Written by Old Bluffer 19th Feb 2007
Selina Kyle is a timid PA for ruthless (and chauvinist) businessman, Max Shreck. She is belittled constantly by her boss, but deludes herself into thinking the job is good enough to put up with it.
When she is caught by Shreck going through confidential files though, her fate is sealed. "How industrious" Shreck says as she babbles on about assembling the notes for him - and as this is Christopher Walken, we can see that the dowdy Gotham secretary is doomed.
Having Christopher Walken as your boss would have to be the most stressful office job in the world!
Selina is oblivious to all this though, and continues to talk, revealing that she guessed her boss's password would be "Geraldo", after his creepy stuffed chihuahua! She also makes it quite clear that she knows all about Shreck's innovative designs for a power plant that actually works to suck power from Gotham City, stockpiling it for nefarious purposes.
This earns her a Walken thin-lipped-smile-of-impending-death.
"What did curiousity do, to the cat?" he asks her, herding her towards the window at the same time.
"How can you be so mean to someone so meaningless?!" Selina responds, playing the Helpless Female card, but when it becomes evident that Schreck is unmoved, she finds a bit of backbone:
"OK, go ahead, intimidate me. Bully me if it makes you feel big. I mean, it's not like you can just kill me!"
"Actually, it's a lot like that."
This smile doesn't mean that everything is going to be all right...
Shreck then moves ominously closer, before grinning and saying "Huh?! HUH?!" - the loveable old rascal, he was only joking with her!
Selina barely has time to laugh with relief when Shreck turns and hurls her forcibly through the window, where she falls hundreds of feet to the snow dusted street below.
Notice the typical Burton scenery in the lefthand pic.
What follows is open to interpretation, as Selina Kyle's powers aren't granted in quite as obvious a fashion as Gotham's other fantastic villains.
Pfeiffer's clothes were smeared all over with tuna for this scene!
As she lies bleeding in the snow, cats begin to emerge from the shadows, and each one blows some life essence into the dying girl's mouth. Presumably this happens nine times, with each cat giving one of its lives to save her. This has a side effect that we see later too, in that Selina is gifted with the agility and strength of a feline, allowing her to leap and fight far better than a normal secretary...
The cats then leap all over her body and even gnaw her fingers in order to revive her.
This bloodthirsty feline has no interest in helping and obviously just wants a snack!
We next see Selina back at her flat, looking wild and clearly unhinged from her strange rescue from the world of the dead.
She shrieks in rage at the sheer sappyness of her apartment and starts smashing it up. She then does what any self respecting Gotham personality would do, and sets about crafting herself a distinctive costume.
The next time we see her she is of course Cat Woman, an amoral, angry persona, not altogether unlike Batman.
This film shows the struggle between Selina and Catwoman in a sympathetic light - although she is capable of evil, there is still hope for her to master her dark side as Wayne has (mostly) managed to do.
It's amazing what you can knock up with some old bin bags and a sewing machine.
"Betrayal"
Not really, they don't really have an alliance, so to speak.
Would this count for Animal? Even thought they didn't eat her, they did play some part in the scene.
False Alarm? Although it's not quite like a fluffy cat (Boom! Boom!), it did seem like he was going to push her out of the window at first.
False alarm is good, all the signs are there. I dunno about animal, since it is how she was revived, but has nothing to do with how she was killed.
I say betrayal because it is pretty good worker-boss relations not to kill one another.
One more thing, the second image of her lying on the ground doesn't show up.
You mean number 6?
Right, it doesn't show on the writeup
Looking at the film's Wkipedia page, I discovered a word I'd never heard before.
Defenestration: The act of throwing someone or something out of a window.
Who says that this site doesn't enhance your word power?
So time to add a new category?
Thanks, the image should now show.
I thought about Betrayal, but there really isn't much of an alliance between the two, she is just his PA.
There is more of a case to be made for False Alarm, and I nearly added it in fact. What stopped me was partly the lack of time between him laughing and then killing her anyway. Also the False Alarm category is really for when something external to the killer scares the victim - rather than the killer just toying with his prey.
Defenestration would certainly have a lot of deaths in it...
I think Selina Kyle is the first Gotham character to have true "super powers" in the film franchise isn't she?
The Joker is just twisted and the Penguin is merely physically deformed. Batman never has any powers either (one of the reasons he is such a cool comic book hero in my opinion).
Later on in the series I don't recall the Riddler having any powers of note either, I'm not sure about Two-Face.
Poison Ivy and Mr Freeze obviously do, but that is in the fourth installment.
I'm not sure I class Batman Begins as part of the series, it feels like the start of a completely new one to me. What do you think?
[quote old bluffer]I think Selina Kyle is the first Gotham character to have true "super powers" in the film franchise isn't she?[/quote]Debatably. Remember, she gets shot in limbs, but counts those as "deaths." The incidents she "dies" from (falling into kitty litter, through a glass house) she probably would have survived anyway. I do reckon this counts as a death, mind - she falls from at least seven stories.That's because it is. It's a re-boot. Why do you think Two-Face and The Joker are in next one?
BTW, are you going to use my Shreck write-up I sent in today (just to be helpful)?
I wasn't necessarily speaking about her nine lives when I referred to super powers. More her enhanced agility and fighting prowess. She was just a normal secretary before her resurrection as Catwoman, but then turned into an olympic grade gymnast, expert whip fighter and martial artist etc.
That's a good point. Or it could just be something completely random, like the rest of the film...
DEFINENTLY!