I hold certain beliefs to be true. They shape how I see the world, how I process experiences and understand people. The most powerful (and dangerous) beliefs are the ones you’re not even aware you’re holding. Some are so deeply engrained, they’re almost invisible. I think it’s important to become aware of your beliefs and take an active role in shaping them, revise them every now and then.
Strong beliefs can narrow our vision. They’re great for accomplishing things, but not great for understanding people with all of our quirks and nuances. They also have a peculiar way of becoming self-fulfilling: if you believe x to be true, consciously or not, you’re going to act in a way that validates x. For this reason, I’m wary of holding on to too many negative beliefs. I try not to be cynical.
Last weekend, I saw a screening of Cat Person, a film based on the viral 2017 short story by Kristen Roupenian. Put simply, it’s about one woman’s experience of a date gone horribly wrong. Because the story is written in limited third-person, closely following Margot’s point-of-view, by the end, we’re meant to feel the horror she feels when—spoiler alert—Robert bombards her with a slew of drunk texts that grow increasingly hostile.
One of the main ways the movie diverges from the story is in humanizing Robert and showing how Margot has made some wrong assumptions about him. In the post-movie screening Q&A conducted by Ira Glass, the director, Susanna Fogel, said:
I think for the medium of film—and just biased as the director who’s talking to actors about why they say and do certain things—I want to understand the context that led to Robert being the way he is, partly because I’m talking to an actor who’s saying, ‘Why am I like this? Why did I say this? What do I mean when I say X or Y?’
Providing access to Robert’s consciousness is a worthwhile exploration for the film. It allows for a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics between these two characters. When asked what she thought of this choice, Roupenian maintained that the story and the film are two different products and that the horror of her story lies in “someone else’s consciousness being fully trapped away, and you’re just alone with the stories in your head.”
I love what she said because it perfectly sums up the claustrophobia of modern dating, which is largely conducted through texting. As an asynchronous medium, texting leaves much room for misinterpretation. It’s so easy to shoot off a text. Because we expect to hear back quickly, when we don’t, our brains can easily come up with a paranoid theory about why someone isn’t responding. I’ve been guilty of this, and I realized it was because I hold the belief that if someone truly likes me, they’re going to think about me at various points throughout the day, and wouldn’t they, therefore, remember to respond to my text?
This isn’t an unreasonable belief, but you can see that it contains multiple assumptions. The first might be true: if someone likes you, they’re going to think about you pretty frequently. But maybe other things in their life might demand their attention, or they might have their own fears, their own beliefs, holding them back from engaging. It’s hard to know what’s going on with the person on the other side of the screen because their consciousness is locked away.
Many of our beliefs are meant to protect us, but like an autoimmune disease, they can sometimes lead us to self-sabotage. Margot withholds her true thoughts and feelings from Robert because she’s afraid he might act out if he’s insulted. She treads carefully around his ego. Men’s egos are fragile might be her guiding (mis)belief.
I think the tragedy of Cat Person is that a single bad dating experience can reaffirm each character’s worst beliefs about the other, and subconsciously color their perception of all future dates to come. You can just imagine how Margot and Robert would walk away from their shared experience much less trusting and more cynical. He might think: Women will lead you on while ridiculing you behind your back. She might think: Men can’t take “no” for an answer and will get aggressive in the face of rejection. I wouldn’t be surprised if anyone who commits a cardinal dating sin (e.g. ghosting, cheating, flaking, stringing someone along) has been on the receiving end of that same behavior.
Despite all the debate and controversy that “Cat Person” has stirred up, it depicts a pretty common dating experience—so common, in fact, that it verges on the banal. It’s about two people trying to figure each other out with imperfect information and a lack of self-knowledge.
When you’re young, you don’t know what you want. You flex and flow. Anything is possible. And so you get into situations that don’t quite feel right, but you don’t know why. This is natural. It’s only through experiences that don’t feel right that we begin to develop an intuition for what does feel right. As we grow older, we acquire taste. We become more discerning. I like this. I don’t like that. We develop an inner voice to guide us through new and murky experiences, and most importantly, we learn to trust that voice.