There’s a scene in The Batman that’s raising some eyebrows. In the scene, Catwoman, played by Zoë Kravitz, enters her friend Anika’s apartment. She calls out to her, referring to her as “baby.” This, plus the fact that Catwoman is often portrayed as bi in the comics, got some people’s bisexual alarm bells ringing. Among them was Matt Galea, an interview for Pedestrian. In an interview with Kravitz, Galea wanted to know once and for all whether this interpretation was accurate.
According to Kravitz, the answer is a definitive yes.
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Is Catwoman Bisexual?
“When I expressed how happy I was to finally see Catwoman portrayed as a bisexual woman in the cinematic universe, Zoë nodded emphatically,” Galea wrote. Kravitz went on to say that she agreed. “That’s definitely the way I interpreted that, that they had some kind of romantic relationship.”
There it is. Definitive proof that we’re finally seeing a canonically on-screen, bisexual Catwoman, right? Not quite. In another interview with the same publication, director Matt Reeves was less enthusiastic. “She’s drawn to strays because she was a stray and so she really wants to care for these strays because she doesn’t want to be that way anymore,” said Reeves, quoting Kravitz. “Anika is like a stray and she loves her,” he continued.
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He even went so far as to say that Anika “represents this connection that she has to her mother who she lost, who was a stray anymore.” He does say that we can “interpret it that way for sure,” though it wasn’t their intention. “She has an intimacy with that character and it’s a tremendous and deep caring for that character, more so than a sexual thing, but there was meant to be quite an intimate relationship between them.”
Not Again
Seems this is another case where a movie-maker got to sidestep the question and leave us in an LGBTQ+ grey area. I’m getting flashbacks to Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok. “Val is bi in the comics & I was faithful to that in her depiction,” Thompson tweeted. “But her sexuality isn’t explicitly addressed in Thor: Ragnarok.”
YES! Val is Bi in the comics & I was faithful to that in her depiction. But her sexuality isn’t explicitly addressed in Thor: Ragnarok. https://t.co/hmb5lYN5to
— Tessa Thompson (@TessaThompson_x) October 23, 2017
If an actor faithfully plays a known bisexual character but it isn’t explicitly addressed, are they even bisexual? If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around to hear it, is Catwoman still bisexual?
My head-canon is nodding emphatically. What about yours?
The Batman debuts in theaters on March 3.
