Cats: An Existential Crisis

[00:07] *Dan stares unblinkingly*

[00:40] "CATS" ends with Old Deuteronomy, played by Judi Dench, explaining to the audience that, no further explanation, no longer require an interpreter to the Jellicle Ways.

[00:54] I feel utterly unprepared to talk about Cats on its own terms these characters. I'm not familiar with this story and, very clearly, Cats has no interest in

[01:10] There is a character, a stripey white cat who fills the space that would normally be occupied by an audience surrogate. I think her name is Liz...?

[01:23] unlike most of the other cats, she doesn't get an entire musical number that mostly consists of saying her own name repeatedly. She was definitely named after a queen...

[01:36] She is an outsider to the local culture of the cats who occupy this neighborhood, Indeed, these explanations make up the cats explaining who they are to Liz and the audience.

[01:52] are all nonsense. This is not accidental, freeform absurdity, but 109

[02:04] a little unmooring. the Jellicle Ways of Jellicle Cats, but you can't. You've been Punk'd.

[02:20] a ritual where Old Deuteronomy picks a worthy cat who gets of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Cats because canon

[02:32] but at some point I *believe* it was mentioned that this erases memories, which strikes me as different from regular death.

[02:48] eager to die. for reasons I was unable to parse. I guess Macavity, who was either a prankster or a

[03:02] serial killer. The closest thing to an evolving plot consists as the sole remaining candidate, can win by default. hates wins and gets to die, but, in a good way. What is happening is

[03:20] remains beyond human ken. This is just what you get when you sign up to see Cats. music and dancing. Dancing and film have an

[03:36] coincidence that the prevalence of dance in film has become increasingly niche as cinema has grown more sophisticated. that you are watching people

[03:50] human performance. fake performance, what they're seeing is impressive,

[04:03] every human's body has been And this is well and truly where everything goes off the rails. of the Uncanny Valley that it has set up residences,

[04:18] developed its own system of divine mathematics. physical feats of dancers are coarsely

[04:30] having the too-precise movements of a Fortnite emote. Fairchild's human face hovering in front of his cat head like a cardboard

[04:42] crops up several times in the movie, most extensively in a sequence involving singing and dancing mice and Rebel Wilson eats several of the cockroaches.

[04:57] once but twice in the film, she unzips her the same cat skin, but now wearing Vegas cigarette girl from the '70s. The effect

[05:12] is so unsettling that I felt my own skin trying to escape. Some cats wear them, others don't. innocuous theatrical convention that is FAR

[05:26] at least, until those cats take their clothes off. wearing a giant fur coat and it is impossible to describe just how

[05:38] when he suddenly apparates wearing nothing at all. who aren't wearing clothes, the act of disrobing It becomes nudity, and a nudity that

[05:53] despite it being deliberately recorded for the instinct is to politely look away in as though director Tom Hooper had

[06:09] steal his clothes. These moments all the cats on screen and, like an optical illusion, they're ALL naked. A room full

[06:26] of naked human cats writhing and yowling. The film is permeated with a subtextual horniness that is made by virtue of a disconnect

[06:39] between the subject of the script and the subject of the camera. and seduction, but nevertheless cats at the audience, splay their legs and

[06:52] post-orgasmic heap. their own moment that becomes seared prophets of old glimpsing the true face of God.

[07:09] to express in words the scream when Judi Dench's Old Deuteronomy scissors them in the air to express her approval of

[07:24] another cat's musical number.