Cats (2019) is considered the worst film of the last decade. This has been somewhat surprising given the wild success of the original Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. But even Webber’s work was met with a great deal of ambivalence, as illustrated by the well-known joke that “someone once said that the worst thing about having a mistress is you had to see ‘Cats’ twice.” Disregarding Tom Hooper’s robust attempt to adapt Webber out of hand for uncanny visual effects or an apparent appeal to furries is specious — as though Mark Ruffalo’s face mapped onto the Hulk was any more realistic or the Chitauri any less bizarre. Most critics even winced at the erotic elements inherent in ballet, expressing more about their own prudishness — or at least the prurient moralism of the post-#metoo era — than the tantalizing performance of Francesca Hayward. The last attempt to portray Cats on film was far less ambitious: opting to merely capture the same choreography on a traditional stage set in London’s Adelphi Theatre. Hooper, by contrast, attempts to mediate between the wonders of early twenty-first century digital cinema and the practical necessities of stage action. Not unlike in Marvel and Star Wars films, Cats relies heavily on motion-capture animation to bring to life supernatural creatures and chroma-key animated backdrops to break free from the constraints of architectural set design. Yet, because Webber’s megamusical is primarily a conceptual dance revue as opposed to a narrative-driven story, Hooper’s performers are constantly coming up against the limits of the artifice of digital cinema. These tensions between stagecraft and narrative, which Webber and Hooper each wrestle with in their own way, point to deeper problems inherited from Webber’s source material, T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. 

If Quartets (1943) was Eliot’s attempt to organize the word on an analogy with the sonata in music, then his Book of Practical Cats (1939) might be considered his attempt to organize the word on an analogy with the fairy play. While the genuine fairy plays that emerged around the French Revolution introduced elements of sorcery and magic only in order for them to be defeated by a more cunning hero in the name of truth and reason, in Practical Cats the supernatural elements are introduced to return all-too-familiar human characters to an organic animal state. The musical force of Eliot’s meter, which in his other works threatens to submerge everything into singsong, seems here unrestrained. Struggling to get going, through fits and starts, just as in his other works, Eliot relies predominantly on the present-participular tense which betrays a diminishing imagination for the progression of feeling through his work. It is as though something is always happening, but nothing ever happens. This flattening of time coincides with the transfiguration of characters into linguistic symbols — as with Burbank with his Baedeker and Bleistein with his fat cigar, and the haggard Princess Volupine — which reduces the dramatic unfolding of characters to the arrangement of literary allusions. It is as though Eliot presumed that the artistic unity of his oeuvre would be assured by the logical unity of the history of literary form. Similarly, in Practical Cats the characters are reduced to literary allusions further embodied in the musical sound of their names. Meaning is reduced to the arrangement of things: frozen and fixed yet fleeting with unfulfilled possibilities. The great accomplishment of Eliot’s work is precisely this. But Practical Cats considered independently of Eliot’s work risks reaffirming as natural precisely what he attempted to problematize. [1]

Eliot in Practical Cats had already given his characters a musical life. This is reminiscent of the dreamlike cat number in Footlight Parade (1933) choreographed by Busby Berkeley. It would not be surprising if Eliot had seen it himself. In that film, dance revues showcase flowing kaleidoscopic figures which Siegfried Kracauer described as the mass ornament. [2] The individual dancers are stripped of their personal qualities as well as their group characteristics. Instead, through a process of abstraction, by dividing themselves up into discrete bodily movements — of heads, feet, arms, legs etc. — the girls give form to geometrical patterns and shapes composing something greater than the sum of their parts in the ornament. Just as Eliot’s poetry took refuge in the abstraction of the word into metronomic rhythms and fragmentary allusions, so too does the mass ornament take refuge in abstraction. Yet despite the robust exercise of reason such efforts simultaneously seem mute and empty. Under the auspices of rationality, what has become a kind of second nature — this empty rationality — is reasserted and expressed through the use of abstract signs.

Both Webber’s adaptation of Eliot and Hooper’s adaptation of Webber most likely drew inspiration from sequences such as those in Footlight Parade. However, faced with the abstract empty unity of Eliot’s book of poems, Webber chose to fabricate a sense of dramatic progression by creating a mythological cosmos through which he could attempt to reassemble Eliot’s “cats” into human beings. In Webber’s plot, the cats compete to be the sacrificial offering to the “Heaviside Layer” in hopes of finding a new and better life. This was an effort to give to what are not whole characters a sense of an erotic life — passions — without which each characters’ choreography would have no adequate expression. Hooper continues along this same continuum already initiated by Webber: developing a narrative plot through a primary agentive character who seeks to be initiated into the cult of the Jellicle Cats. By contrast, Eliot’s works and the mass ornament, by abstracting from the individual, point to the locus of the erotic — that life-sustaining instinct of civilization.

Busby Berkeley in Footlight Parade, a film about stage producers becoming obsolete in the era of the talkies, tended to push the plot off of the stage and into the vacuum of film grasping at new and as yet unfulfilled possibilities for art. In Hooper’s Cats, it is somewhat the opposite: we move from the photo-realistic computer generated graphics of London cityscapes back to the concrete realm of the stage following Webber’s musical adaptation of Eliot. This attempt to return to a more concrete existence has sacrificed the possibilities formerly indicated by abstraction, yet without overcoming the new problems it posed. Some of these unworked problems come to light in Hooper’s film in the forms in which they have been naturalized during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Perhaps this is the source of the uncanny feeling that has led critics to indiscriminately pan it and college students to ironically enshrine it as a cult film on par with Rocky Horror and The Room. Let us instead attempt to sustain our critical confrontation with these supernatural powers of film which have long been beyond our control. The spasmodic beauty of abstraction reflects the social reality of capitalist production — a kind of rationality that is not yet rational enough. What is required then is a further development of reason and abstraction, however uncanny that may seem. //

[1] The account of Eliot’s work here is indebted to Helen Gardner’s The Art of T.S. Eliot (1949) and Clement Greenberg’s essay “T. S. Eliot: A Book Review” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (1961).

[2] Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, translated by Thomas Y. Levin. Harvard University Press, 1995.