As is in vogue these days, I saw “Cats” high and I must impart to you all, the cognitively-bounded masses, that the film is a misunderstood masterpiece.
Let me be clear: I acknowledge that “Cats” is very, very bad at being a certain type of movie — which may be precisely the type of movie that you expected and/or wanted to see. This is true.
In fact, I cannot say that “Cats” is particularly “good” at being any type of movie, per se — because declaring something “good” really requires us to have a body of films in its genre to compare it against, and I’m not sure there’s anything that plays quite on the revolutionary terrain of “Cats.”
But I do believe that one can experience “Cats” with a mind opened (perhaps chemically) on a certain reading of the film that makes it, in a word, transcendent. That renders all of its foibles into expressions of a deeper theme and begs us to invent new vocabulary to describe what exactly it is doing.
Let me tell you how the expanded mind must receive “Cats,” and the concepts we need to add to our lexicon in its wake.
First: “Cats” takes its surreal premise deadly seriously at a thematic and aesthetic level.
Andrew Lloyd Weber wrote a Broadway musical about the societies of cats explaining themselves to people, starring people as cats. Consider that. Here’s how you could’ve written that synopsis just as honestly:
An alien intelligence lives among us. We have conducted our lives in parallel to it for millennia — superficially orbiting each other, but never really seeing each other, or possessing the concepts to do so.
One day, in a burst of ambition, the alien decides to try and transcribe the experience of its bizzare-o religious death cult society into a form that the humans would understand: that of a Broadway musical. To breach the bounds of empathy, they represent themselves to us in the forms of men and women — at least, men and women as they conceive them. These unreal creatures try and relate to us how the aliens conceive of themselves, individually and collectively, in our vocabulary, and tell us what gives meaning to their rituals and traditions. To make the experience familiar for its audience, the alien renders its self-expression into how it thinks a three-act structure probably works, with “characters” and “plot” and “pacing” and “mood.” It is a rough attempt, but a noble one.
The creatures we see on the screen before us, of course, are never real. Cats do not look like Rebel Wilson covered in fur. They are irreal, and yet it is precisely their irreality that hints at something more profound than a normal human character behind its eye — they are the cipher to another quality of mind altogether. We require, here, our first term of art to describe what we are seeing:
The uncanny mountain. The uncanny valley, we all know, refers to when a CGI creation looks so close to human as to almost trick us into believing it — but, perversely, that postured near-humanity registers as danger and evokes revulsion when the viewer notices all the subtle ways in which it is not quite right. The uncanny mountain, on the other hand, is a parallel and opposite experience. It is the experience of seeing something that is almost human in many ways. Yet it insists to us, openly, that it is not human, that it represents something more, something superhuman, and that makes its eerie facsimile of human features covering the unnatural thing behind them actually alluring, fascinating, the opposite effect of the uncanny valley. It is the feeling of looking on a god in its almost-human form, or a demon that slips us a peek of the horns under its hat.
That is the feeling one is overcome by watching the uncanny human-cat hybrids dance — they move like people, and yet one can detect in the artificial shiver of their graphically rendered fur as they spin and contort that they are but the shadows cast by another reality outside the cave. In that way, the question “why are the cats sexy” is the wrong one altogether — of course they are sexy, they are urgently sexual creatures locked in a fertility-death cult — the reason they might appear sexy to us is that we are only prepared to receive their essence disguised through Taylor Swift’s hips. The wrongness of their bodies itself is a metaphor for an unsurpassable separation between us and the expressive force outside our cave.
Read through this lens, all of the surrealism of the movie “Cats” resonates as an artifact of the incredible distance traversed in trying to translate cat consciousness for humans. Of course the chorus line of roaches should have small human faces, think the cats in their cute little writer’s room, for we are trying to represent them to people, after all. Of course the magical cat should be represented in a top hat, making disembodied trombones float through the air in celebration while bouquets of flowers burst out of the aether. That will be how people understand that he is magical. Of course the story should shift, within 30 seconds, from the most tragic song’s final chord, to a laughing villain threatening his victim in a dark alley, to the broad and joyful chords of “Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat,” as that is what the humans would call an “emotional transition.”
In this way, the film is able to overcome the viewer with laughter at its absurdities without ceding to the emptiness of camp. It employs what I believe is the second piece of new aesthetic vocabulary that “Cats” requires from us, deep camp.
“Camp,” of course, occurs when an artistic creation is so poor (often deliberately) at mimicking the reality that it purports to represent that the viewer laughs at its shortcomings. “Deep camp,” par contre, exhibits its shortcomings as thematically relevant to the meta-oeuvre. When we are watching “Cats,” we know, as we have already established, that we are not looking at real cats. Moreover, we are not intended to be deceived that we are looking at real cats. We are fully aware at all times that these are not actual cats, and we are invited to experience their irreality as a gesture towards an impossible translation — that of the cats presenting for us a version of their reality in a format in which it cannot naturally exist.
It is therefore with joy and acceptance that we greet the absurdity of Ian McKellan dumbly stooped with his face hovering half an inch over a bowl of milk, badly lapping at it with his all-too-human tongue, a poor representation of catness indeed — and yet noble in its affect, as we are made to grapple, in that image, with how deep the chasm lies between our two realities (Sir Ian’s and the cat’s). It is with a kind of respect that we hear Idris Elba’s laughably feeble hissss at his co-stars and how unspeakably stupid the whole line of performers appears simulating “cat applause” by alternating their left and right paws up and down. It is unbearably bad, and that is fitting, and its badness is itself a source of meaning in the art.
[It is, in fact, sometimes so unbearably campy that I cannot accept that the creators of this masterpiece did not know what the movie was doing. Here is their self-aware signature, if nowhere else so clearly. Sir Ian McKellan yowling in cat does not happen by accident. Sir Ian always knows what the movie is doing. He is a knight.]
The third term of art we require to appreciate “Cats” is what I would call decriticalization. It describes the sensation of being taken out of one’s critical mind, leaving one more receptive and vulnerable to the appeals of an art. As one watches a film committed to its well-established genre, one is able to separate oneself from the experience of the film in order to critique its execution of certain expected genre elements. In “Saving Private Ryan,” for example, we can stop and appreciate how realistic the war cinematography is, in part because we are already anticipating the beats of the story while we are supposed to be experiencing it. In a romantic comedy, we may groan at how predictable the plot is, or appreciate small subversions of the formula. In a Marvel movie, we may spend the entire running time critiquing style.
In “Cats,” the film loudly declares early on that the viewer is not permitted to anticipate anything intelligible. As the second cat we are introduced to jovially sets enslaved human-mice hybrids to play in a cupboard band while swallowing human-cockroach hybrids, the viewer is violently decriticalized. We are neutered of our expectations, and with them, our critical faculties. We are confronted with the possibility that this movie could do anything — anything at all — and so experience it in a state of wonder and/or suspense at its vision and/or terror.
It is this suspension of the critical mind that grants the film latitude to play emotionally on the viewer. Because we have not steeled ourselves against the tropes of any genre, I am in full and genuine suspense when “The Magical Mister Mistoffelees” becomes a public trial over whether the titular cat can reapparate the kidnapped leader of the cats before she is murdered by a criminal cat on a remote gangplank. Will he do it? Are the first four times he has failed just baiting the audience’s expectations for a final success, and emotional release? Or will he fail at his ultimate attempt, too, and be disemboweled by Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat in retribution? I have no beliefs left. These are all possible worlds.
In this state of critical vulnerability, even the tired conventional appeals of “Cats” have greater resonance. When Jennifer Hudson wails her sad little cat song, I can’t gird myself against that pain. This may partially have to do with the weed. When the cat society breathlessly receives its hallowed leader, Old Deuteronomy, I too feel touched by a transcendent presence as she passes, grazing their blessed cheeks.
***
Two notes on “Cats” that do not fit precisely into the themes of this review otherwise:
First, I have not seen the original 1998 PBS recording in its entirety, though I have seen 15 minutes or so of it in passing. I have never, of course, attended a live performance. Nevertheless, I could immediately detect which song was the new one, “Beautiful Ghosts,” and whispered as much in my best demure, not-at-all-high aside to my wife in the theater, who confirmed. There is something in that new song’s lyric and melody that sounds too easily human. In Andrew Lloyd Weber’s original score, every song subverts your musical expectation in some way — a slightly wonky tune, a lyric that drags on a few syllables after it should have returned to tonic. It all sounds like a jerky translation of a story that might have been written, originally, in cat.
Second, the moment when Sir Ian McKellan topples his cat enemy from the end of a long pier by forcefully exclaiming “I am Firefrorefiddle!” reminded me of another career moment of his involving an enemy on a long pier. Although “You shall not pass” doesn’t quite have the same oomph as “Firefrorefiddle!” I expect the internet will remedy the original LOTR footage for us soon enough.