Nine lives
Cats came back despite critical efforts to shoo it
Cats is trending again on social media. Don’t be shocked. There’s hardly been a day since the film’s December release when some sort of Cats-themed nugget of news hasn’t appeared on Twitter or Instagram, whether it’s James Corden and Rebel Wilson dressing up in furry costumes to present the award for best special effects at the Oscars, or the film sweeping the board at the anti- Oscars, the Golden Raspberry Awards ( or Razzies) for worst cinematic underachievement.
The latest flurry of attention came last week when stoner comedy star Seth Rogen put it on at home. The result was ... confusion. “It is truly trippy,” he tweeted. “Am I supposed to know what a Jellicle is?”
Anyone who’s seen it will empathize with this bewildered breakdown. But while Rogen’s transfixion may have happened under quarantine, it’s far from an isolated case. Fascination with the awfulness of Cats continues to spread. Revival screenings have since sprung up, inviting audiences to arrive in cat drag and sing along.
Having made a wild success of special Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings, theatres have applied the same idea to The Sound of Music, Moulin Rouge! and Grease, and enjoyed similarly packed houses.
It needn’t even be a musical. Or any good. The cult of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, the legendarily abysmal indie often dubbed the worst film ever made, has been sustained by specials in which fervent “fans” throw plastic spoons ( and shout “Spoon!”) at the screen every time they see one of several framed photographs of spoons that sit on the sideboard of the titular room.
With The Greatest Showman, the critically derided PT Barnum musical that became a shock audience favourite, this treatment approached campy nirvana because it had songs, was something people might actually turn up to see and was also most of the way to terrible. Cats goes the whole hog. Yours truly gave Cats zero stars. You won’t find me racing, let alone paying, for a repeat viewing of many one- or two- star films, or even many threes, given how much quality cinema exists. And yet Cats somehow got its claws in.
It’s a critical cliché to call something “unwatchable” but Cats attacks this yardstick — much like everything — from a different angle. Indeed, it’s the very opposite of unwatchable. While it’s unfolding, you feel like Malcolm Mcdowell in A Clockwork Orang. There is nothing to be done but watch. Perhaps I should have awarded it five furballs, or 26 fish carcasses, or some miscellany of other trashy treasures.
Whatever. Now that we’re all looking for ways to survive self- isolation, it must be time for a Cats drinking game. Mix a Miaowjito, or some evil shot of your choice called Cat Nip, and tip one back every time the camera zooms into an actor’s digitally altered crotch; every time Corden delivers a catthemed joke or pun on the word “paw” and every time there is a neck nuzzle or nose rub. When Ian Mckellen laps extravagantly from a saucer, you’ll be doing the same, if you remain conscious that long.
As tourists on Planet Cats, the only options are paralytic or bust.