Catwoman, the Novelization

Books, books, books.  They’re like movies, but the visuals are in your imagination.  What you read comes to life in your head instead of on a screen.  The author comes up with a story and lets you come up with what it looks like.  Well, aside from picture books.  That’s a whole different thing, though.  Let’s stick to words.

The reason I’m writing about books is that I recently read one that pertains to the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  That’s right.  Nearly four years since writing about a book called The Disaster Artist, which was about Tommy Wiseau and the making of The Room, I’m going to be writing about another book that is related to a different movie.  There’s a little bit more before getting to the book, though.

I spent the opening of this post talking about visualizing the story in your head.  But there are some books where the story has been visualized for you.  They’re called novelizations, which are books based on movies or television shows.  They retell what has already been brought to screen.  A wide array of movies have had novelizations.  In fifth grade, I read a copy of Back to the Future III.  A few years ago, I read a novelization of The Abyss.  Now I have read a novelization of the movie Catwoman.

For the most part, the book was very close to the movie.  It had all of the same irritating aspects.  Catwoman was one in a long line of Catwomen that existed throughout time.  Patience had the relationship with the detective who took way too long to figure out that she was Catwoman.  The dialogue was just as terrible as it was on screen.  I appreciated the story a little bit more because I understood the potential of the villain as a threatening force, but that didn’t make Catwoman any better.

What helped was a series of chapters that weren’t in the movie.  Not because they were chapters in a book and the movie didn’t have chapters.  There were three chapters that detailed information that was not present in the movie.  I’m going to go over those three chapters in an attempt to share how they helped the story.

First, let me set up the chapters themselves.  When Patience was resurrected by the cats, she sought out some help.  She ended up confiding in a woman named Ophelia Powers (I just realized that the woman helps Patience harness her powers and her name is basically “oh, feel your powers”).  The woman gave Patience a book.  The chapters that will be described were excerpts from the book.  They were different tales of people whose lives had been changed by cats.

Chapter Seventeen – The Lady of the Beasts

This chapter tells the story of a Minoan servant named Aktana who served a selfish woman on an island.  That woman bossed people around in the name of a Goddess, yet didn’t respect the Goddess.  When a volcano erupted, Aktana fled the island under the urging of a “sand-cat.”  She hid with the cat’s owner in a storage building on another land while the volcanic debris fell around them.

The title of the chapter came from the Goddess, who was known as The Lady of the Beasts.  The cat seemed to have been sent by the Goddess to save a strong woman who was being undervalued and put in the path of danger.  This lined up with the background of Patience becoming the Catwoman.  Her hard work at her cosmetics advertising job went unappreciated.  She had stumbled upon the higher-ups being evil, like the woman Aktana was serving being disrespectful to the Goddess.  She had been killed for her devotion to her job, as Aktana almost was.  It was a way of showing why Patience was given her cat powers.

Chapter Twenty – The Poet and the Inkmaker’s Daughter

Ukon was the daughter of a drunken inkmaker.  She handled the ink shop while he spent his nights drinking.  He would then come home and beat her.  One day, while he was out drinking, Ukon gave a poet named Ga-sho a finer ink than he could afford without charging him the extra price.  Her father was not impressed by this and beat her badly.  When she awoke, a woman was telling her to leave and not go back.  She went with the woman and saw that her house was on fire.  It burned with her father still inside.  The woman turned out to be Ga-sho’s cat.

This was another chapter meant to give insight into why Patience was chosen to be a Catwoman while also giving some history of the whole cats saving people thing.  Ukon, like Patience, had heart.  Ukon cared about Ga-sho and helped him with his poetry.  Patience felt bad for Laurel Hedare when she was passed over for a younger model.  Their sympathy for these people led them to dark places.  Ukon was beat because she cared about the poet and his work.  Patience fell into a trap because she cared about Laurel’s sad story.

Chapter Twenty-Three – Midityi Goes Hunting

A widow named Midityi lived in a town with tigers loose nearby.  The Maharajah of Alwar came to the area to hunt a tiger and he used single women as bait.  Midityi fled and encountered a cat that gave her powers to fight back.  Midityi turned into a tiger woman and went after The Maharajah.

Here’s where these chapters fell into place.  Midityi was like Patience in that she was given powers to fight back against a bad world.  Midityi fought the Maharajah who kidnapped women as bait.  Patience fought a cosmetics company that produced dangerous concoctions.  They were women trying to make the world a better place by using the their cat powers.

These three chapters of the Catwoman novelization gave a background to both the powers and to Patience’s coming to terms with it.  They were a beginning, middle, and end to the realization of her powers.  The first showed her that the cats had saved her from her old life.  The second showed her that she should use her compassion to help others.  The third showed her what she could do with her powers.  It was a three chapter story about Patience learning how to become a Catwoman.

It would be hard to include the three chapters in the movie Catwoman without it killing any of the pacing that had been built up.  It killed the pacing of the book, for sure.  Seventeen chapters into reading about Patience’s life and her problems with Hedare, there was a chapter about someone from another time going through a different struggle.  There was no warning.  It just suddenly happened.  The three chapters of background history were the three strongest chapters, however.  They didn’t suffer from the attempted cool of everything else.  There was no forced dialogue and the characters felt real.  The influence of the movie’s script was gone and the author was able to write her own stories within the story that was Catwoman.

As I said earlier, most of the novelization felt like the movie.  The only real difference was that there was slightly more insight into Patience’s thoughts.  There was also the annoying little detail where the book differentiated between the Patience and Catwoman personalities.  I got really irritated whenever she was called Catwoman in the descriptions.  Ugh.

Catwoman was a story with many problems, in both film and novel form.  The novelization tried to improve it by giving some background to the powers.  It let the readers imagine something in their heads without simply replaying the movie.  There were deleted scenes that we were allowed to interpret in our own way.  And it was better than the movie.  Most of the time, when people say the book was better than the movie, they’re talking about movies that were adapted from the book.  In this case, the book was better (slightly) than the movie, but it was the other way around.  The movie was first.  The book was later.  It’s movie magic on the page.

I’m going to leave a few notes here because there are some things I need to leave you with:

• Here’s the post for Catwoman.
• And here are the posts for The Room and The Disaster Artist.
• This is a bonus post, and as such, there’s still the regular post for the week.  Here’s the post for Baby Geniuses 3-5.