and soon it will be morning: appreciating ‘cats’ as theodor adorno might’ve

(This article is around 2,000 words long, so may take you 8 or 10 minutes to read).

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.

Last question, though: they filmed Oliver decades ago; when are they going to do Twang!!? The world is waiting. 

happier simpler times

This is a good time of year for visiting places where the veil separating earth and heaven seems thin, attenuated - and for reflecting back on happier, simpler times.

With that in mind, here’s a photo of Luton. In 1985.

(Hit a motherlode of boring postcards at a local charity shop; sometimes it's the greater pleasures - family and friends; Christmas - but sometimes it's the tinier ones).

Many people think of Luton with great fondness (at this time of year especially); this is a complex, ambiguous emotion known as Lostalgie. Of course, Luton in the 1980s had its dark side: while everyone was guaranteed a job and low-cost housing, there was also not much freedom, in fact it was one of the world’s most heavily surveilled states. Worse: from the early 1960s until November 1989, Luton was forcibly separated from neighbouring Dunstable by a barrier that residents would, from time to time, attempt to tunnel through with often fatal results; the ‘Luton Wall’ is a looming presence in the British ‘kitchen sink’ films of that era.

No, sorry [checks notes]... I didn’t mean Luton, at all; I meant East Germany. 

pray as you go

So I've diarrised films seen and books read as per usual; I've also been finding the prayer app 'Pray As You Go' (available on a number of platforms) useful lately in order to build at least some minimal level of daily spiritual practice into a busy life (busy with work, family etc; occasional, very occasional, political activity; heck, even writing once in a while).

In a word, it presents you daily with a ten to fifteen minute programme of spiritual music (e.g. Taize, plainchant, sometimes the quieter end of the kind of 'contemporary Christian music' you'd hear on Premier or UCB), prayers/ reflections, and Bible readings (drawn from the Anglican lectionary; at least, I think so; I leave the technicalities of that sort of thing to the wife). If you're also a Christian, I commend it to you.

Incidentally (as we're encouraged to be at least minimally open about our spiritual predicaments and mental health 'journeys' these days): a few years ago - pre-Brexit pre-Trump but the war in Syria and North Korean nuclear tests were already 'things' - I found myself highly anxious about world events. Sleepless. Hypervigilant. I asked, through the Anglican church I was then attending, whether I could meet with a spiritual director. Some people, dimly aware of spiritual directors (like they're dimly aware that you can request virtually any book in print from your local public library through inter-library loans for just a few quid... but then, why would you? it's a life hack, you're welcome) think they're just for clergy; they're not; and I've long seen my own work (protecting my own secret identity here, but it's sort of at the interface between education and the caring professions) as a form of ministry.

The chap I met with was extremely helpful and, through talking and praying with me, helped to sort this out. He shared some of his own life experiences; he'd been away at boarding school at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he'd had to deal with that while still a teenager. Listening to me talk about what matters to me, what draws me (what calls to me, you might say; do make time for Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning if you haven't yet; in narrating how he survived some of the worst human experiences imaginable, he also discusses why you should attend to and not dismiss your own persistent daydreams), he suggested that I could at some future point 'read into' Franciscan spirituality as something which aligns well with the sense of an ecological perspective in Christianity, Christianity as 'an option for the poor' etc. This is something I still haven't fully unpacked, "and that's okay" (as we also like to say to one another in group therapy); it's a 'could' and not a 'should'. "Do or not do, there is no try" (Yoda); "sufficient unto the day" (Jesus), etc.

The punchline to this is that, towards the end of our half dozen or so times of meeting together, my spiritual director - who'd raised a family, had grandchildren, was retired after a career in industry; don't think that he was a hermit on a mountain top - said, casually, "of course, I'm somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan myself, politically." This was funny and, like all good jokes, lent a new perspective to the view: can we reach across what otherwise divides us? Can we put ourselves to one side in the service of others? We were talking just the other night around a campfire at Journeyman (which I attend, volunteer for, am part of; it's available to those of all faiths and none, but only to those who are or self-identity as male; there are good pragmatic and in no sense antifeminist reasons for that and perhaps that's a topic for another blog post; there's a lot of Jung in Journeyman's embodied understanding of the human journey) about mentoring we ourselves had both received and offered; that's what brought all this to mind, I think.

the socialism of fools

Let's be frank with ourselves: some of our friends on the Left, present company excepted, are idiots. Anyone who thinks that anti-semitism is something 'got up' recently (including by a significant number of concerned community leaders, current and former Labour MPs and others) in order to spite or frustrate Labour generally or Jeremy Corbyn in particular has no sense of history - and may not even have heard the well-known expression "anti-semitism is the socialism of fools" (sometimes "the anti-imperialism of fools") often attributed to August Bebel but in fact in common circulation amidst German Social Democrats - then the world's largest and most powerful workers'movement - as early as the 1890s.

scenes of chemical life: george eliot, nick kent and other writers i've read, re-read, half-read etc

Lately I've been reading about communism ('fully automated luxury' variety: well, it's a provocation wrapped in a single phrase... see also singularity, accelerationism), the 1960s/ 1970s, social media and how to commit fraud: go figure.

I've been seeing the Sex Pistols through Nick Kent's eyes as chancers, sociopaths, thieves and fellow junkies (he prefers The Clash, both as artists and as people... though the terms in which he prefers them are reminiscent of Marty De Bergi's praising Spinal Tap for "their exuberance, their raw power - and their punctuality"); I've also seen them as philosophes by watching the trailer for Julien Temple's The Filth and The Fury with French subtitles on. L'Obscenite et la Fureur, 'reveillez-toi, Sid.' (I've watched the actual movie three or four times, and you should too: loved the video collage effect, loved  'punk as music hall'). 

I've been going to Wells Fountain Poets semi-regularly; at January's meeting, there isn't a guest poet (it'd be mean to drag someone out so soon after Christmas) and, instead of us reading our own work during the open mic, we read other people's; it's a great way to get to know new work. I'll be taking Krzysztof Jaworski's 'Monodrama' (which leapt out at me from Altered State, an anthology of Polish poetry in translation, ed. Rod Mengham, Tadeusz Pioro & Piotr Szymor) and also David Bowie's 'Eight Line Poem'... if only to stir up that old Keats-Dylan hornets' nest. It's straight after 'Oh You Pretty Things' (possibly the creepiest and best paean to the Ubermensch in all of popular music) on Hunky Dory. Perhaps I'll sing it. There are other controversies these days, e.g. about whether artless sincerity is of value, and who has the right to imitate, ventriloquise or represent whom. Never annoy or vex a poet.

-------------

George Eliot's Middlemarch. So let’s re-tell entire story from the POV of the ‘stupendous spider’ that good-hearted, mediocre clergyman (& enthusiastic naturalist) Camden Farebrother shows soi-disant ‘brown patch’ Mary Garth. 

(My sixth re-read, and I’m already pitching an interpretative dance version for next year’s Edinburgh Fringe. I like this novel a lot; keep seeing new meanings and correspondances; when Virginia Woolf called it “one of the few English novels written for grownup people,” she was right).  

James Woods' How Fiction Works. Numbered paragraphs: who does Wood think he is, Nietzsche? A series of glimpses into free indirect style, Nabokov, Flaubert etc; suitable for reading on the Eurostar.

Howard Jacobson's Coming From Behind. Though this novel (misanthropic generally; bordering particularly on misogyny, homophobia, class hatred) isn’t terrible, it’s not-terrible in a ranting, 1980s stand-up comedy way... so didn’t finish. 

Robert L. Moore & Douglas Gillette's King Warrior Magician Lover. Everyone in mythopoetic men’s movement (guilty as charged)’s read Moore-and-Gillette and Iron John, like everyone in second wave feminism read ‘Second Sex’ and ‘Female Eunuch’. Worthwhile, though. 

Chris Stokel-Walker's Youtubers. Gaming’s bigger ($-wise) than Hollywood and the music industry combined; top youtubers (PewDiePie, Zoella et al) get larger U.K. viewerships than Strictly; enjoyed this useful cultural/sociological primer. 

Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Provocative, clever title; interesting on AI, robotics etc. Remember the Socialist Workers' Party paper seller who told you that computers, e.g. BBC Micros, are the reason communism (never yet tried; "neither Washington nor Moscow" and all that) can now work, despite Hayek’s criticisms of command economies per se..? It's a bit like that at times. In making such a comparison, I'm being a bit cheap (like Government-subsidised Spreewald pickles in former East Germany); I just can't help myself.

Dan Davies' Lying For Money. Though lived forwards, money must be understood backwards. This more granular book offers a historical typology of fraud, telling us plenty about complex societies and ‘honest’ capitalism. 

Nick Kent's Apathy For The Devil: A 1970s Memoir. Handy 1970s discography (back pages) soundtracks this my-drug-hell page-turner from legendary rock journo who loves and hates superlatively (loves: Bowie, The Clash, Joni Mitchell; hates: Sham 69, Jethro Tull, Queen). 

Sheila Rowbotham's Promise Of A Dream: Remembering The Sixties. New Left into second-wave feminism. Features (memoirs interest me for their 'brief lives') "a bearded Sikh Maoist from Hemel Hempstead" who attends one meeting (entering and exiting within a sentence). 

Ian MacDonald's Revolution In The Head. Complete annotated Beatles discography, which brings a wealth of sociological, literary and musical erudition to the party; be prepared to lose whole afternoons, if a Beatles fan. 

if it seems too good to be true: some films i've seen lately

Aside from The Sun Is Also A Star - which you should see - the best films listed below are the French ones (which S. and I watched in order to re-acclimatise to le French-speaking prior to a Parisian weekend break), particularly Lolo written by and starring by Julie Delpy. We did take one photo of a Lolo-style photo of "a view of the Eiffel Tower" from Montparnasse - i.e., barely a view of the Eiffel Tower - as well more conventionally touristic views of landmarks; we also photographed almost every artwork on the fifth floor of the Pompidou Centre (ways of seeing?) and visited Le Caveau de la Huchette jazz club. Nice!

Frankenstein Created Woman (1967, dir. Terence Fisher, starring Peter Cushing, Susan Denberg) - If it seems too good to be true, it probably is; don't go for a picnic in woodland with sexy Susan Denberg if you've a bad conscience.

(Trigger warnings: gender essentialism, outdated attitudes to disability, a trio of 'young blades' who resemble the Bullingdon Club and smash up restaurants in Old Tory style).

Harry, He’s Here To Help / With A Friend Like Harry / Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien (2000, dir. Dominik Moll, starring Stephane Freiss, Anouk Grinberg, Agathe Dronne) –  Pleasingly amoral allegory: everyman character kills & (symbolically) eats/ incorporates murderous friend/antagonist/ shadow, unlocks own creativity, becomes own father (see: existentialism), wins spousal respect, acquires air-conditioned 4x4.  

The Village (2004, dir. M Night Shyamalan, starring Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, Joaquin Phoenix) – This looks and feels a lot like his previous, ‘Signs’; loses by the comparison, though; feels underpowered; the ending (unfelt, unresolved) feels like a shrug, a retreat. 

Albert Camus (2010, dir. Laurent Jaoui, starring Stephane Freiss, Anouk Grinberg, Agathe Dronne) – Down these mean Algerian streets, a man must philosophise; then that wise-guy Sartre shows up, spills his guts about ‘Les Temps Modernes’ and some dame called Simone. 

The Woman In Black (2012, dir. James Watkins, screenplay by Jane Goldman from novel by Susan Hill; starring Daniel Radcliffe) – Couldn’t care sufficiently about glum, bereaved (insufficiently versatile) Daniel Radcliffe as protagonist; repeated shots of Victorian bric-a-brac (clockwork toys etc) felt de trop. Liked car/ quicksand business. 

Lolo (2015, dir. Julie Delpy, starring Julie Delpy, Dany Boon, Vincent Lacoste) – French writers are often wittier, more stylish about the sexual/ romantic marketplace (plus Oedipal and other family romances) than British/ American ones. Just observation, or cultural cringe? 

To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018, dir. Susan Johnson, starring  Lana Condor, Noah Centineo, Janiel Parrish) - Y.A. romcom in which young lady’s letters designed not to be sent are sent, accidentally on purpose. A transparent plot-device; life, like art, is full of them. 

Wine Country (2019, dir. Amy Poehler, starring Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Ana Gasteyer) - Forty- and fifty-something friends celebrate a significant birthday in this ensemble drama which comfortably passes the Bechdel test and contains hints of joy, tenderness, regret, millennial-baiting. 

The Sun Is Also A Star (2019, dir. Ry Russo-Young, screenplay by Tracy Oliver from novel by Nicola Yoon; starring Yara Shahidi, Anais Lee, Charles Melton) – This witty, beautifully photographed romcom showcases NY as third character (and, incidentally, educated me about the Korean-American stake in U.S. black hair care). Self, daughter, mum enjoyed.