I saw Cats the other day with my family. Yeah, I know. But it’s possible that you should, too (you’ll have to hurry; the cinema was virtually empty when we were there in Bristol on the 27th); let me try to explain why you should.
Some
cautionary asides at the outset, though, by way of full disclosure.
First, I’m
not that into musicals (though I liked Blood Brothers and I’m keen to see Avenue Q – if only because watching funny, goofy Sesame Street-style puppets
singing about schadenfreude or that 'the internet is for
porn' appeals to my inner adolescent. It's been out for around fifteen years now, I know; sometimes it takes me a while to get around to things).
Second, I once
persuaded my good friend J. to see Liquid Sky with me at an arts cinema in
Bradford (we lived in Leeds; he had a car). You know, Liquid Sky (1982),
the one about extra-terrestrial lesbian heroin-addicted vampires in NYC (okay,
this is a rather glib, reductive summary of an impossible-to-summarise
film).
At the time, Liquid Sky was only about a decade old, hadn’t attained the cult status it now
holds, hadn’t even yet birthed electroclash in music; you’d think J. would’ve
been grateful to me for being, as usual, ten years ahead of the stylistic curve.
But no, he commented afterwards: “I can honestly say that that was the worst
film I have ever seen.” He’s doing alright now; works for the Financial Times.
Make of all this what you will.
Third, there
were four of us who went to see Cats. My other half was just disappointed and
bored and from time to time asleep; felt embarrassed about her choice (Bohemian Rhapsody last year though; usually she picks winners). My son felt amused and
somewhat mystified; he has a generosity of spirit and there’s a lot that
he’s prepared to entertain for the sake of family loyalty; possibly he inwardly
adjusts his expectations during each of his frequent drives from West London to the West Country.
My daughter
and I enjoyed the film however; were grinning and laughing to one
another almost the whole way through. In what spirit? Well, we’ve spent lots of
Sunday evenings in termtime eating pizza, re-watching Doctor Who and discussing
which our favourite episodes are and why (so, yes, the unsocial hours that my
wife used to do when working at a residential special school have helped our
dad-daughter relationship also hold an occasional aspect of ‘flatmates’); we’ve
a shared ‘humour wavelength’ which also stretches to enjoyment of the 1970s
disco, nu disco and euphoric trance tunes that I do housework to (the cheesier
the better), they get me up and moving you see (I buy this stuff by the yard at
Cheddar car boot) and to a connoisseurship of the bad lyric; we’ve a dozen shared
favourites in that regard.
On that
small sample, then, you’ve a fifty-fifty chance of actually enjoying Cats.
All that
said, I can honestly tell you that my appreciation of Cats exceeds my appreciation
of ‘ghost/ most/ toast’ in Des’Ree’s ‘Life’ – it’s of another quality altogether
– and that I enjoyed Cats about ten times more than The Greatest Showman even though, in every ordinary respect, it’s a worse film.
What’s wrong
with Showman? Technically, nothing. Acting, scenery, choreography, plot
development, continuity, storytelling: all’s good. The deal-breaker for me,
though, was that it back-projects a celebratory pro-diversity politics and
poetics (which I wholly support, incidentally) onto P.T. Barnum’s
nineteenth-century life. Sorry, I don’t believe it; and for me, leaving a
cinema after 100 minutes of P.T. Barnum biopic knowing nothing about P.T.Barnum (how did the American Civil War affect him, for instance? nope, none the
wiser) implies having been cheated.
(At least Showman is only empty, a missed opportunity; it’s not actively mendacious
about its subject like, for instance, Pochantas – “colours of the wind?”;
colours of brutality and colonialism, more like – or the execrable The Boat That Rocked aka ‘The Boat That Was Later To Be Investigated As Part Of Operation
Yew Tree’, which deserves to have been tried by a jury of its peers. Don’t
think I’m impossible to please. There are lots of popular, populist films
which, to a necessarily limited degree, both celebrate and explain properly
some particular episode in social history; Made In Dagenham does, for
instance. I’ve met Barbara Castle in real life, you know - but
I digress).
Cats, of
course, doesn’t have the problem of having a real subject matter to misrepresent
or just to avoid presenting in the first place; it’s fundamentally just a load
of old nonsense about cats (“yes, T.S. Eliot was a great poet; this was one of
his weird side projects,” I whispered to my daughter at one point while
stealing her popcorn; I’m that parent).
And, while
it’s an awful film, it’s better to fail at doing something harmless than to
succeed in doing something bad (as I try to tell the wife; she says I’m making
excuses; we’re working through it). Better than that, it’s interestingly awful:
this is what interested me.
First: there’s
the morbid fascination of seeing a veritable galaxy of talent all experience a
memorably bad day at the office. I say ‘all’; the post-film consensus of our
party was that Taylor Swift at least escapes with her
dignity more or less intact, demonstrating a
sort of feline ability to land on her feet and walk out of the experience
unscathed (oh, the old Taylor can't come to the phone right now! Why? Because she's coughing a fur-ball into your shoe). Bill Nighy, too; I could swear he was in it even though his name
doesn’t seem to appear on the imdb or other online credits lists (directors
sometimes ask for their names to be taken off if a studio has ruined their film,
do actors do this too? or was I dreaming/ confabulating back there? you know how it is at Christmas, undigested bits of cheese and so on): I’ve
never yet seen him fail in a film and I haven’t now; think of him as an ageing
rocker in Love Actually and imagine him in this as someone with a sort of built-in
self-ironising force-shield preserving him from harm. Finally (while we’re
handing out honourable mentions) there’s Judi Dench, who merely twinkles in a
generic all-purpose grandmotherly way for a bit, then looks bored; the good
news is that she’ll have to be in at least five more movies before retiring in
order to live this down as otherwise, she’ll have a credits list resembling
that of Orson Welles (first film credit: Citizen Kane, 1941, last film credit: voice of
Unicron in Transformers: The Movie in 1986). As to the rest of the cast, it’d
be invidious even to begin to name names.
Second: in
‘anthropomorphised animal’ stories generally, the semiotics of nakedness
(proper to beasts) versus being clothed (proper to persons, in most contexts)
can be a bit of a puzzler: why does Peter Rabbit wear only a jacket, for instance?
This is an inescapable feature of that genre and doesn’t usually cause us more
than a momentary aesthetic or conceptual problem; this film, however, magnifies
and redoubles this inevitable ‘loose thread’ effect to a vertiginous
degree; some cats go about naked, some
clothed, some only seem to wear jewellery (which might be considered a little fast), still others only wear shoes (a box-fresh pair of white trainers in
one dance sequence, 1930s chorus line style high heels in another); Judi Dench,
as someone’s pointed out, appears to wear a fur coat made out of her own skin –
and that is both weird and impossible
to unsee.
Similarly, the
world-building’s unresolved – is this a version of London based on our familiar
human world, except that the humans remain unseen? There’s plenty in the film
that would suggest nocturnal cats frolicking behind their owners’ backs, as it
were. (Inconsistent scale’s a problem, though. Daughter commented at one point,
“cats aren’t that small” – and she was right; domestic cats just aren’t that small relative to knives, forks, dinner plates etc). Or is it a version of London wholly inhabited
by cats rather than humans? There’s plenty in the film that would suggest this
too, the advertising billboards for instance and the consumer capitalism that
they imply appear to address themselves to cats - so there’s a fundamental
indeterminacy here, a Schrodinger’s Cat problem so to speak.
Third:
semiotics and world-building aside, the cats themselves are compelling but
really odd to look at. The way they move, for instance. To what extent are the
actors attempting to move in a cat-like way? No-one appears sure of their brief
in this respect; many actors move like people for most of their screen time,
occasionally throwing in a quick hiss, or some cat-style face washing or milk-lapping
as placeholders. (“Like, what the hell? Weirdo?!” – daughter). Other actors –
especially if female rather than male, chorus rather than principal – slink
around continually in ways which more obviously connote ‘feline’ and which may also
gesture towards connoting ‘seductive’ or ‘sexy’; this, in relation to musical
theatre generally rather than this movie in particular, is a whole Performance
Studies thesis in itself so I’m not going to go into it now.
There’s also
a more fundamental problem with looks – an ‘uncanny valley’ problem, to use a
term AI and robotics researchers use in order to describe the
almost-but-not-quite level of verisimilitude that most of us experience as
‘creepy’. To unpack this a little (and to explore how this is a problem in
film, where we necessarily see close-ups of actors’ faces, but not in the
theatre where we don’t and can’t): if your pet cat suddenly had eyes, a mouth,
hands and feet which exactly resembled a human’s while the rest of its features
remained in every other way feline, you’d be both fascinated and repelled. You
wouldn’t any longer be able to relate to it straightforwardly as ‘a pet’, but
nor would you be able to relate to it as you do the persons with whom you share
your life. So that’s perhaps the itchy fascination, the unconscious creepiness
behind the conscious amusement, of how we’re meant to relate to the cats that
people this movie (or the people who cat it).
Okay, it’s
late now; I’m almost done. Someone
mutters and the street lamp gutters and soon it will be morning. Here’s one
final reflection: the distance between careworn youth (Liquid Sky with J.
during the Long Vac) and carefree middle-age (Cats en famille at Christmas)
is also the distance between jouissance, il n’y a pas d’hors-texte and all that
ironic dinner-party jazz (early 1990s) and a resurgence of interest in the
Frankfurt School and other modes of analysis arising out of the
Marxist-humanist tradition (late 2010s). I’m not quite sure whether I’m talking
about my own story arc or about fashions in literary and cultural criticism
more generally at this point. Both, I think. A bit.
Because despite
what this article may suggest, I’m actually getting a bit old for ‘so bad it’s good’; that kind of thing's best left to the young and/or insecure. ‘So
bad it’s good’? No (despite the fact I’ve spent an evening and two thousand
words talking about Cats); if we understand and can also accept our own
finiteness and smallness, it’s better for us to pay attention to William Wordsworth
rather than William McGonagall, Velvet Goldmine rather than Showgirls (neither of these films is what you’d call family entertainment, of course), Invasion of the Body Snatchers rather than Plan 9 From Outer Space. On the other
hand, if we entertain a sort of Frankfurt School critique, seeing almost all mainstream
Hollywood films as ‘wrong’ and in their way deceptive, then a film like Cats may be a kind of relevation. When we so often live and move within the
pervasively, invisibly wrong, it can be revelatory to encounter the visibly, obviously wrong. If we can then pull and
pull at this loose thread in order to undeceive friends, family, neighbours, fellow trade unionists etc by widening their conception of ‘the wrong’ and ‘the bad’
then so much the better: this would be cultural criticism as part of a wider emancipatory
project as Adorno and friends always intended.