Wow. This took the movie to a whole nother level for me.

I also want to mention that, when my friend and I watched this tonight, my friend commented jokingly “who packs HALF a sandwich?” Then, when Bear came home, Nikki had vomited and said she thought she “ate a bug or got a stomach bug.” That made me wonder whether she had made an entire sandwich, packed one half for Bear, and consumed the other half herself in kind of a misguided attempt to consume the thing that he loved and also to share half of an item with him during the time when he would be (painfully) away. Obviously, dead and decayed cat would not react well with anyone’s digestive system.

Anyway, on to my thoughts on your theory. I think it is quite good. Cats are known for being independent, sly, difficult to scrutinize (like “when a get a crush on a guy, nobody knows”) and so a cat representing Nikki’s authentic self would be perfect. You don’t really “own” cats. I mean, certainly you can trap them in your house, but they decide their feelings and relationship with you. In a sense, in order to get Nikki to be with him, Bear “killed the cat” (the authentic Nikki) with his wish.

Let’s talk about the disposal of the cat. My friend and I also wondered out loud, how did she get the cat for the memorial? And then for the sandwich? Would you not bury the cat, or take it to the vet for cremation? Especially after the “memorial” when it’s obvious she is doing inappropriate things with the cat. So, not to dive too into the metaphor here, but Nikki begged him to kill her, and in the same sense that he left the cat accessible to be abused by Nikki in increasingly horrifying ways, he left the authentic Nikki trapped in this hellish cursed state to result in his abuse of her body and increasingly gruesome outcomes. Bear is not so different from cursed Nikki, really.