We Need to Talk about Cats
About once a week or so I’ll go to the movie theater to see a film, usually by myself. I enjoy the way movies make me think about the world and my place in it but I struggle to unlock that experience unless I detach myself from the very world I live in. In other words, I go to the theater to force myself to actually pay attention to what I’m watching. After last night, I’m not sure I want to pay attention to movies anymore. In fact, after last night, I’m not sure about anything anymore. This is because last night, I went to see Cats.
Half a dozen friends and I took our seats. The previews before the movie almost exclusively advertised coming films featuring either animated humans, graphics-assisted live-action animals, or trolls, with each trailer more horrifying than the last. Someone whisper-shouted “They show these to children?!” These previews served as a nightmare fuel aperitif but nothing could have prepared us for the full body blackout of the main feature.
Watching Cats was the visual equivalent of eating cats.
The movie opens focused on a cloth bag writhing in the hands of an obscured, presumably human, figure. The bag is tossed into an alley where its contents punch and dig until a slender white cat-person emerges from the bag’s opening. Note that this is just a full-on person in a fuzzy skin suit done up in makeup and CGI to look like a cat-person. Not a cat. Definitely not a cat. A cat-person. This was a choice. But so this horrific creature immediately prompted ballistic laughter from the audience. People truly just fell apart. On screen, the arrival of a new face in the alley piqued the interest of the neighborhood’s existing residents, who began to poke their own increasingly ghastly cat-person heads out one by one. As each successive creature emerged, people only laughed harder. You’d see a cat slink across a trash can and you’d lose control of your tear ducts and then as you finally recovered your eyes and breath, a fucking cat in a tuxedo would pounce on top of an abandoned car and your chest would collapse all over again. And then they started singing.
“Oh God,” I shuddered.
“God had no hand in this,” said the person next to me.
In theory, Cats is a movie musical wherein a series of zany, hedonistic, diabolical, and hauntingly sexual felines take turns introducing themselves with personalized, non sequitur songs set amid London’s grimy underbelly. In practice, Cats is more of a religious experience than anything else because it’s for sure not like any movie or musical I’ve ever seen. Most of the high-profile faces were unrecognizable underneath their Catssassin’s Creed cosplays and the songs were largely incomprehensible. There were like ten entire sentences voiced outside the structure of a song, almost all of which were by Gandalf, who plays a character from the overlapped portion of a Bernie Sanders - Master Splinter Venn Diagram. Gandalf -fine, Ian McKellen- doesn’t do any singing and in the scene he’s introduced he barely speaks. Even still, every time he was shown my entire row imploded. Also, the songs had no real structure to begin with. Since their lyrics were all cribbed from T.S. Eliot’s original poems, the songs have no coherent shape and only one of them has any functional chorus. That song would be “Magical Mister Mistoffelees,” which is actually maybe kind of a banger. During that song, my row started shouting out Migos-style adlibs between the repeating bars of the chorus.
“Oh well I never was there ever -BDRRR- a cat so clever -CLEVER- as magical Mister Mistoffelees - BDRRR BDRRRR!”
Watching Cats was like looking into the eye of Sauron and liking what you saw.
At an early juncture in the movie, Rebel Wilson’s character is introduced. Her name is Jennyanydots and she hangs out in a human kitchen. All the items in the kitchen are naturally human size so even though Jennyanydots is clearly the human being Rebel Wilson, she prances throughout the set surrounded by giant ass chairs and dishware. She proceeds to blast the audience with a song and dance number during which she shows off her collection of computer-generated rats with the faces of human children. The ratlings are assembled in a string band and they play their little rat instruments admirably, considering they are doing so in front of a horde of dystopian predators who could eat them at any time. They are tiny and plump and overall the least mortifying thing so far. You’d think this rodential interlude would tide over the audience for at least the remainder of the scene but you’d be wrong because Jennyanydots then dares to unleash a fanciful and expertly choreographed parade of cockroaches, also with human faces. Each roach-person has two legs and four arms. And wings. And they jump and step in perfect time with masterful coordination until Jennyanydots begins picking them off and biting them in half. She treats her poor performers like they are the booth-side conveyor belt at a sushi restaurant but despite her ravenous appetite these remarkable insects keep stepping. They never break. This shows remarkable discipline and is probably why roaches have survived since the age of the dinosaurs. Jennyanydots then unzips her fur to show that she is wearing human clothes underneath, which, I mean, wow, but then she continues eating these poor majorettes! It seems she’s a monster who cannot be stopped but then as a matter of course she is stopped, if only because a new cat needs to introduce himself.
Enter Jason Derulo, styled in the cat equivalent of pimp clothes as Rum Tum Tugger (RTT). He verbally lassos all the female cats to follow him over to a milk bar where he performs a sexy monologue about how sexy and curious he is. The whole number gives off a nightclub vibe, with female cats drinking milk and loosening their limbs as RTT stands atop the bar gyrating. It was incredibly off-putting and audiences were left to think, “uhh wait was that basically a furry version of the Nelly Tip Drill video or am I just a freak for thinking that?” Nobody really laughed here and nobody wanted to make eye contact with anyone else. It was made worse by the fact that none of the cat-people had any CGI on their hands so it was just real human hands all the way down.
Watching Cats was like if Adult Swim roofied you.
Over the remainder of the movie, you see Idris Elba nude, two burglar cats leaning way too far into their Cockney accents, James Corden swan diving into a trash can, and Judi Dench looking dangerously close to a female Emperor Palpatine. What you realize eventually is that these cats are all competing to journey to the Heaviside Layer, a place which offers the promise of rebirth into one of the chosen cat’s remaining lives. Judi Dench plays a matriarch called Old Deuteronomy who is in charge of selecting the cat who will cross over. It is meant to be understood that cats have nine lives and so this rebirth is a gift but since we are never introduced to a cat who has experienced this rebirth, we cannot know for sure that reincarnation is possible. So, with reincarnation technically unproven, we have to acknowledge the possibility that the race to go to the Heaviside Layer is a suicide competition designed by cult leader Old Deut to reduce the cat population in London’s underbelly and thus free up more resources for those that remain. That she chooses the most decrepit cat to send off to her next life is played as a kindness but upon second inspection it gives off real eerie vibes of “killing poor people is virtuous.” That Old Deut is Jim Jones is not a take I ever expected to write but here we are.
In any case, you know how after Avatar came out there were stories about people committing suicide because they didn’t want to live unless it was on the movie’s fictional planet of Pandora? This is the opposite. I need to survive in order to protect our world from the Catpocalypse that is absolutely coming for us. A psychotherapist named Stacy Kaiser wrote that fans’ obsessions with Avatar was masking a more serious problem in their lives and that, “the movie opened up a portal for them to express their depression.” Yeah no, not the case here. There is no more serious problem facing me or the world right now than the existence of Cats. Unfortunately, more Cats might be the only solution. I’m going to see it again over the weekend.