'Catwoman' and the Campy Genius of Toxic Beauty Cream
17 years after Halle Berry saved the world from addictive face cream, we're still left with more questions than answers. But who needs those?
Halle Berry’s Catwoman, which hit theaters exactly 17 years ago, could not have been made today. Not because the multibillion-dollar comic book megabrand DC would have a problem with the fact that Catwoman is so horribly made that it’s practically astonishing—that’s their bread and butter—but because there’s simply no way that a film about an addictive, toxic beauty cream could get past the first round of script revisions in the age of Into the Gloss.
And yet, that little jar of skincare magic is what gave us the most deliciously campy, queerest superhero film of all time. On this day in 2004, Halle Berry managed to usurp decades of iconic Catwomen to become the ultimate, defining version of the feline fatale. Dedicated nerds could write thesis upon thesis disagreeing, but they’d be dead wrong. Michelle Pfeiffer had her instantly recognizable suit stitching, Anne Hathaway had the streamlined elegance made for fighting, Eartha Kitt had the cat eye mask and jeweled necklaces, but Halle Berry? She had a completely impractical, undoubtedly uncomfortable costume comprised of torn-up leather pants, leather bustier, cat helmet, and gloves with diamond claws. It’s so completely based in sex and titillation that it’s almost offensive, which is exactly what makes it brilliant. 2004’s Catwoman shirked any preconceived notions of what the beloved Batman antihero had to be in favor of an origin story completely separate from any canonical notes. It’s the kind of pure batshit brilliance that could only be made in the early aughts when writers rooms were shotgunning Red Bulls between lines of coke and throwing darts at a wall of franchise names to see which intellectual property they could adapt into a film that looks unmistakably like a video game next. We’ve got our Resident Evils and our Aeon Fluxs, but nothing, nothing compares to Catwoman.
It requires a whole lot of boldness to pluck a beloved character from an entire universe that writers and artists spent decades crafting the intricacies of just to plop her in the middle of a computer-generated, nameless city, kill her, bring her back to life on a garbage island with superpowers instilled by an army of ancient cats, and have her world-saving mission be that she must fight off Sharon Stone and her bleach blonde pixie cut, but that’s just the kind of fourth-wave feminist manifesto that Catwoman is. Its director, mononym icon Pitof, was simply unconcerned with any of the inevitable backlash. He wanted to make the kind of harebrained, poppers-fueled, gay fever dream that French men only dream of after spending a night at Café Cox in Paris, and by god did he succeed.
Catwoman, whose real name in this film is Patience Phillips (because, and follow me here, she is too patient) reawakens with a new lease on life and is determined to figure out who killed her the night before when she was delivering art mockups to the top-secret labs of Hedare Beauty, stumbling right into information no civilian was ever supposed to see. After fleeing into the bowels of the laboratory, Laurel Hedare and her spiked pixie cut order her cronies to flush the pipes. I, too, would be furious if I had to die by being comically pounded in the face with sewage until I tumbled into a lake of garbage, so it’s not surprising that Patience is a tad miffed when she’s reanimated by a cat meowing into her mouth.
After dickmatizing a Hedare Henchman in a club with her feminine feline wiles, Patience/Catwoman pounds information out of the guy in an alley fight, finding out that Hedare’s new mega-hyped beauty cream, Beau-Line, is deeply toxic. Gee, you don’t say, a cream that claims to not “just hide the effects of aging, [but] actually reverses them” isn’t safe to smear across your visage? Could’ve fooled me! It also apparently fooled the FDA, who apparently told Sharon Stone’s pixie spikes that their trials of the product never saw any of Beau-Line’s side effects, which consumers use if they stop using the product—headaches, nausea, fainting spells, and the eventual destruction of your entire face?! They never saw this?
Forget being unethical and a terrible business model, it’s really just a scheme that doesn’t make any sense! Even if Beau-Line is addictive, there’s no way that they could keep everyone using it consistently, making it mighty easy to figure out what would be causing withdrawal symptoms! When I don’t drink or eat processed sugar for a few weeks, my skin glows, which I can easily attribute to refusing those two things as I am an adult human with a working brain and simple deduction skills. If my face fully starts sizzling when I stop using a beauty product, I’d probably attribute it to said beauty product!
But Laurel Hedare simply does not give a single solitary shit about her product essentially being a bougie St. Ives Apricot Scrub, she’ll stop at nothing for Beau-Line to hit the shelves, for reasons that are never made clear. Is it because her husband is replacing her as the face of the company with the younger woman he’s fucking, which gives her the chance to deliver a fat third-degree burn?
Or is it because she’s obsessed with the idea of making botox in a bottle for naive customers everywhere, something that I actually could get on board with? Later in the film, Laurel tells Catwoman that continued use of Beau-Line makes your skin like “living marble…and you can’t feel a thing!” Peering past the cloudy, sweet cream foam that is Catwoman’s plot makes me think that there may have been some commentary about spousal abuse that got lost somewhere in the editing bay, but maybe that’s just me looking for answers where I know answers were never meant to lie.
Whatever Laurel’s reasoning may be, Catwoman, with the plight of all meek graphic designers everywhere on her shoulders, knows she must stop it. And her plan to do just that? Wrap a chain around the wheels of all the delivery trucks, hook the chain to one of them, and pull all the wheels from the cars. Never mind the hell that all the local Ulta managers are going to have to pay the next day! After she delays Beau-Line from being shipped out, Catwoman launches into a knock-down, drag-out, claw-scraping, metal-pole-whipping fight with Sharon Stone’s rock-hard face and even rock harder Got2b Glue’d pixie cut spikes. Through repeated kicks, punches, and scratches, Laurel’s health meter takes no damage thanks to the face-freezing wonders of Beau-Line, which we know covers herself with from head to toe after she’s seen sipping a martini and lubing herself up with the stuff.
How does the purported science of Beau-Line work? I’m desperate to know. Pitof had to have thought about it. Why won’t he do us all a favor and come out with it? Too afraid, hiding away at some villa in France? Show yourself, coward! The public demands to know if Laurel Hedare canonically had cheeks of steel.
Even for being as revolutionary as it is, Beau-Line is apparently still just glorified spackle, because once Catwoman gets a few more hits on her, Laurel’s face starts to look like mine after I wash my face with the Massachusettes tap water at my boyfriend’s parents’ house: flaking like Maldon salt. Once Laurel’s sent flying out a window and holding onto a pole for dear life. Upon seeing her marred face in the reflection, Laurel does what any skincare guru would do after seeing her empire and face literally crumble before her: she let’s go! Sharon Stone straight up succumbs to death at the end of Catwoman because she can’t deal with looking ugly for even one second. Legendary behavior.
Then, the production team threw a Sally Beauty dummy with a pixie cut from 200 feet in the air and filmed it falling for a full Sex and the City “Splat!” moment. From there on out, the day is saved and no one bothers to open an investigation into the FDA to figure out how the hell women’s faces were turning to marble without anyone noticing.
It’s just so beautifully, gloriously stupid. Catwoman, after decades and decades, finally gets her own spinoff film and her Big Bad is…an evil face cream. An evil, toxic, addicting face cream! That simply exists within the film because its purveyors want to make money. Maybe Catwoman is really a commentary on the evils of capitalism and the incessant scam of the modern skincare industry, but that’s another story for another day. Gwyneth Paltrow can sleep easy tonight. What was the inspiration for this? Why beauty cream?! Why did they style Sharon Stone like the portraits of hair models that hang in mid-level salons run by women with expired cosmetology licenses? Questions will abound forever, or at least until I’m finally able to get ahold of Pitof, who could not be reached for this story no matter how many exhaustive efforts I really did try.
Catwoman may be a film of its time, but it will always be a masterpiece of now. The last 17 years have only been kind to this film. If Catwoman had been made now, we’d have to endure a whole episode of The Dewy Dudes about it. Well, you would. I have never listened to a straight man say anything. We’d have to sift through listicles from The Strategist and The Cut about which products really are good for antiaging and I’d be duped into buying one using the link on the site, forgetting that they make a commission. There would be a new viral tweet every week for a whole month about which product from The Ordinary makes your face disintegrate like Beau-Line (the Granactive Retinoid 2% in Squalane, by the way). Gays would be making incessant jokes about Madonna’s current rock-hard face being the result of Sharon Stone’s beauty cream (it’s just vitamins). No, no. Catwoman came exactly when we needed it, but it will continue to remain a camp classic. There’s no other film where a man breaks his whole hand on Sharon Stone’s face, and there never will be.
Catwoman is, simply, a once in a nine-lifetime film.