Cats Review (Film, 2019)
Imagine an inescapable force haunting society. No one knows for sure how it came to be, but it did. It is real. It is here. It is now and forever.
Now and forever. That’s not a threat; that’s a promise.
It lures you in with a sense of wonder. Maybe you notice a gentle hum, the hymn of an ancient ritual of destruction hiding in plain sight. Maybe it’s the movement, a whirling dervish performed again and again in hopes of ending us all. Or maybe it’s the promise of the sublime, a world where even stray cats are hopeful and happy in their meager existence on the outskirts of society.
Promise isn’t the right word. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. This force defined its own influence from day one and we let it. We let it pervade our minds with an act of hubris that we treated as a joke. We invited it into our homes, into our cars, into our public spaces with ads, punctuated by a gentle hum, a spell imprinted on the subconscious.
Rejecting the force through criticism did nothing. It defined what it was on its own terms and no one could say otherwise. Just because it failed to meet traditional notions of form or function or purpose does not mean that it failed to meet its own objective.
Now and forever. A synthesized hymn for our own destruction.
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I am not a devotee of Cats. I try to approach it from a safe distance. My interests are purely academic.
Sure, I did see it. Everyone did. You couldn’t escape it if you lived close enough to one of the major hubs of the phenomenon. The title alone made it feel like a safe gift for a child, a show simple enough for them to understand. A show full of magic and movement and wonder.
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Walking into the darkened theater in the morning is, itself, a surreal experience. The sun is out, but it fears to tread in the neon geometry of the raked auditorium. If you’re lucky, your seat has some give and freedom, though you know once the screen flickers to life that society dictates you sit quietly and attentively, absorbing whatever is thrown your way.
These otherworldly conditions are usually mundane. Maybe you have a snack. Maybe you chat with a loved one until the quiet begins. You watch a story unfold, lost in another world you choose to enter. You enjoy it or you don’t, but it all ends soon enough.
Sometimes, though, the alienation of your surroundings can lead to unexpected consequences. From the riots at the premiere of Stavinsky’s The Rite of Spring to disastrous talk-backs with audience members shouting down the world for questioning their significance, our limits can be pushed so far by the void of the theater that we have no choice but to react.
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It caused no riots on Friday morning. It barely made a whisper. More seats than not were empty, and the few people who did attend admitted to being long time fans of the initial emergence in the US.
The fantasy that drew people in for decades finally revealed its true form. From the opening appearance of hidden eyes in a cloud to the lingering results of the ritual going into the credits, it does not try to hide its world of pure terror. These…beings populate the screen in a world with no rules of form or design. Sometimes, the world is giant, meant for an unseen species with forks and knives so large they dwarf the bodies of the beings dancing onscreen. Other times, it is sized to perfection, with stairs and stage and chairs at the perfect size for whatever those things are supposed to be.
We catch one glimpse of whatever controls this world at the very beginning. Even they are out of place in this non-Euclidian world of geometric nightmares. They are shorter than a car and a fence meant to be giant in scale to the other beings onscreen, yet they are able to carry one unwanted being in a small pillowcase that they toss in the trash. The pillowcase transforms to five times its original size, larger than a car tire but dwarfed by the other beings onscreen. But some of those beings are shown to be both smaller and larger than a car tire and eventually the same size as the poor wretch abandoned by the overlords of this dominion.
These beings cannot be real. There is no way for them to actually exist. Yet they’re just close enough to humans that we believe they could be real. Their eyes, their noses, their lips are like ours, yet their bodies are covered in fur that constantly glitches out of existence. Their floating faces are constantly in focus no matter how far away, even when their bodies lose form to the static void surrounding them.
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Now and forever. The lingering influence of this fever dream of the 80s, a thought experiment in form, is inescapable in live performance. The prescribed rites of twirls and taps, leaps and lunges revolutionized how we view musical movement onstage. It is a cacophonous rage of ballet, jazz, contemporary, and tap, the old and the new, the real and the imagined, that literally spills off the stage and drags you unwilling into its precisely pointed arms.
Its eyes have always followed you from its earliest form. A pair in the clouds is not as menacing as an entire world surrounded by glowing eyes from every corner, flashing in time to an otherworldly drone and whine carried through space and time. Even the conductor and executioners of the haunting hymn to sacrifice and forced reincarnation feared to tread on the sacred grounds of the rotating altar.
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The world is all too aware of the threat of the original incarnation of these rites of wintery destruction. The new devotees knew that changes must be made to once again capture the world. The combination of shaky animation and extreme displays of human emotion serve as a distraction to the threat of the ritual.
The implicit is made explicit and we are forced to go along with it. Outsiders should fear to tread unless they truly believe. Victoria, the abandoned cat, is threatened in a cemetery for not conforming to the rules of the Jellicle way. It is only through the mercy of Munkustrap that she is permitted to view the ritual rather than be sacrificed to its inescapable power.
This is a world where what was presumed to be metaphor is now real. Jennyanydots can bend the will of smaller creatures around her and change her form at will by tugging on her collar. Mr. Mistoffelees is magic when he chooses to be the magical cat. Grizabella has been left to die on her own after betraying the trust of the Jellicle way. And Macavity is an actual threat, kidnapping his competitors and trapping them on a barge to force Old Deuteronomy to make him the Jellicle choice. These poor beings are fighting for the right to sacrifice themselves so the Jellicle way of existence can grow more powerful day by day.
It is more menacing than it has ever been, and it is powerful enough to not have to hide its true form any longer.
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When the lights came up on a Friday afternoon, I was left in a daze. Did what I see truly happen? How was I convinced to revisit what I knew my whole life to be an animalistic ritual to fertility, sacrifice, and the hope of mercy from an all-knowing power that can grant you new life if you deserve it?
Minutes passed.
Then hours.
Then days.
It can now destroy your perception of time, as if it has always been there and will always be there. It can make minutes stretch for hours as you try to understand the twists and undulations of the beings casting their spell onscreen. The world is circling in my memory, a haunting and dissonant hymn to an ancient force that wants our undying worship.
It has pervaded my mind. It controls my thoughts.
Now and forever.
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Cats is currently playing in theaters.
