tricktster:

tricktster:

i just saw cats i have just been sitting in my car in the parking lot for 30 minutes trying to process it when i get home i’m going to share some thoughts

Okay. I think I’m ready to start talking about this.

This is going to be a lot, so I will do a courtesy text break. If you’re on a device that doesn’t allow for a text break, I’m… I’m so fucking sorry.

When I was a kid, I had two chief obsessions: convincing my parents to get me a pet, and musicals. Well, specifically one musical: Annie. In the early 90s there was this televised talent search to cast the next Annie on Broadway, and as a child with a flair for the dramatique, I became pretty obsessed with the thought of how great it would be to be me! a kid! but famous! On Broadway!!!

Obviously I did not get the part, because I did not go to the audition, because both of my parents worked full time and were not inclined to switch careers to Stage Parents at that juncture. Also, obviously, because it would have been a real crushing blow for 6 year old me to discover that what I believed was “dancing” looked to the outside observer like “a medical emergency.” But! My mom bought me a cassette tape of the soundtrack and then took me to see the touring production of Annie when it came to town, and holy shit, I was just star struck with the entire concept of stage musicals after that. I thought they were the most incredible thing on earth, and I wanted to see every single one.

I remember the exact moment that my perspective shifted. It was 1998, I was 9, and I had just turned the TV on to PBS in the hopes of catching some Wishbone. Instead, I saw this:

Obviously, I didn’t understand what I was looking at, because to my inexperienced (and absolutely correct) eyes, what I was seeing was a clown in rags singing the world’s most boring song, forever. Then the camera cut to the audience, and there, in the aisles, were more awful clowns, lurching around, getting in people’s faces, a blur of leotards and faux fur. I was concerned. I got my mother. “What is this?” I asked, pointing at the screen.

“Oh god.” She said. “It’s Cats.”

The pieces fell into place. I had heard of Cats. I had desperately wanted to see Cats. It had both of my interests! But this…

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“I have no idea.” My mom said. “Your dad and I saw it on Broadway, and when we left, we both agreed that we’d pay twice the price of those tickets to get those three hours of our lives back.” She shook her head, and walked back into the kitchen. I stared at the TV for a moment longer, then turned it off. I had just learned something that rocked my 9 year old world to its core:

Musicals could be terrible.

I am 31 years old now, and I still like musicals, but until today, I’d avoided Cats at all costs. Don’t get me wrong, I’d skimmed the wikipedia, I’d used photos for comic effect, I was aware that someone named Rum Tum Tugger was involved, and I knew, vaguely, that Cats was about something called Jellicles that were competing to die. I was also well aware that a movie had been made, and that it had developed a reputation as a total shitshow from the second it was released.

Now, I like bad movies a lot. Like, I’ve seen all the Twilight films in theaters. I get genuine joy from watching movies like The Room, Manos: The Hands of Fate and The Wicker Man. When my friend mentioned wanting to see Cats at brunch today, I was immediately in, since I’d heard that they were releasing a version with improved CGI after the first round of reviews came out, and I wanted to get in while I could still see the worst possible version. I want to establish that my friend and I were on the same page. We knew this movie was going to suck, and our plan included me smuggling in two of those 5 oz bottles of wine in my purse.

I’m thinking back to the moment where we gave our tickets to the checker, 4 hours ago BC. “What are you seeing?” He asked us. “Cats!” We both laughed. He gave us what was, in retrospect, a sinister smile. “Awesome.” He said ominously.

During the trailers, it quickly became obvious that the social order was about to fall apart. This theater had assigned seating, but even though the theater definitely wasn’t full, people were just kind of sitting wherever. I realized after a while that there were two camps in that theater; a minority were taking their kids to the movie about kitties, and the majority were here to see a garbage fire. Notably missing: fans of the longest running Broadway Musical of All Time, Cats.

The lights dimmed, and bags started rustling. We were clearly not alone in sneaking alcoholic beverages into this theater. To reiterate, since my friend and I are not terrible assholes and had no intention of drinking and driving, we brought slightly less than one serving of wine for each of us.

We really should have just Ubered.

I sat in the parking lot afterward, and wrote as many thoughts out as I could while it was still fresh in my mind. Before I share them, I will provide you with my newly formed understanding of what the plot of Cats is: A human being is driving a car, which contains a burlap sack, which contains a cat whose name I never learned, who is our protagonist. She is thrown out of the car by the human, and is discovered by approximately 30 Jellicle Cats (more on that below). They introduce themselves to her, one by one, over the course of several hours, and then one of them dies. That’s it. That’s the framework we have to work with. The rest of this post is pieced together from what I shared with various group texts immediately after the film.

At first, the visual appearance of the cats is jarring to the point of distraction. The size of the cats is wildly inconsistent from shot to shot, and the relative size of the props and sets to the cats makes absolutely no sense. At one point, they’ll just look like a normal human eating a normal sized chicken leg, then they’ll suddenly be eating a shrimp bigger than their mouths could possibly fit around, and they’ll eat it in one bite.

After Protagonist Cat emerges from the burlap sack, she is surrounded by a bunch of cats who begin singing a song to explain that they are Jellicle Cats. The song occasionally includes lyrics that seem like they should define what a Jellicle is, but then you listen to it, and it’s just like “A Jellicle Cat has a tail and paws!” i.e. indistinguishable from any definition of A Regular Cat.

The cats seem to communicate in three ways: dancing, song, and nuzzling. Each cat seems to have their own unique dance style, except when they don’t, and whatever they are communicating through these dances seems to be understandable only by Jellicle Cats. Protagonist Cat does a lot of ballet. As she danced, I genuinely tried to parse if she was showing us that she was happy? Sad? Anxious? I guess that’s up to us to interpret, because it’s the same fucking dance every time.

The nuzzling is also bewildering, because it seems to be used interchangeably for every type of affection, whether romantic or platonic. As a result, everyone looks like they are just about to kiss, but nobody ever kisses. Cats with romantic attachments nuzzle and gaze at each other the exact same way that the youngest actors do to the venerable Dame Judy Dench, rendering the whole gesture wildly nonsexual. And yet! It always feels like this whole mess of cats is on the verge of fucking!

We start out in a graveyard, where the cats do a dance that communicates nothing. The cats are all more or less nude at this point except for one cat that is wearing a top hat and a spangled vest. We are informed that he is a magician. He has a magic wand that is actually a scaled up pencil, and even though he looks like this, he is somehow the Protagonist Cat’s romantic interest.