It's OK to enjoy Cats. No, seriously. Go ahead. It's just a little uncanny.
Normally I focus strictly on cultural phenomena, and their relationship to happiness. But as you'll have noticed if you got here from my blog, at this point I'd like to discuss a specific form of unhappiness: that created by the experience of the uncanny in the minds of many movie critics, who seem close to the edge.
The film version of the Broadway musical opened in the middle of a maelstrom of criticism. Most of the reviews were quite bad – but for a healthy proportion of the negative reviewers, the problem seemed to be more about what was going on in their heads than on the screen.
First, to be fair, there was some small number of positive reviews – on Rotten Tomatoes it came in at 18% when I last checked. And there were some full-on pans, complaining about the general plotlessness, the fact that either the cats or things around them keep seeming to grow and shrink, and problems with the source material. But a healthy portion of the reviews came out something like this:
Dazzlingly weird, but occasionally creepy... a phantasmagorical mongrel that fascinates even when it appalls.
Or:
I felt as though I was unable to wake up, slowly sinking deeper and deeper into madness.
This musical hellscape is also
…one of those rare cinematic events that feels like a collective hallucination - improbable and entirely indescribable.
These comments all seem to belie a deep ambivalence about something that seeps through every moment of the project. As Alissa Wilkinson of Vox asks in the sort-of-review-ish-essay she wrote after seeing the film:
Is Cats a good movie?
Is it a bad movie?
Is the answer to both “yes”?
If the cast were playing humans-playing-cats with inanimate tails and properly placed ears, I suspect a lot of the reviews would have pointed out the young, attractive, sexually energetic cast. But they're not.
Nothing Is Exactly As You'd Expect
A big part of the problem seems to be with the cats themselves. These costumed, CGI-upped actors are too catlike to be human, exactly, and too human to be cats.
It took a while for me to figure out why. In addition to very pronounced tails and the occasionally computer-enhanced burst of definitely-not-for-people motion, their ears are problematic.. Human ears, as you may remember, stick out in the middles of human heads, while cat ears rest on the top. In most cases when people dress up as cats, their ears are hidden under wigs, or flattened with stockings or glue. But the sides of these cats' heads were (almost without exception) uncannily smooth. Placing cat-ears on the tops of the performer's heads wasn't a problem, but digitally removing the ones that belong next to the human faces creates a sense that everything is just a little out of proportion. The eyes seem a little too big, the heads unnaturally narrow.
When a person tapes down their ears, there's still a little bump – a bump that says, "Just kidding! Ears hiding here!" But if you get rid of them, replacing them with something up top, creates a problem for the human-recognizing parts of our brains.
Welcome To the Uncanny Valley
In 1970, a professor of robotics named Masahiro Mori wrote a paper about the appearances of robots, and published it in an obscure Japanese journal. Robots that look like useful hunks of metal – like the ones that assemble cars – don't really draw an emotional response from people. But as they look more and more like humans – Robbie the Robot, then Rosie the Robot – Mori suggested, people will begin to empathize with them.
Up to a certain point.
Once it becomes slightly possible to confuse a robot with a human, Mori anticipated, people will stop empathizing, and be repulsed instead. Now, we're treading through the uncanny valley, where things are a little strange and disturbing. They aren't people, but they're also not not people.
Apparently our brains treat things that seem kind-of-human in kind-of-human ways, adapting normal human responses while making allowances for difference. It's OK for Sylvester to try to swallow Tweety because we know they're not human. It's not OK for Hannibal Lecter to eat a person's liver because it's clear that he is. It appears that a certain part of the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) – places a valuation on human-like images, as rewarding to engage with (possibly giving us the sense that they're familiar, and, therefore, relatable). We can happily interact with creatures that are clearly not human, and we can interact well with people who are. But what about beings that aren't not human? Those fall into the uncanny valley.
And they also seem to trigger the amygdala, which is the home of a number of strong emotions.
So on the screen Taylor Swift and Judy Dench are recognizably themselves, wearing costumes – but they're also not. Hence the dysphoria of the uncanny.
But There's More: THe sexy uncanny
The Cats cats seem to trigger this discomfort in a lot of reviewers' brains, causing them to write things like:
You'll never forget it - though you will try.
Why? I suspect sex. As portrayed in the film, the cats aren't just uncanny. They're mostly id – Freud's vision of the animal, instinctive nature in all of us. These cats aren't especially violent, aside from some hissing, rude pawing, and an attempt to make Old Deuteronomy walk the plank, but they are libidinous. They spend a lot of time slinking around one another seductively, and eying each other in ways that can only be described as sexy. At some point in the film, I thought every cat was going to make a move on pretty much every other cat. They never did. It's not a romance. It's what cats would do, if they were people, apparently.
And did I mention that they're mostly naked? They are. And many of them are dancers, with a thin layer of fur CGI'ed on over well-defined, athletic bodies. If the cast were playing humans-playing-cats with inanimate tails and properly placed ears, I suspect a lot of the reviews would have pointed out the young, attractive, sexually energetic cast.
But they're not.
Instead, the reviewers have basically summarized their feelings as "Yuck."
How does this relate to culture again?
We live in a society that uses a lot of semi-sexual metaphors to describe cats – as slinky and sly – and, as Aja Romano points out, many cat metaphors to describe women. But actually being sexually attracted to animals is a no-go in polite company. This isn't to say that people haven't dabbled in the crossover between sexy person and some sort of animalhood. Take a peek at this ad, for example.
So it's OK to enjoy Cats, uncanny as they are. That dissonant feeling you might experience is just your brain letting you know that it's working the way most people's do. Cats is an interesting experience on the screen, and, apparently, also in lots of people's heads. If you're interested in the strangeness on both sides, it's worth a look.