or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Skimbleshanks
A Mostly Unedited and Under-Researched Peek into my Personal Mind Hell / A Meditation on Cats, Trains, the Way, Absurdism and Seeing, Dancing, Death, Disaster, Doom, and Suffering
[NOTE: The second post [here] in this series on Cats contains actual information that I neglected to learn before writing this one, and it may in fact be more useful to read first]
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PART I: A DISTURBING INTRODUCTION ft. A STRANGE MAN
Two weeks ago, we saw a production of Cats at the James M. Nederlander Theatre in Chicago. It was fantastic. Previous to this show, my only familiarity with Cats had been with the 2019 film and the spectacle surrounding its magnificently expensive celebrity-powered failures. I would never have had the inclination to look further had not my partner guided the both of us, one fateful night, into a bout of fawning Mistoffelees-mania and quickly decided to search for tickets, which fortuitously lead us to a show happening right now in our city. So, I must preface everything below with an acknowledgement of this guidance, as well as for the cast and crew and for the cats of the world and their great wisdom, without which I would be writing an even thinner and more spurious piece of pseudo-mystical thought-trash than what exists here before you. Also, I admit that I have no real knowledge of musicals or the world of stage productions in general, and I expect that some of the inferences presented herewithin will disagree with the canon of Cats scholarship. I am sorry. Let’s go.
To begin, red herringly, let’s talk for just a moment about the 2019 big-time movie version of Cats, which we will refer to henceforth as 2019 CATS. I don’t want to dwell on this too long; much ink has already been spilled, and so on. It was, as I have mentioned, my own starting point for engagement with Cats, so aspects of its execution naturally became comparatively useful for what I’d like to discuss here. [On a similar note, I will not be giving an introductory explanation of Cats, its premise and history, here. Not only am I not qualified, but I expect that if you’re going to read this, you’re most likely already into Cats to some degree. If you actually have no familiarity with it, then you should probably see it for yourself in some form before reading this.] We saw the 2019 CATS with some friends in a mostly empty megaplex movie theater and had a great time. In general, I remember feeling mostly baffled by some kind of unconfirmable sense of disjuncture between certain choices on screen and a surviving through-line of …something, hidden behind the special effects and erratic pacing. We left the theater, and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. On the other side of this disorienting biopolitical gauntlet of arbitrary suffering and variously widespread magical delusion, one thing truly, irrevocably, stuck with me: that guy Skimbleshanks.
Skimbleshanks, as portrayed by Steven McRae in 2019 CATS, hit my circle of friends and acquaintances like a train. A sex train. To put it simply, seemingly everyone wanted to fuck and/or party with Skimbleshanks. Skimble was a shining beacon of liberatory musical, theatrical, physical prowess which burst forth in the middle of an otherwise muddled disaster and thrashed your brain with insane tapdancing muscles. Jennifer Hudson’s Grizabella also, obviously, stands out, but discussion of her character and performance require a decidedly less exuberant, more somber tone which doesn’t find such amplification in manic retweets. After seeing 2019 CATS, you mostly want some relief. Skimbleshanks was there, it seemed, to take you by the hand and tell you it was all worth it.
I felt somewhat differently about Skimbleshanks after that first viewing. While I understood on a basic level that the song itself “slaps,” and that its rendering through dance, by an actual dancer, was empirically “good,” something felt not quite right. I was disturbed, for reasons not easy to place, by a hidden relic not quite unearthed in the film and which no one else seemed interested to examine—something which I myself was apparently not ready to parse. The disturbance was compounded in contrast to the phenomenon of lust and devotion exhibited by my peers. I was alienated. Skimbleshanks had ignited in me an experience of alienation that I would not reckon with for years to come. This amidst the general crapola of the 2019 CATS experience amounted in my brain to an unintelligible train wreck of impressions, and I was as nonplussed as the average reviewer despite assuredly having more furries in my life than Barry at MovieYuck.com. The ghost, however, was strong, and I could tell that somewhere in the wreckage of it all there was something, something in Cats, which was certainly …a thing. Then, like I said, there was a plague, and certain things transpired. This is my excuse for not having looked deeper into Cats until now. I shelved it.
Going into the musical viewing, then, I was curious how I would take the Skimbleshanks number, what it’s like in the original, what sort of rendition we would see, etc.—and I voiced this thought to my theatre partner without really knowing how to explain. I was trying to be open minded, but I said that, oh, I dunno, I just don’t really like tapdancing? This was incorrect. We’ll get into that later.
We’d watched some videos of different songs from the 1998 film version, mostly for Mistoffelees, and I was interested in Cats. Seeing the show live confirmed this interest; it revived, clarified and reenforced everything that I thought I’d maybe vaguely intuited from the 2019 movie experience.
Here, on that note, is a basic rundown on my impression of what Cats is all about:
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PART II: WHAT IS CATS? WHAT IS DEATH?
Okay, I said I wasn’t going to do it, but I should summarize briefly my whole impression of Cats so that I’m not just talking to myself. A lot of this is obvious(?), though, and either way it may be crass to put into words; forgive me. I want to be thorough.
Cats has a reputation for its “simplicity,” for its purity and immediacy of intentions carried upon a thin story. The problem is, things that are simple simply are not: they contain vast histories of human experience, and that broad universality is what makes them reputedly “simple” or “obvious.” Only some gentle effort is required to lift the veil of mundanity from these actually quite mysterious aspects of everyday life.
Cats are mysterious because we cannot communicate with them comprehensively using any human language. Their interiority, their experience of the same space of life we live within, is undeniable, but at the same time a total mystery to us. There may be an impulse here to say “No, stop being dramatic, cats are basically like us, and I understand them.” I know, I know, I like cats too. I get it. “Cats are very much like you,” we are reminded in the lyrics of Cats. But I beg you, resist the hubris that would flatten this intuition into an answer that closes doors. You do not totally understand cats any more than you totally understand another person or even your own self. If we did, life would be dimensionless, no? And the musical Cats would be that much more catless. So, cats contain mystery. Many things do. In fact, everything does, but cats in particular will contain mystery and stare at you at the same time. They live in your house. Sometimes they go out, they work all night long in the dark, they experience whole lives, they come back to us. They have rituals and ineffable desires, and they have turbulent natures in stark contrast to their Zen composure. Cats are something much more than cats, just as we are something much more than dictionary-describable apes.
Cats and humans are the same, and yet different. That tension means something. Considering these equivalences and ambivalences in comparing two kinds of life, one might very well ask, “What is life, then, anyhow?”
Also, why cats, though? Ducks experience life, too. And fish. The musical could have been called Frogs, or Cockroaches! It could have been about our interpretation of the interiority and mutualistic life of trees and fungus and the web of living and dying that makes up a forest, or any part of a world of living things. But it’s about cats. Well, we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves here, but the cat-focus of Cats is suitable essentially because of death and the mysteries of life’s meaning in the face of death. Cats carry an enormous amount of cultural weight and spiritual mystique which situates them at death’s door and at the limb of the unconscious. They are poetically useful in that respect and in their adjacency to human life and its problems. We made cats—not Cats, the play, no, a weird man named Andrew did that—we made cats the domesticated animal and associated cultural phenomenon that terrorizes native bird populations and contributes to ecologically destructive clay mining. We made the cats that gather in dysfunctional groups to have little knife fights and catch diseases in the scummy trash-feast-festooned alleyways of the mega-cities of the world. We made the cats upon which some have visited an absolutely nightmarish history of cruelty in certain parts of the world, and in certain parts of history, by certain kinds of “We,” a history which we should not take upon ourselves here to explore, because it’s too damn sad. There’s kind of a problem with cats. Something happened there, with the cats, and we struggle to even grasp it. Yet cats walk through it deftly, with grace. They have nine lives, so to speak. This is intuitively understood going into the experience of Cats, so much so that one doesn’t at any point stop to think about it. Why are the cats, in the standard stage design, living in a picture of destitution? Because cats, that’s why. [Again here, there is a whole other thing to be written about Grizabella, about cats and suffering and death, care and compassion. I will be able to touch on the subject only tangentially.] Through this pre-understood facility of the cat’s with death and the problems we have historically created for ourselves, Cats from the title has already passively announced its subject matter.
Where Cats directly introduces itself, ostensibly, is in the prologue song “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats,” as well as in the two numbers that follow, “The Naming of Cats” and “The Introduction to the Jellicle Ball.” The first of these songs especially and the two that follow in complement are subversions of the musical format’s introduction to the world or premise of a story. We expect to hear a song that tells us “here is what’s up.” What we get instead is something in the same shape as that, but with much less certainty and clear expression. Instead, the particulars of the words demand of us an openness to a certain amount of interpretive speculation and free thought. To take “jellicle” as an obvious example, the words to these songs use funny little made-up or defamiliarized corruptions of standard English communication which encourage wild imagination.
If you pay attention, though, some things are made clear. We are told that the story will concern death, and some sort of ritual of mystery surrounding death. There are nods to reincarnation, to the mystery of life and its origins in nothingness as a mirror to death, and to a oneness of being that binds all living things, including the Jellicle Cats, together into a universal community riding upon the ever-breaking cusp of a wave in the incredible sea of infinite change. The world is hard, for cats and for us. Cats, again, are evocatively situated in proximity to this hardship, and in these opening songs, we hear of another theme adjacent to death and suffering: that of compassion. Grizabella carries all the weight for this huge piece of the story. She is in pain, and we are meant to understand that her life is basically over. That’s a bit messed up, but uh nevermind. The point is that the cats shun her. She was once a Jellicle Cat too, a part of something magnificent, and now she is not. Acknowledging her story would seem to risk some of that magnificence for the Jellicle Cats, and they cannot bring themselves to reach out and touch her, to accept her back in. Some of the younger cats try but are stopped by the older cats.
Shunning the destitute and the suffering is a key problem here, for the cats and for us, in its clear and discordant contrast against the jubilant and adventurous life that Cats purports to celebrate, a life where we get to live in the now, vicariously, imaginatively and collectively and playfully through the characters on stage, at peace with the chaos and hardship. To shun those who are suffering belies this whole endeavor, and those suffering can’t themselves take part in it without collective support. The shunning is a self-destructive poison of humanity. The group fears poisoning by disease, dysfunction, or degeneracy, and instead poisons itself with something darker. It’s the same poison that kills us every day as we keep turning the pedals on this thing we call a society, keeping ourselves fed, not looking down, the machine barely functioning, leaving the woeful in its wake as it hurtles toward planetary destruction.
Ahem. This contrast between Jellicle-ness and compassionless negligence of the hurting, this is what makes Cats into the neat little simple but powerful empathy parable that it is commonly described as—that I have seen it described as by people who are way more into Cats than I am. And it is simple: Reach out and offer touch to someone who is in pain.
But there’s more. We’re going to talk a lot about names, here in Cats. In the song “The Naming of Cats,” we learn that cats each have three names, one of which is a secret, true name. This is a concept with ancient roots, that of a true name. There are many places in different schools of thought, far-flung, to draw connections to. The first that came to mind for me personally was that of the Tao Te Ching, a work which we do not have time to fully get into here. To put it in the form of the briefest citation possible, there is a Way, a deepest truth of the universe, but, as the opening lines of the first chapter say:
The way you can go
isn’t the real way.
The name you can say
isn’t the real name.
In Ursula Le Guin’s annotated translation of the Tao Te Ching, she says that “A satisfactory translation of this chapter is, I believe, perfectly impossible. It contains the book.” There are ways we can access the Way, but we cannot directly know it. Cats are like this too. We can only access their truth of life in degrees, through layers. To name them, as a human, is a sort of hubris that claims knowledge we don’t totally have. But we do it, because names are important to us. Names are closely tied to how we see ourselves as existing in the world, as distinct, and in relation to others. Names may not seem so huge to you, but that’s just it: The thing that goes unnamed is in the Everything (big), and it’s in Every Thing (small). A cat:
His mind is engaged in rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought
Of the thought of his name
For the rest of the musical, we continue with various songs all showing us a cat or cats who is/are like us in some way or another. The use of strangeness, however, remains effective throughout. Cats oscillates between projection of human mental qualities and experiences onto the cats and, conversely, a deployment of some almost Dadaist absurdity (I am stretching some words here) in the strange names and terminology, a sort of inverted-Verfremdungseffekt (Brecht’s “distancing effect“) which forces a degree of alienation on the viewer in their regarding of otherwise ordinary things like cats living in a house or cats playing around with corks. This allows your mind to play around with the cats, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge with potent imaginings. It becomes more real. This oscillatory technique has an effect of intellectual abandon. We follow along, alternately stepping on step-stones of familiarity and leaping through empty space. Of the former, those ordinary human qualities and experiences, most of the projections are normal and quite applicable to many other animals, or at least mammals with whom we can more readily identify on metabolic and psychological grounds: Food, for example, is a daily reality of relish and hardship for cats and people alike. Leisure, indulgence, and times of plenty, too, by extension. Domesticity, sex appeal, mercuriality and idleness, imagination, theft and play, even the role of elders in groups of animals, all of this has immediate applicability to the cats’ world of cats, such that we can easily project onto the cat people …but trains?
Trains, Skimbleshanks?
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PART III: TRAINS (IN HELL)
I will not waste your time: I admit that trains do indeed have a clear applicability to the evocative themes of Cats. Enduring ever since the invention of the steam engine, the creation of rail systems, and the vast and accelerated travel (and colonization) that these technologies enabled, trains have always carried with them an air of mystery and freedom, again an invitation to daydream about possibilities. Trains are also a feat of cooperation and coordination. Trains are very hurrah, hurrah, if you know what I mean. It just fits. You see the cat in the little train man costume, you see him dance super good, and you think, “Yeah, absolutely. No questions.” It’s kind of like how trains are Christmas for some reason.
But something ain’t right here. The story thus far has presented to us these little critters that just can’t be defined, anarchic chaotic scavengers living in their wild moon cult in a forgotten alleyway, shouting cryptic invocations of death magic and unresolvable ancient enigmas. They dance, yes. But do they dance like a train? Do they operate a train with continuous technical aptitude, running swiftly and ceaselessly toward the distant horizon? Do cats do that?
These were my questions as I sat, ill at ease, through the song “Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat” toward the end of 2019 CATS. In the moment, I couldn’t articulate it at all. Upon more recent examination, I can elaborate my complaints more precisely. It was, crucially, the linearity of the company’s dance and their parade-like march upon an actual steel rail, progressing forward with Skimbleshanks leading—the machinic coordination, the imitation of an engine-driven train, the hurrah hurrah of it all—that struck a disquieting chord somewhere deep in the fear part of my brain. Cats just… really don’t do that. They don’t go like that. To be frank, the scene creeped me out and just didn’t seem to fit into the scrappy back-alley-cum-junkyard themes of Cats that I thought I had grown accustomed to during the film’s roughly hour and change preceding.
Listen, I’m not here to say you’re a fascist for wanting to bone Skimbleshanks (that’s a post for another website). You could make a case that I am tilting at windmills, or trains, I guess, when it comes to searching for darkness amid the virtually unanimous outpouring of adoration for Skimb and his song, which “slaps,” and “fucks,” and “bangs,” and “goes hard” and what have you. It does, but it scared me a bit.
But I’m learning and growing. I believe I have come to understand, and I’m writing this to prove it to myself. We’re getting there. Bear with me.
Life is not one way! “It takes all kinds,” as they say. Sort of an underhanded and vaguely rude expression, I think, for a true thing I can’t put into better words. There are many kinds of cats, or whatever it was Old Deut said. So true, my man. And we need some of them to help with the train, which I myself am not suited for. And thank you very much to the workers of the CTA.
I have a note here that just says “Trains: We want them!” I think this is self-explanatory. Nevertheless, let’s review: Here in the so-called United States of So-Called America, so-called “we” have all just sat through an incredibly frustrating and foreboding couple of decades of what I’m going to call, with a marked unprofessionalism, “Economic Shit.” Something is wrong. It’s the neoliberalism of it all, or whatever, it’s the closure of mental health facilities and the trendy-design chat bot therapist, and it’s the price of food, the tainted water, the water in little plastic bottles, the no healthcare, the labyrinthine healthcare, the Bezosification of the little shittily made pieces of shit that we buy to make shit work, and then they break again because everything’s shit, and the stupid car tunnel, the exploding electric vehicular manslaughter cars for === rich people, the traffic, the traffic, the traffic, the socks you bought online which came in a gigantic box filled with inflated plastic bubbles. It’s the VR AI JOI NFT GPT experience, the feeling that everything is bullshit, it’s the video card mined under brutal conditions and made to run Minecraft yet will soon be your boss, somehow, surprise, the video card is your boss now, it’s the food trend that wipes out a village and the forests leveled to create warehouses full of efficiently flat-packed furniture that shatters to splintering chaff when you move or live or sleep anywhere near it ... It’s the way the city’s transit payment system is operated by some kind of corporation which is clearly holding discrete sums of all our monies for the purpose of basically having a huge pile of cash they can do bank stuff with. It’s the transit cops, their attack dogs with cages on their faces and the piss everywhere, because there’s NOWHERE LEGAL TO PISS FOR MILES AROUND, BECAUSE THEY FORGOT TO MAKE THE CITY HAVE PLACES TO PISS IN, it’s the ads for crap from years ago still leering at us all over every station, and the overall, gradual abandonment of coherent plans for the upkeep of functioning public transportation for the people who live in it, so that the city can instead focus on paying the cops ever more bajillions of dollars for new tanks and bludgeon wax, for polishing their bludgeons. It's the insanity of it all. And the trains are breaking down. And if there were better trains, things would be a bit better. The trains, at least, could be right. Shouldn’t they agree with us on that? The mayors and the bastards? So “give us trains,” is the call.
Amid this furious, hot-to-the-touch, uber-productive miasma of new and high-powered ideas for things that will kill us all, it is easy, yes, to just want the goddamn trains to work. If you’re going to make me take part in this, just let me get around in order to do it, right? Let us have trains. I can watch the “decline,” or whatever, from the windows of a train shambling through the ruins of an evil empire. This isn't sarcasm; I genuinely share that sentiment, to an extent. That’s all fine, as long as there’s a train.
If I’m being uncharitable, though, it could come from some kind of expectation that we’re entitled to this, that “in this day and age,” and in a country where things “should be better” [than elsewhere less fortunate], that the trains should work, that someone should be making them go. But why should it work? What reason have they ever given us to expect that any of this, ultimately, will work? What did we think was going to happen? …Uncharitable, but even then, it’s an honest expectation. A lot of people worked really hard on trains, and it would be a shame to let them rust. So, yeah. Trains: we want them.
Here’s my question, though. Where is the train taking me? It’s taking me to work, that’s where. It’s taking me downtown. I don’t want to go there. My work is bullshit. I’m not totally sure I want to be on a train that much. It was an unpleasant coincidence that while I spaced out during the train part of Cats, pondering this train stuff and anxiously massaging my hands, I discovered a new callous on my palm that I had not noticed before. A mark of labor, the thing the train takes me to. My little part in a machine.
I realize I am betraying a certain tendency of thought here which opens cans of cans of cans of- please, I beg you again, bear with me.
Nevertheless, there are some things to be said about trains. We can reach all around for more examples of the diversity of the wonder of trains in media. On the one hand, Dil Se.., wherein trains are incredibly exciting and romantic, with more powerful dancing and singing, more possibility, more freedom of travel across a vast and multitudinously complex empire. On the other hand, there is Snowpiercer, wherein the train is society and we have got to get the hell off.
I know, of course, that there is no rule in story and art which says that one must adhere to strict ideological consistency in order to create something interesting or good (or more to the point, there is such a rule only if you are a certain kind of asshole). I am not going to say that Cats should pick a posture toward trains and the built world and produce the corresponding propaganda. This is especially so with regards to the kind of experiential group thing that is theatre. Why should theatre cater to my preexisting personal mindset? “All the world’s a stage,” and all that. In fact, the opposite of that inclination toward ideology is often true in the broadest general sense, for anything only has meaning insofar as we can continue to engage with it, as living things, inquiring and questioning and learning. If life was a clock, we would tick and tick and tick. Webber and Eliot must have understood this while writing Cats and its source material (weirdly, given some of their conservative aristocratic inclinations? Lol anyway), as evidenced by another character: Immediately following and in direct contrast to Skimbleshanks’ pocket-watch-checking, we are slapped around with the alluring danger of Macavity, who has “broken every human law”(wait, has he? Holy shit). There are many kinds of cats. Life is not one thing.
There are also different kinds of trains. Trains within major cities (commonly subways or monorails or some other cool future train), these are one sort of thing. Trains that take goods and mail from one distant place to another, these are another thing. And even the various interconnected systems facilitating free movement, the ones we really want, the ones that are being destroyed by the neoliberalism of it all; these too are a thing. There are also the trains that have to cross borders, trains that carry around coal and gas, industrial supplies, and toxic chemicals (note that I am writing this in the month following the derailment and ensuing chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio), and trains that carry military tanks and livestock packed and jostled and tired on their way to slaughter, connecting up the world that we know now to be built on a system that is swiftly generating the next great plague. There’s a difference between these kinds of trains, I guess. Or rather, it’s not so much a binary difference as it is …all very complicated. Trains are evocative of freedom and possibility and flight, yet they are also the knitting of a great and terrifying steel skeleton that has come alive, and now it speeds the world towards its own destruction with the pulsing intricacy of an evolving, seething thing, a god of our very own, built from real alchemy of the very stones, now too vast and powerful to stop or even comprehend. [EDIT: I would be remiss not to add here a nod to the great and even very recent history of railway strikes in certain continent-spanning empires, all those successful and blocked-by-the-bastards alike, which demonstrate a real capacity for the cats inside the machine to shut it down. I believe the true Skimbleshanks is on board for that.]
And h- Wait holy shit Andrew Lloyd Webber did music for a whole other musical about TRAINS, too? Oh my god, what the hell, do I have to watch this too, now? I’m going to have to pass. No thank you. No.
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PART IV: TRAINS AGAIN (BUT WITH CATS)
Here is where the experience of seeing a real live production of Cats changed everything for me.
First of all, Skimbleshanks is, classically speaking, not the same hyper-competent machine-gun tapdancing sex symbol that he became in the 2019 CATS movie. I will remind the reader here that I went into the theatre experience of Cats with a vocal skepticism of tapdancing. I was plainly wrong. Tapdancing, like all dancing, exists in a range of forms which can be defined in relation to two poles. The intensely fraught character of Jennyanydots revealed this to me. Her tap-dancing is lively and free, a joyous little spectacle of dancing revelry, the independence of spirit, that simply cheers you up. Dancing in a line, on a rail, on the other hand, begins to represent the opposite pole of this dancing spectrum, where we find parades, mass religio-monarchical ceremonies, fascistic displays of cultural uniformity and military prowess, and dead-eyed, synchronized TikTok thrusting.
Good old Skimbleshanks, in the stage production we saw at least, does not tapdance at all. He dances around in a much idler way. This itself was revealing, and even had an explicit analogue in the written lyrics which I of course hadn’t been able to notice past the CGI-fur-coated devil’s dancing on display in 2019 CATS. The lyrics describe Skimbleshanks as causing a delay to the train’s departure because he was fucking around with a thimble, or something, and they didn’t want to leave without him. Classic cat stuff.
In the original work, Skimbleshanks’ whole thing is a parody of competency—and I mean that as compliment. It’s very intentional.
It was me who was in charge
Of the sleeping car express
From the driver and the guards
To the bagmen playing cards
I would supervise them all, …more or less
This is the same joke as when we say “aw look, she’s using the phone” if our cat or dog or lizard happens to sit on our data screen object. It’s funny and cute to imagine our goofy pets doing human stuff, because they can’t really do that, or they could never be bothered to learn (or to lower themselves, if you ask me), and the unseriousness of that picture is has a light-heartedness, a heart-lightening effect on something like, say, the great and powerful railway system. This is all just to say that the Skimbleshanks we see on stage is just a cat guy. He was probably awoken from a nap right before he appeared on stage. The Skimbleshanks we see in the 2019 CATS movie is more like “Get on this train, now, before it departs. We are not waiting for you. The train is powering up. This is the fuck train.”
I’d like to take one more brief moment here to just really emphasize that cats simply do not have jobs. Some cats are trained to help with stuff, sure. They have, historically, helped to keep down disease-carrying rat populations. That’s fun. But cats in general are not interested in having a job as employment, and we should respect that. The joke of “Cats with jobs” is profoundly depressing to me for its insistence on a mindset that we would rather imagine these ultimately mysterious beings as like, being computer programmers or working on their PhD or whatever. I know it’s a joke, okay? It’s just that it’s a miserabilist joke.
It's notable, I think, that the other discussion of employment in Cats comes in the song of Jennyanydots, who is a sort of luxurious and beloved MP or homeowners’ association leader(??), insisting that the cockroaches just need jobs, something productive to do, and they won’t be a nuisance any longer.
I think that the cockroaches need employment
To prevent them from idle and wanton destroyment
So I formed from that lot of disorderly louts
A troop of well-disciplined helpful Boy Scouts
With a purpose in life and a good deed to do
I dunno, man. This is so bleak. This is a whole other essay. I am not exaggerating when I say that I know this passage will bring up some genuinely dark and challenging trauma for some of my readers, and I apologize for confronting you with it. I see you, and I love you, and I reach out and fail a merit badge in your honor.
Back to the jellicle cats.
The cats on stage even come together to make a fun pantomime train out of junkyard wheel-rims and a big kite-like tube/tunnel/cylinder of cloth, like from that gymnastics fun time for kids that maybe you did, in your suburb? It’s fun! It’s not like marching on a rail at all! There is a moment in the 1998 filmed version of the original-ish production of Cats (and maybe in most? Or others? I don’t know) when the choreography includes the cats sort of marching, or parading, in a line—as if a train. However, it’s very brief, and they’re going in a circle. They’re going in a circle, of course, because they're on a stage, and going in a circle is the only place they have available to go. Herein lies another case of the expansive (and expensive) filmic capabilities of the 2019 CATS production losing itself in its zealous march to the horizon.
In the theater, I was so lost in thought over these comprehensive and direly meaningful differences in the portrayals of Skimbleshanks that I didn’t even notice something incredible happening in the choreography on stage. I saw it only later in a clip from the 1998 movie. The thing is this:
The train falls apart!!!
They don’t just move on to the next bit of dancing and disassemble and discard the train parts; no, there is literally a gag where they all “crash” and fall to the ground in mock cat-astrophe as the pieces fly apart and wheels roll away. The train falls apart. It breaks down, it crashes, it comes to a stop. This is all incredibly Snowpierceresque. It shook me to my core.
[In fact, this may not have even happened on stage when we went to see Cats live. I can’t say, because I was not paying attention at that moment, and my partner was unable to confirm later. In retrospect, if it was indeed left out, I can see why the production may have deliberately cut the crash moment from their choreography in this particular run (see again: recent train-based disaster).]
There is one more angle here that I couldn’t help but see after having witnessed the train crash moment:
To state the obvious, trains go to places. We get on the train that takes us where we want to go. Where do the cats want to go? They’re not going to work, that’s for damn sure. They want to go to the Heaviside Layer. Ergo, the train is taking us to the Heaviside Layer. The train is taking us to the afterlife.
The train is not only the Snowpiercer, an engine eternal driving society to its inevitable doom, the train is also the boat across the river Styx, the vessel that takes us to the other side. This makes Skimbleshanks like unto Charon, shepherding us on to the same fate we all share: death. The 2019 CATS version of this scene likewise cannot escape the haunting implications: We see a line of cats parading behind their leader in this dance, Skimbleshanks, like the cloaked figure of Death leading the Danse Macabre. So we all will go. Be not mistaken by the big flying tire that actually carries Grizabella, R.I.P., to the Heaviside Layer, and how Old Deuteronomy is the one who leads her to it. That’s for jellicle cats, and it's a mechanism briefer in lifespan and historical scope. No, Skimbleshanks is our Reaper. The hypnotic first steps of Steven McRae’s performance as Skimbleshanks are all the more haunting for this vision, and honestly it almost redeems the whole thing for me, except that I don’t think that Tom Hooper would be on the same page as me here. I think he probably saw it as that celebration of competency, of the machine, clickity clack, of the power and majesty of the railway. He is definitely a guy for power and efficiency and production, given what we know now about his cruel and driving treatment of the overworked visual effects team, burned out like fuel in the furnace powering the whole endeavor. This mode of creative production, so typical of our era of VFX spectacle in film and video game megaprojects, contrasts grimly and distracts from the immediacy and simplicity of a stage experience, which, although it requires a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes, hits the viewer on a completely different level that film cannot reach. Hooper’s attempts to get there betray themselves, fatally. The thing is, when the dancing really starts, it doesn’t matter what the director thinks or wants anymore, because magical things begin to happen. McRae cut through the bullshit and took us straight to Hell. An actual wizard.
But I would ask you, wouldn’t you rather that Charon of joy and slumber and forgiveness, over a Charon of acceleration and mastery?
∗ ∗ ∗
PART V: CONCLUSION, OR THE MYSTICAL LACK THEREOF
I don’t want to harp on the disaster of 2019 CATS too much, but at this point it’s maybe useful to note that the depth of the meta-material at play here is one reason why the 100-million-dollar cutting edge special effects extravaganza of celebrity was doomed from the start. The task of the movie, without their knowing it, was to attempt to name the name of a name of a name, in a sense. Cats themselves help us name the name of a thing they have some tangential access to. Then Eliot, and then Webber help us name that in layers, and then the stage actors give a name, in the form of a theatre experience, to that, and we see it and know the thing by the name that we hear. At that moment, Cats in the incarnation that we received it in was and is an almost perfect thing (minus the memory-holed weird racist interlude that no one wants to talk about), a thing supported by thousands of years of theatrical tradition; it is what it is. There’s not much else needs to be done with it. Just do it, and do it live.
Which points to the fatal truth of what I’m trying to do here, which is that
ALL OF THIS TALK IS FUTILE
…and forget everything you just read, because Cats resists smart analysis as deftly as a cat escapes our superficial perceiving. The true experience of Cats takes place on a level that cannot be related or enhanced by talking it into dust. “You cannot know it, but you can be it.” –the Tao again. Just be like the cats. Just be cat. Old Deut shows us:
So this is this, and that is that
and,
A cat is not a dog
His final words are a parody of certainty and paternalistic, patrician, pat wisdom about who’s who and what’s what, the “facts of life” and “the way things are.” Yet, some things really are that simple. And yet they aren’t. It is all that simple, and it isn’t – the name you can say isn’t the real name, but what you can say is what you can say. And what you can do is what you can do, til you find not-doing.
Just do the train if there’s a train. Skimbleshanks will help you. You don’t get to decide where the train is going. No one does. None of this is going to make sense. But you can get on the train, and you can get off the train.
And there you are, wherever.
🐱
Mimo the cat walked on my keyboard partway through this and typed three equals signs, which I am obliged to leave in. Thank you, Mimo.
