The year I turned seven, the United States started a series of conflicts in the Middle East that, as I write this nineteen years later, have done nothing but change shape and aim, showing no signs of ending and destroying thousands of lives in the process. The environment of the planet itself continues to suffer a similar fate, a product of the same kind of blinkered and gluttonous thinking that brought us forever-war. I can make no claims to precognition, and my decision to pursue a career in music indicates a tendency towards apocalyptic thinking, but I cannot help but feel that we are living in the end times. The alchemy of our collective sin accumulates in the crags of the earth, under our fingernails, in the air we breathe. We wanted too much, too fast, and we took it from those who could only give their lives and homes, from the earth that held us, from the sea and air that defined us. And so it is timely that we are punished, and that our punishment is appropriate to our sin. As the wrathful should succumb to wanton cruelty is it not fitting that the gluttonous and the greedy should be suffocated by the weight of all they ill-conceivedly desired? Of course it is fitting. The air heats, the seas rise, the world expands beyond its limits to meet our insatiable hunger. Enter Cats.
As a further codicil to our ever-complete punishment, we are given a film so bloated in its mindless gluttony that it threatens at any second to explode and drown us in the tailings of our own consumption, or else to collapse into a singularity, to hit a climactic note of desire so suffused in thoughtlessness as to become uniform and perfect and infinitely dense, something fitting to satisfy a complementarily infinite hunger.
The coked-out maximalism of Cats makes it a difficult film to talk about. I mean that in the most literal sense – it is difficult to translate the experience of the film into language. Condensing any one sensation of it into some kind of syntax drags the whole rotting mess along with it, a single fishing hook pulling up generations of snarled refuse. How can we speak of the way the voices seem to emanate from nowhere without also discussing the singular uncanny-valley-horror of the faces of these creatures, their homunculin grins miming singing as they play-act at having souls, at walking, dancing, feeling. And further out, the bodies themselves, without referent in the world. Sapient in proportion, feline in texture and gait, angelic in endowment, with grotesque collisions of unlike flesh at the wrist and face. That they should be animate at all is more than I can bear, but the extent of their locomotive carnage is beyond the pale of words. They move without regard for any force or law. The specificity of their contact with the world is questionable, their place in extension camouflaged under a layer of fur so patently hideous that it challenges the eye at a muscular level. They adorn themselves in mockeries of human clothing, playing magician, train conductor, aristocrat; costume and motion condense to the unreality and horror of a straw-stuffed corpse, strung up to wave at birds and grin. And when the costumes come off, the sudden baring of form without content, limb moulded to limb in dead impotent clay, is a spectacle of obscenity that dwarfs the pornographic. The revelation of a chaste ken-doll fallowness, a field sown of nothing, but displayed for all the world as if fertile. The Cats have the anatomy of a barren trophy case – lights on, glass shining, nothing to display.
I will not labour long on the narrative and linguistic content of Cats. That the show is equal parts howling gibberish and death worship should be nothing new. The creatures shout their names over and over again, reintroducing themselves and stating their place in the world. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, they oscillate between demanding a place in the world and an identity to fill it, and longing for oblivion. Their names are the product of newborn muscle working through previously unspoken syllables, content to ram together noise without consulting meaning. If there is one thing I have in common with the Cats, it is that I also long for their death.
I saw Cats at a late showing on a Sunday night. I did this for the same reason that one wears a bag over one’s head when partaking of the French delicacy of Ortolan Bunting: I was hiding from God. Late on his day of rest I hoped that perhaps he would not notice as I snuck into my own private Gomorrah, replete with popcorn and well-cushioned seats. I did this to myself. I was not ignorant. Years ago I played bass for a run of the musical, and, while I loathed every second of it, undergoing the entire experience with my head away from the stage left me wanting. Yes, the perverted babel coming out of the actors mouths filled me with rage. Yes, the songs felt like an affront to the concepts of pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Yet, without the final element, the visual of it, I was left unsatisfied in my rage. I had no sky in which to affix my stars. But I am changed now. As my pounding headache subsides, as the feeling returns in my legs, I am bereft, ruined, without recourse. And yet, cleansed. My vitriol is complete. The lovecraftian crucible of Cats has annihilated me; it has burned the impurity from my body and mind, and I shall never again know fear or doubt. The blood that pumps through my veins is thick and toxic. The world as I behold is hollow and empty. But when I look up, I see the stars. I have at last been given my sky, and the constellations of my disgust burn bright and livid. They dance in shapes neither human nor feline, and yet somehow both, and yet somehow lesser. A corruption of the very idea of corporeality. Their borders blur and shift in legion, defying the retina to rest, challenging the mind to find a pattern or form it can trust. With every eunuch thrust they pervert the erotic itself, until sense and body are robbed of all appeal. I will never be aroused again.
Cats is the final piece of art. It is the period at the end of the sentence of all human culture. We’re dying, all of us. Cats will wander the streets, calling for us to bring out our dead, slavering with glee as the piles dwarf the sun.
Crud Meridian 