In Defense of Cats

Yesterday the Cats trailer arrived a day early from the announced release and the internet lost its collective mind. Some expressed their excitement, while most responded with dismay and horror at the CG recombination of human and cat, cast in fantastical sets where the cat people are proportionally sized to house cats. Tears have been shed over the rendering of the beloved cats with the film being called a bastardization of the original musical and “the stuff of nightmares”. To those people I ask this: What the fuck are you talking about?

What did you think the cat people were going to look like? Did you think they would wear grease paint makeup and leotards like the original televised production? Did you think they would get the Lion King treatment and be dead-eyed photorealistic cats? What in your wildest dreams did you imagine for these cats? I’m here to tell you that this version of Cats in INCREDIBLE and BEAUTIFUL. That it is 100% a faithful continuation of the original production and that it is not only the art we need, but also the art we deserve.

I came to Cats as an adult. I grew up sheltered on a remote horse farm in upstate New York. My parents held the same opinion of Cats that everyone else seemed to have “We don’t get it and those city folks will spend money on just about anything.” As such, I found the idea of it boring, confusing, not for me, and I dismissed it.

When my wife and I moved in together in New York she gave me a crash course on Broadway’s history and importance and soon we were attending shows regularly. When the Cats revival came she suggested we go in both an ironic and unironic way, the way that comedians can’t tell if they earnestly like something, or if they only like the idea of liking something. I sat in my seat, surrounded by foreign tourists and zero New Yorkers; the audience a microcosm of Times Square itself.

And guess what? I was fucking delighted for two hours. I don’t know what people imagine when they think about Cats. Do they believe the actors think they are cats and take the whole experience very seriously? Do they think it’s a performance piece? Or like Cirque Du Soleil? Do they think it’s a drama? Cats is end to end one of the funniest comedies I’ve ever seen. It’s two fucking hours of cats singing. They’ve got names like Jennyanydots and Rumpleteaser. Their performance is interrupted by a fucking boot dropping from the sky. Act one ends with a 15 minute dance solo from a cat we’ve never met before! What musical has the stones to end its opening act with an event that should invite the audience to leave?? In the finale Grizabella and Old Deuteronomy fly into outer space on a fucking tire! How could this be anything but a comedy punctuated by great dancing and cats acting fun and gay and, well, like fucking cats? Rum Tum Tugger is a mood. Grizabella is a diva. Bustopher Jones is god damn riot.

After the show and with the new purchase of my official Cats hat I thought a lot about the history and context of this musical. Think about it: How the fuck had Andrew Lloyd Webber come across the idea for a musical about Cats based on a T.S. Eliot poem? And then CONVINCED investors to give him fuck tons of money to bring it to life. The show completely defied what a broadway show SHOULD do; exchanging solid, dining room drama with abstract explorations of cat life. It feels to my modern sensibilities like it would be DOOMED to fail and yet people said “hell yeah, let’s open this shit”. And then it opened and got great reviews and PEOPLE KEPT GOING FOR 20 FUCKING YEARS. It was the greatest practical joke of all time.

This musical came out in a terrible time for this country. America had a dumb, senile, washed up celebrity for president who thought greed was good and hated coastal elites in spite of having made his fortune with them. The rest of the country witnessed the boom of televangelists and were terrified of satanism while in the cities stock brokers were snorting down lines of cocaine and spending millions of dollars on shitty collages of Jeff Koons fucking a porn star. It was a spiritually bankrupt and artistically lost decade. Every person was lying and conning and faking their way through life and art was no different. Objective reason and theatrical criticism were completely impotent in the face of the swaggering big dick machismo of America’s rightness. We were the saviors of freedom, the world’s police, the protectors of democracy, NOTHING we made could be BAD. It was a period of time where insane and poorly conceived artistic projects were green lit with mountains of funny money and there, in the distance, at the crest of the wave, was Cats.

I was in awe that it even existed. It took such a perfectly fucked up period of time in this country to make Cats a part of the culture and not just an LSD fever dream that opened and closed in two months like Andre Lloyd Webber’s roller skating musical. It was all about context. If Cats had been performed in its entirety somewhere in the middle of Angels In America its relevance and artistic brilliance would be unquestioned.

I tried to talk to my comedy friends about this show and was shocked at the response. These people who pride themselves on how original and inventive they are, how good they are at identifying the culture and making a subversive counter argument to it, those who enjoy being provocateurs and devil’s advocates⁠ — all had the same sun-bleached shop worn opinion: “Cats sucks.” How could these bright and fun comics have the same opinion as my parents, who believe Obama is the antichrist? Many shared that they had had a negative experience with Cats as a child, that a well meaning parent or aunt had taken them, and that a day in the city had been fun, but that Cats had been the lowlight. That it was boring and dumb. They hadn’t revisited Cats since their childhood and were still committed to the same opinion they had formed when they were eight. They may as well have said that sex was yucky and weed can kill you.

And here I am all over again. Arguing the merits of this movie the way I argued the merits of the live performance, living in an artistically blighted time with a greed is good president in an era that at best we will look back on and say “ at least we didn’t start world war three”. It’s a shit ass time to be alive and while our infrastructure is crumbling and our cities are on fire and rapists control the most powerful positions in society a light in the darkness has come.

It’s fucking Cats baby. It’s back and just as weird as ever. What don’t you like about it? How Rebel Wilson’s cat boobs jiggle? They’re cat people, bitch, get used to it. You don’t like how their bodies are shaped like humans and they look like writhing furry piles of dysmorphic horrors? Did you see Cats you dumb asshole? That’s what Cats is. What you’re seeing is Cats. It’s a musical about a series of cats making their case for why they should be chosen to reincarnate, then Old Deuteronomy is kidnapped, then a cat magician appears and pulls him out of a rainbow flag, then Old D flies to space with Jennifer Hudson.

The existence of the movie, much like the musical, defies all logic in a way that is heartbreakingly beautiful. How did we, as a culture, get to a place where rather than expending our energy into colonizing mars or maybe, just fucking maybe, reducing carbon emissions a little bit, we have instead bent our mighty powers, our god-like apprehension, to spending the GDP of the state of Rhode Island on a film about CATS fucking around in an ALLEY? Like a butterfly surviving a tornado, the sheer impossibility of events that led to this should be enough to convince you to purchase a ticket and witness it. And consider this: the garishness of this production⁠ — of the digital rendering⁠ — is a direct and accurate spiritual continuation of the garishness of the original Cats, and that this musical is reflection of ourselves as a culture. Musicals like Dear Evan Hanson and Next To Normal and Fun Home and The Sound Of Music and Carousel and The Band’s Visit and Les Mis use tragedy and relationships and historical importance and explorations of the human condition to mask the plain truth that this art is a product for you to buy, a business that must turn a profit, and maybe Cats is completely unpretentious about the arrangement. “We spent a lot of money to bring you these dancing cats,” the studios and the theatres and the producers and the marketing teams say “So why don’t you come on down and buy this shit already.”

What am I going to do? Behave as if I haven’t been born into and spent the last 32 years participating in this prison? Suddenly pretend I’m a great critic of art after I gobbled all these horse shit superhero movies and Disney remakes for the last decade? I may be a spineless coward unable to do anything to positively affect this broken world around me but I’m not a hypocrite. I’m going to go see Cats six times and I’m going to fucking love it.