Elaborating On a Video Essay about Cats (2019) & Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism"
...and How the Video Somehow Never Mentions the Part Where the Cats Dance Terrifyingly like a Machine and oh god I'm writing about youtube video essays
Some short time after posting my own spurious Cats wordbarf earlier this year, I came across a 2020 YouTube video essay called "CATS & The Weird Mind of TS Eliot: An Analysis," by Maggie Mae Fish. It's almost an hour long. There's costuming and artful lighting and skits. It's that kind of video. It's very engaging, and I enjoyed watching it. Clearly, a huge amount of work was put into researching and producing it. I learned a lot, like really so much that I had neglected to look up before writing about Cats, and unfortunately it has to do largely with fascism—even more than I noted intuitively and mentioned in what I wrote before. So, on that basis alone, I feel obligated to make note of it and acknowledge what I've learned somewhere visible alongside my own Cats junk.
Something about this video also struck me as way off the mark. Some-things plural and superficial which amount to something else, a deep, nigh unanswerable thing at the bottom of this, and it takes a bit of time to get there. If this looks excessive to you, I agree, it is, I’m really only writing it because I already sank several days into writing about a musical that turned out to be inspired by the work of a bastard, and I feel like I have to follow through. I'm just doing due diligence as someone who writes about silly things online. Also though, if you have seen this video essay or have concerns about Cats, I think there actually is something helpfully illuminating here relating to a central source [under]used in the video, and conversely all this stuff about Cats enabled me to better read Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism." It is neither reassuring nor damning to see this thing, but it makes the mess, as a mess, make more sense.
[The real Eco stuff is the last part, after all the quibbling. I'm doing the quibbling because I think it's a good setup for why the Eco thing helps, and I'm doing the quibbling first because putting the Eco thing first would read like citing Eco in order to quibble.]