as hard to understand as women are ... You always need to keep women at arm's length."

Women will be familiar with this sort of hogwash. Kane may have been offering a seductive notion of feminine power, but he was also presenting the male perspective as the default human one, with the female as an exotic, dangerous and incomprehensible twist thereon. Men are people, women inexplicable succubi sent to confound them.

Catwoman's initial comic-book incarnation – as jewel thief Selina Kyle/The Cat – came at a time when cinematic femmes fatales were busy symbolising the disrupted wartime social order by turning leading men to pulp. Kane reportedly based Selina Kyle's looks in part on those of his own favourite actresses, Hedy Lamarr and Jean Harlow – both controversial figures known for their frank sexuality and dangerous wiles.

CATWOMAN, like the classic Hollywood femme fatale, has always been a dramatically ambiguous emblem: on the one hand, an empowered, self-sufficient woman who gives as good as she gets, but on the other, a misogynist fantasy of unlimited female duplicitousness in whom desirability represents nothing but a trap.

Such subtleties were all but lost in the 1960s television version of Batman. Starring Adam West as a somewhat portly and graceless take on The Dark Knight, the series notoriously depicted the social justice travails of Gotham City as a tongue-in-cheek pop-art romp, in defiance of a comic book series that had become increasingly serious and dark.

Catwoman, as portrayed over various instalments by Julie Newmar, Lee Meriweather and Eartha Kitt, came without a back story or alter-ego, but with a smart mouth and a bluntly bawdy sexuality.

With the plot and character intricacies of the comic book series largely the preserve of initiated nerds, the small-screen Catwoman – stacked, provocative, trashy – came to represent the popular conception of the character. That changed in 1992, with Batman Returns.

For the earnest feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, Catwoman's persona had been far too ambiguous to allow her to function as a reliable role model,

but the self-reflexive, anti-ideological, kitsch-crazed 1990s provided the perfect backdrop for her reinterpretation.

With Batman in 1989, Burton had opted to draw out the dark social and sexual currents beneath the surface of the Batman myth. This psychoanalytic approach became intrinsic to the superhero sphere, permitting a new generation of credible film directors to take on blockbuster sagas – with toy tie-ins – without sacrificing their intellectual credibility.

Right-thinking adults could engage with Burton's edgy Batman films without appearing nostalgic or immature; men, in an age beginning to embrace new laddism and silicone-pumped porn-chic, could admit to fantasising about Michelle Pfeiffer in latex without having to stand in the naughty chauvinists' corner, and women could concede that they liked her make-up job as well as her kick-ass karate moves.

This was 1992, remember, a time when Basic Instinct had just streaked through cinemas, Madonna's book Sex was pending and everywhere S&M imagery was expressing both a new sexual honesty unfettered by political correctness, and a post-Aids terror of sexual corruption.

The Burton/Pfeiffer Catwoman appealed precisely because she encompassed both extremes of the post-feminist female condition: she was independent and sexually aggressive, but also lonely, embittered and unfulfilled.

The long association of women with cats, as identified by Bob Kane, carries primary connotations of grace, slinkiness, self-sufficiency and cruelty, as well as incorporating "kittenish" softness and vulnerability, and the cruder triggers of the word "pussy". But the other conventional affinity between women and cats comes in the form of the mad multi-cat-owning lady, that hunched bogeywoman to every long-single woman: childless, disappointed by men, and wont to vent her curdled love on uncontrolled numbers of "furry babies".

As imagined by Burton and screenwriters Warren Skaaren and Sam Hamm, the Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman is both cat lady and sex kitten. A down-at-heel spinster secretary at the start of the film, she becomes the jaded, raunchy Catwoman after years of abuse, neglect and sexual rejection. "Honey, I'm home," she calls, on returning to her apartment. "Oh, I forgot. I'm not married." When Batman fights her, she tricks him by acting vulnerable – "How could you? I'm a woman!" – only to whap him about the head when he weakens and remind him: "Life's a bitch – now so am I."

Heady stuff for a generation of girls still striving to establish whether they should be demanding gentlemanly redress from the patriarchy, or asserting their ability to fling it right back in the perpetrators' faces. Hit Batman right back, or take him to a tribunal? Burn your bra, or pole dance for ironic "empowerment"?

Whatever personal conclusions we may have reached, Catwoman provided as thrilling and divisive a focus for the debate as Sharon Stone's Basic Instinct villainess or Madonna's ever-shifting public persona. She was, crucially, a nuanced character rather than mere sexual set-dressing; she had a history, narrative agency and funny lines.

Batman Returns didn't even see fit to follow comic-book convention by pitting "bad" Catwoman against a "good girl" love interest for Batman, and yet Catwoman would prove to be a far more enduring and memorable character than the various virtuous girlfriends he would run through over the years.

IN 1993, DC Comics gave Catwoman her own comic- book series, and from 1995, the wonderful retro-styled DC Comics TV series Batman: The Animated Series further affirmed her status as a classy, retro-hip, T-shirt-ready reference point.

Given the vague memories that attend Kim Basinger, Nicole Kidman and Katie Holmes's appearances as love interests in previous Batman films, it is not hard to comprehend Anne Hathaway's decision to sharpen her claws as Catwoman.

Like Pfeiffer, whom many deemed not sexy enough when she filched the part from contenders Annette Bening and Sean Young, Hathaway has a whole good-girl thing to get shot of, and Catwoman, with her teasing manner and bluntly fetishistic mode of dress, is by now a fantasy rite-of-passage role for any starlet wishing to graduate from girl to vamp.

For Hathaway, appearing as Catwoman will permanently fix her sex-symbol status, up her box-office value and potentially unhook the possibility of a separate Catwoman franchise from the bothersome memory of the flop 2004 film starring Halle Berry.

In more complex terms, the Hathaway Catwoman will reinvent a character whose multiple interpretations – like those of any truly resilient icon – can be seen to undulate in harmony with social shifts.

Catwoman's intriguing status as a vulnerable villain – a baddie who might at any moment turn good; a violent criminal who might, as a "mere woman", stop a fight at any moment with a well-timed wobble of the lip – is reflective of a deathless dilemma around male and female roles.

Batman's writers have never been able to let the character dispatch Catwoman with the same decisiveness he might deploy with a Two-Face or a Riddler, because she is female, and it's not a fair fight.

But this condescending assumption also means she is eternally empowered to come back and mess with him again. And here she embodies something pretty fundamental, and fundamentally confused, about contemporary gender roles. Who is most enfeebled by the assumption of weakness on the part of women – the women themselves, or the men who make it?

Whatever answers Christopher Nolan and his co-screenwriter, brother Jonathan Nolan, propose in The Dark Knight Rises, it is a safe bet that Catwoman won't end the movie sharing her litter tray with anyone. Perhaps her most compelling quality is that in all versions of her myth, she tends to end up, like Kipling's Cat That Walked By Himself, "by her wild lone".

Cats don't tend to set up domestic units, and a lady cat can, if she chooses, mate with 30 different toms during one cycle; by doing so she can even conceive kittens by different daddycats, which will be born within the same litter.

It is hardly a recipe for domestic security, and Bruce Wayne, however lonesome and misunderstood he may appear in angstier versions of the story, is at heart a creature of convention, driven by the desire to replicate the prelapsarian security he enjoyed with his rich nuclear family before social disorder ripped his certainties away.

Catwoman is the bad girl you have to leave behind in order to live that way – or, more radically, the constant, scratchy reminder that you can't, outside of a storybook, really live that way at all. She is the patron saint of all those careworn singletons who have made a life out of luring lovers with charisma and danger, only to find that they tend in the end to settle for pragmatism, submissiveness and predictability.

And if she has to wear a latex suit to get that point across – well, there's more than one way to skin a deathless post-feminist agent provocateur.

Hannah McGill is a writer, film critic and former director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. The Dark Knight Rises is released this Friday

PREVIOUS INCARNATIONS

EARTHA KITT (1967): Kitt's feline features made her the ideal candidate for the role: those sultry slanting eyes, that svelte figure – not to mention her purring vocals on the song I Want To Be Evil. Her casting was not without controversy, however. Kitt was of mixed race which, given 1960s sensibilities, meant there was no romance between her and a white Batman (Adam West) in the TV series. Nevertheless, Kitt's trademark growl secured her sex-kitten status, as did her fitted bottle-green suit, although the outfit looks demure besides future PVC-clad Catwomen.

MICHELLE PFEIFFER (1992)

Michelle Pfeiffer perpetuated the villainous edge of sometime love interest, Catwoman, portraying her instead as Batman's alluring adversary. Cast two years after her Golden Globe win for her performance in The Fabulous Baker Boys, Pfeiffer was the rising star of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the form and seductive stare to capture the creeping, thieving Catwoman in Tim Burton's Batman Returns. Her skin-tight PVC suit reinvented the character as a more explicit sex symbol, the suggestive star of a dominatrix fantasy.

HALLE BERRY (2004)

Berry's credentials were promising. As a recent Bond girl and X-Men superhero, she had been voted number one in FHM's 2003 100 Sexiest Women in the World poll, and seemed to fit the bill as snugly as she did the catsuit. The film, named after the character, was a risky departure from Batman's Catwoman, warrior-like and ferociously clawed in a costume which combined criss-crossing belts, a bra and kitten heels. With her character stripped of its trademark persona and clothing, Berry delivered of a box office flop.

anne hathaway (2012)

Formerly associated with sweet, self-deprecating roles, Hathaway's Catwoman seems likely to become her breakthrough performance. In The Dark Knight Rises, the iconic femme fatale heads in a new direction, though also exhibits shades of her comic book past. Costume designer Lindy Hemming has returned to those comics for inspiration, and the result is a more functional, high-tech catsuit, fit for its thieving purpose. Painting Catwoman as both historic and futuristic may well prove a safe bet in box office terms.