I walked into Cats, as most sane people would, expecting something horrendous. The sound mixing, the CGI, the weird acting and casting choices were all things that I had heard complaints about. I was actually observing how human-like Judy Dench’s hand looked (so much so that you could actually see her ring), when I realized something I never wanted to admit: I was enjoying it.
I know for a fact that I shouldn’t have been enjoying myself, straining my eyes due to the darkness of the shots, which was added to mask the horrendous CGI. I attempted to find (which wasn’t very hard) different reasons why this movie should be hated. For one, some of the cats were wearing shoes while others were not. This doesn’t seem that big of an issue -- but, it continued to bother me for the entire time. Some cats didn’t even look like cats, just humans with fur. This was most noticeable with the cats played by James Corden and Rebel Wilson, who, while very funny people, made me hate every comedic actor that has ever graced the screen. Taylor Swift taking such a large part in this movie, on and off screen, was a huge misstep for her. I’m not even sure what accent she was doing or how Andrew Llyod Weber allowed her to add a song halfway through. Along with this, the most basic elements of filmmaking were entirely disregarded, each shot causing you to long for the credits, each edit terrible enough to make a person recoil.
Almost every element I should’ve hated, and made me disregard this movie as awful, but I was still having a great time. The rest of the audience seemed to be with me as well, and it was almost like we were all experiencing some sort of shared trauma together: by the end we were connected in a communal way. Each painfully serious moment filled with audience laughter, each annoying lyric sung as though we were screaming back at Andrew Llyod Weber himself. I have never been so happy to be in a movie theater. All of my favorite types of people were there: granola parents, obnoxious teenagers, and of course, theater lovers. Not to say that this was a highly regarded show. Cats, as a theater production, has been ripped apart and parodied for as long as theater history itself. A very talented actress I once knew, even though she had a substantial part in Cats, wouldn’t allow her friends to come to the show or take pictures. She, like myself, was ashamed to be so fascinated and involved in the world of Cats. But as a movie, I am sure that this will soon be a sort of “cult classic”, amongst the ranks of The Room, or even Rocky Horror Picture Show. A cult classic is a film which is unpopular to mainstream audiences, but watched religiously by a specific group of people, usually in a sort of revolutionary or ironic way.
So, why do we love to watch movies ironically? Why do we have continued midnight screenings of films that have been labeled as B-List or straight-up Bad? I am pretty sure that one doesn’t dress up as Riff-Raff for a showing of Rocky Horror to admire the wonderful cinematography, or the fantastic set design. They do it for the community. A theater full of their peers, even if they are strangers, reciting the lines and throwing objects at the screen. Not unlike my experience at the Showcase Cinema de Lux on a Sunday afternoon with my parents, we were all in it together. If I sat in my room and watched Cats on my computer I think I would have hated it: without the comradery and shared disappointment, there is no joy in bad movies. The thing that was the most memorable was the community that was made with a few strangers in a theater, not the movie about people pretending to be cats. And maybe the songs. Damn, they are catchy.
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