by Logan Berry
Titian’s Venus of Urbino + cat
Dear Artaud,
I attended the cineplex! An opening night gala on Christmas Eve. I went to see the film that the critics are competing to deride: CATS. Its relentless aimlessness conjures a present-tense that expands in all directions, like a decaying atom or a toothache, crunching time-space together into distended meat-kissed-CG virtuality, a Purgatory that leads–if we admit one plot-ish aspect that permeates the proceedings like the aftermath of burnt garlic–to Death. Death, which stirs the skins of galaxies, the desires of possums and of proteins, the unmoved mover to which all things keel and simmer, that conjurer of mutagenic distributions, collagist of flesh mandalas and tectonic erasures. Indeed, we see the cats' death drives (what's the opposite of sublimated?) persist as intellectualized *and* instinctual, the Master of Ceremonies, a protean metronome that entwines itself with Eros. Eros and Death, slipping betwixt balletic lunges and frenetic pirouettes, superimposing themselves upon each other such that no primary form can emerge//be mapped or pinned within the ineluctable muck of the Jellicle Dance.
"Have you been an alumnus of Heaven and Hell?" - Tumblebrutus.
Jellicle = death-in-life//death-in-death. The twins Thanatos and Eros conjoined at the nape.
At the end (which is not an end) Grizabella, the strung-out starlet(-cat), sings a torch song and is therefore selected by Old Deuteronomy, (cat-)Bishop of Death, to be relieved of living and to be "reborn" in the Heaviside Layer, what critics have oft-read as an ascent into strip-mall Christianity's heaven where Grizabella will ostensibly be swaddled in the forgiving warmth of (cat-)God. Wikipedia informs us that the Kennelly-Heaviside Layer is actually a ring of ionized gas in the E-layer of the Earth's upper-atmosphere–the aeriform backboard against which frequencies emitted by ancient human radios bounce back and propagate across the Earth through stochastic ghostlike webs of information-varices called skywaves–that simultaneously slurped up continuous wave tones from Enola Gay and spat the code A1269 ("Clear-cut, successful in all respects; visible effects greater than Trinity; Hiroshima primary target; conditions normal in airplane following delivery, proceeding to regular base" trans. Hiroki Kato) to the United States' Tinian base while transmitting a cry from Hell, an eyewitness account of the atomic bomb exploding, from Radio Tokyo to its channels in Germany that said, "The Americans . . . have torn off the mask of Humanity,” (trans. in BBC Summary of World Broadcasts) while perfuming living rooms across all three countries (and more) with transnational broadcasts of the croons-cum-dirges of NBC Radio's "National Barn Dance" station. That is, the Kennelly-Heaviside Layer became a medium manipulated by Power, for its fortification and attendant imperial culture.
What will happen when Grizabella beams up and breaches the ionosphere? Will she suffocate? Will she freeze? Will she combust and transubstantiate into communicatory matter, (mis- or dis-) information, condensate, ramify, and spew through speakers/cochlea across the globe? O Saint Immolation, Miss Euthanasia 1939/1980/2019–crowned with coronal loops for a feline economy of senselessness and revelry.
"There seem to be many more ways of going wrong than of going right," writes Eliot to a confidant vis-á-vis his anxieties about the quality of his poetry m.s., Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, the source text for CATS the musical. He explains that he does not want his poems to be arbitrarily strung together by narrativity (that dreaded human-centipede) but fears the poems, on their own, are "flat" (a pejorative, to be sure, in his usage, but I'd also read: amoebic, plotless, present-tense) and will jerry-rig some formal scaffolding via interludes that include chats between a himself and a Man in White Spats. He elaborates:
"At the end they all go up in a balloon, Self, Spats, and dogs and cats.
‘Up up up past the Russell Hotel,
Up up up to the Heaviside Layer.'"
Perhaps the reduction to religious allegory *is* appropriate, and Grizabella's (cat-)Christ ascent is stapled onto the play (it didn't ultimately make it into the poetry collection) in bad faith, like Saint Augustine's rendering of God as omnipotent & omniscient during the Middle Ages (he was really into Plato at the time!), or Bourgeois Xtianity's promise of life-after-life, reservations into Heaven taken via confession and church donations (credit cards accepted!)–slap-dash plot fabrications or thought-experiments that fuck up the whole system, altering it in all temporal directions (e.g. how it can be/is read today, tomorrow, and, crucially, how it *was* read, the past itself literally revised). "It's anywhere," write poets Olivia Cronk and Philip Sorenson in "Z-Axial Literature," "though especially on tombstones, that writing is visible: outwardly emanating forever."
"The mise-en-scène may not please," writes Eliot in that same letter to his confidant, concerned that his book might include portions, "that nobody would like." Intriguingly, critics seem to hate the movie/poem/musical because it's *too* pleasurable. "Worryingly erotic," writes one reviewer. "Two seconds away from turning into a furry orgy in a dumpster" writes another, alluding to the furry community, a subculture of humans who enjoy dressing up as other animals in full-body mascot costumes. "(A) semi-pornographic fur-fetishist's fever dream," "Seething, disquieting sexuality," "not not a sex thing," etc. The not-quite-human, not-quite-feline, elusive anatomical (read: genital) situation of these libidinal beings threatens hegemony's clean/demarcated/static conception of sexuality and taxonomy. These critics don't reveal flaws with the film; they reveal shame at their own arousal.
I’m reminded of multidisciplinary artist Juliana Huxtable's ZOOSEXUALITY installation, which features nude photographs of the artist with variations of hybridized anatomy–lacertilian, porcine, and canine respectively. The sundry udders, tails, snouts, etc. exhibit radiant, unnatural coloring–with hues of laser-tag fuchsia, lacquered purple, aluminum green etc.–and superimpositions of cartoon animal-faces achieved through a mix of practical (I'm tempted to say "organic"!) effects, like hair styling and makeup, with CG-augmentations. Even the human features look artificial, air-brushed, and made-over. Fantasy and (in)organics commix, and the human and non-human organs coextend and blend. In an interview about the installation, Huxtable says that she, "wanted a kind of psychedelic expansion of sexual desire." Such desiring rewires deeply entrenched anthropocentric cultural coding. This is not about becoming an animal, which implies inert definitions of what it means to be a human and what it means to be animal, partitioning each in opposition to one another ("humans against the world!"). Huxtable's futa furry hybrids and the CATS movie's animorphs dramatize identity-formulation in relationship *with* other animals. We *are* animals. Anthropomorphizing is inevitable, according to artist/ethicist H. Peter Steeves when we realize, "the bilateral nature of the projection, the fluidity with which judgements are made and change and are always up for grabs." He explains, "It's all right to see one's dog as feeling ashamed after he has messed the floor because, in part, we come to have the experience of performing shame ourselves by learning it from the performance of dogs." We're co-constitutive of each other.
Huxtable raises the stakes with INFERTILITY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: SNATCH THE CALF BACK in which she explores these themes within a "large-scale farming" setting. "YOU COULDN'T WALK A DAY IN MY SHOES ... / COMPREHEND THE VIOLENCE I'VE ENDURED..." she taunts in her in-character press release, challenging the viewer to try and comprehend it. Her main animal avatar in this exhibition is a cow-person pictured under duress. In one image she leans over a saw horse, her manacled hands behind her back as "pulsating milk tubes" pinned to her teats pump out her milk, as she tilts back her head in ambiguous pleasure/pain. Thinking about the diction a concerned outsider might deploy to describe her condition ("enslaved," "exploited," "demeaned," "violated," etc.) and thinking about the language her captors might use to describe her, congruencies emerge between the languages of animality and oppression (racism, sexism, classism, most the 'isms'!) (I'd recommend Aph Ko's eloquent RACISM AS ZOOLOGICAL WITCHCRAFT: A GUIDE TO GETTING OUT, which lays out this argument in greater detail.) Handwritten, diagrammatic notations dissect the situation into didactic, mechanizing term and reminders: "lower cow torso penetrated by farmer in act consecrating 'animal husbandry'" points toward her rear end, "convert saw horse into artificial insemination cage" points toward the saw horse, and "ears raised in surrender" point towards her cartoon bovine ears.
Vivisections occur throughout CATS, too, by way of director Tom Hooper's nearsighted camera work. With unusual fetishistic inclination for close-ups (musical-movie directors typically favor wide-shots to extract the spectacle's maximum sugar), Hooper's camera prods like a porn lens, cutting the cats into the parts of their sums. He seems especially fascinated by their tails–which function as stand-ins for their absent phalluses, externalizing carnal impulses through quivers and throbs, or else swooshing around flaccidly–and their genital regions, smooth and shapeless, as if touched up by the Amaro filter or by Ken Doll castration technology (which, it should be noted, inspires *more* not less intrigue, the same way the eye gravitates towards decrypting crossed-out text vs. the overt).
Confession: AA, years ago I was in a production of CATS. I played Old Deuteronomy, (cat-)Bishop of Death (portrayed by Dame Judi Dench in the movie-based-off-the-musical-based-off-the-poetry-collection). Throughout the rehearsal process and performances, I suffered constant flare-ups in my heart due to a congenital defect called Wolff-Parkinson-White-Syndrome. A rogue, superfluous pathway coursed between the upper and lower chambers and randomly fired off electricity, forcing the heart to thrash in double-time for unpredictable intervals that could last longer than an hour. WPW accelerations are typically not mortiferous, but they're disconcerting. I hate the feeling. I hate the feeling of the heart attempting to bust out of its cage. Attempting to burst through the layers of teen-gristle and faux fur, to choke its host with aortic twists. To drown it in red. This mutation/malfunction's roiling potential energy–it could trigger a system failure and kill me. It could remake me into an even more profitable prequel. Xenolithic death angel–rapacious bug– It could do nothing.
Humanity foreclosed a future for itself and its organic co-habitants. But the end is not the end. It's also not-not the end. It's, "an end" (Anne Boyer). Shall we die-out as humans? "I n d i v i s i b l e ?" Shall we tear ourselves inside out? Gutlessness requires guts, as well as a cosmetic surgeon you'd trust with your unborn dozen. Shall we remake ourselves into the image of the book, the play, or the movie? Shall we circulate between the three? I'll accompany you for your renegade transformation, barely capable of faking one fucking song on the cello in Mrs. Rosas' fine earth class. I've given up on sleeping. I've given up on eating. Yes, A. Jellicle cats **are queens of the night. The audience is--decked out in X-mas crimsons, velvets, gummy green baubles, arrays of berets, and caps with veils-- frenzied by the film--crying and laughing and writhing at once in our seats! We can't get enough. We won't stop.
ttyl,
Lo
from Shintaro Kago’s Neko Funjatta.