{"id":53,"date":"2019-12-23T19:07:38","date_gmt":"2019-12-23T19:07:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joshtest04.wordpress.com\/2019\/12\/23\/cats-is-a-triumph-of-the-cinematic-form\/"},"modified":"2025-05-05T20:23:51","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T19:23:51","slug":"cats-is-a-triumph-of-the-cinematic-form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/2019\/12\/23\/cats-is-a-triumph-of-the-cinematic-form\/","title":{"rendered":"Cats is a triumph of the cinematic form"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This article transcribes a video essay available here<\/a>, titled \u201cCats is a triumph of the cinematic form.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Cats<\/em>, the 2019 movie directed by Tom Hooper, represents countless hours of work-power, in likely miserable conditions, assembling what is unmistakably the world\u2019s highest budget work of furry cinema.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hooper, fresh off the success of the Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em> movie adaptation, which I hate, likely had a free reign to interpret as he wished the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical CATS, itself a loose adaptation of T. S. Elliot\u2019s poetry collection \u201cOld Possum\u2019s Book of Practical Cats\u201d<\/em>. The Webber musical is his standard campy fare, lurid face-paint and costumes in the fashion of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat<\/em> or Phantom of the Opera<\/em>, two other musicals which had their own dubious route to the big (or small) screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Easily the least interesting parts in Cats are where Tom Hooper concedes to the style that won him critical acclaim with Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em> and holds a steady close-up of an impassioned face singing a showstopper. Where he\u2019s persuaded away from it, we get Rebel Wilson tearing the head off a cockroach with a human face, Jason Derulo showering himself with milk as a rake of female cats watch in awe, and a succession of cats improbably wearing human clothing seemingly only for fetishistic effect\u200a\u2014\u200aan even more convincing case for Tom Hooper being prevented from filming close-ups than anything in Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em>. Macavity, the cat devil, is introduced with a Batman-like sudden disappearance once he\u2019s off-camera\u200a\u2014\u200abut the next time he appears he really can teleport and does it constantly for the rest of the film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The film is determined to see any suggestion that there\u2019s a sexual undertone off at the pass. Over the first thirty minutes, cats present their groins, arch their thighs, tangle round each other almost deliberately so that there\u2019s as much contact with their Barbie-doll under-sections and chests as possible. Every cat is wearing a human-sized collar. Rebel Wilson\u2019s cat bends her tail forward between her legs and swings it like a windmill. Cats wear fursuits, gorge themselves on food and dive into trash cans to rub themselves in waste. When a male character hits a high note, there is a conversation about neutering where Rebel Wilson makes a chop-chop motion with her fingers. As mentioned, Jason Derulo pours milk into his own mouth as he lies back on the floor. The cats devour other, smaller humanoids with a smile and a wink. During his song, there is a lingering shot where Jason Derulo has a furry cat foot inches from mouth with a furry cat foot. By the time three cats are cavorting on a bed together covered in feathers you\u2019re absolutely numb to it, and the film proceeds to get into the plot\u200a\u2014\u200aand even the plot involves all the cats getting high, having a PG-rated orgy, then lying about groaning for a good minute. Idris Elba\u2019s character is fully dressed for the majority of the film, just so that when he appears sans garments in the climax, you can\u2019t escape any suggestion, Idris Elba is nude now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As critics have mentioned, the film makes minimal effort to explain who anyone is or what they\u2019re doing. They\u2019re cats, they\u2019re having some kind of event, most of them are going to sing one song, the word Jellicle is involved, get with the program. The cats sing an entire song about the importance of the protagonists\u2019 \u201creal\u201d cat name, but we never find it out. It\u2019s just not for us to know. One member of the main cast is never properly introduced and doesn\u2019t have a song. At one point I thought he was singing about himself but he turned out to be singing about a cat dressed as a male stripper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Which is fine! It\u2019s fine.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Much of the prerelease buzz around Cats focused on the uncanny appearance of the characters, human faces rotoscoped by hand onto almost-matching CG bodies. What the previews did not reveal, is that the rest of the film compensates for this effect by being equally uncanny, unsettled, and unmoored from conventional notions of filmmaking. The structure of Cats\u200a\u2014\u200aindividual vignettes about the mercurial nature of individual Cats\u200a\u2014\u200ais forcibly bookended by an overarching plot in which Francesca Hayward\u2019s character, \u2018Victoria\u2019 is abandoned by her (full scale human!) owner, such as it were, and falls into the company of a gaggle of cats who immediately begin a chain of often unintelligible songs which continue end-to-end for the rest of the film, save for brief interruptions by the antagonist, Macavity, played by a gurning, scenery-gnawing Idris Elba. The cats hold a yearly competition, we are repeatedly told, where the victor receives a \u2018second chance at life\u2019. This plot structure being clamped around the more freeform nature of the musical adds a terrifying air of inevitability to proceedings, and makes the eventual awarding of the prize to Grizabella feel less like the triumph of good nature and compassion and more like \u201coh crap, gotta foist this ticking bomb off on someone before Idris Elba gets back. The sense of unease and the unknown is shared between the audience and Victoria, but it leaves the more carefree earlier songs feel like they\u2019ve been shot through the sights of a gun. \u201cStop dancing!\u201d you want to scream at the screen, \u201cIdris Elba is murdering you!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Between this and the borderline-violent reaction unnamed cats have to the down-and-out Grizabella every time she appears, cat society is deeply unsettling, and that\u2019s before the Taylor-Swift-penned addition to the songbook \u201cBeautiful Ghosts\u201d has appeared, with the haunting refrain \u201cThe memories were lost long ago, but at least you have beautiful ghosts\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps to provide cover for some less prioritised effects shots, the camera often appears as if in the hand of a drunkard, dipping and rolling with the music in a way that almost induces illness, especially combined with how, over the course of the film, the scope of the visuals slowly narrows and a set of basic images recurs: The theatre door, the bolted milk-parlour, Grizabella in the street, the graveyard entrance, Old Deuteronomy beckons, repeat. One of the most striking visuals, a stairway to heaven summoned by Macavity when he seeks to force Old Deuteronomy to grant him a second life, does not reappear at the denouement. Instead, Grizabella is loaded into a balloon and floated off into the sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The protagonist sings of dancing with ghosts; Grizabella is \u201csaved\u201d by being jettisoned into the sky and forgotten. The cats who are kidnapped by Macavity throw Ray Winstone, of Noah<\/em> fame, into the Thames to drown – and cheer while they do it. Taylor Swift\u2019s cat disappears halfway through the third act. It\u2019s hard not to come to the conclusion that the film is telling us that the cats are in hell, or at least in purgatory. There is a cat devil, but there is no cat god.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me be clear about what I am saying: this film is an absolute triumph. It\u2019s utterly bizarre, obeys only its own logic, and I would have eagerly watched another hour of it. Go and see this film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Please see Cats<\/strong>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The image of Old Deuteronomy stretching her leg in this article is taken from Twitter user @MrMichaelSwartz<\/a>\u2019s video<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article transcribes a video essay available here, titled \u201cCats is a triumph of the cinematic form.\u201d Cats, the 2019 movie directed by Tom Hooper, represents countless hours of work-power, in likely miserable conditions, assembling what is unmistakably the world\u2019s highest budget work of furry cinema. Hooper, fresh off the success of the Les Mis\u00e9rables […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,96],"tags":[34,35,36,19,37],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","category-media-criticism","tag-andrew-lloyd-webber","tag-cat-2019","tag-cats","tag-movies","tag-tom-hooper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":141,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fevered.earth\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}