Cats rule the internet. Not since ancient Egypt have feline gods held such sway and, given how many desperate office workers have been rescued by their online antics, it should come as no surprise to learn that if there’s one topic capable of distracting us from the grim realities of the news cycle, it’s those neurotic songbird-slayers. Except that it’s not actually cats, it’s Cats.
Since the trailer for Universal Studios’ star-studded adaptation of the 1981 musical dropped on Thursday, it’s become the cynosure of baffled scrutiny. For a brief moment, Brexit, Trump, even Love Island might as well have ceased to exist. Had it been a hit, of course, it would already have been forgotten, but the unnerving weirdness (or badness, some might simply argue) of Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper’s vision successfully united the internet in rapt revulsion as millions of eyeballs hate-watched the likes of Jennifer Hudson and Rebel Wilson cavort, bewhiskered, through a neon-lit netherworld.
Although that weirdness has been exhaustively overstated, the teaser still makes for peculiar viewing. Idris Elba, James Corden, Judi Dench: thanks to an estimated budget of £230m and some state-of-the-art CGI, they and a hodgepodge of others have been transmogrified so that their faces top fluffy bodies. Perhaps because they’ve retained their own anatomical features (wait, shouldn’t female cats have six breasts?) the much vaunted “digital fur technology” manages to make them look more naked than if they’d been hairless.
Could they have escaped from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy? The “uncanny valley” theory has been bandied about, and along with countless memes, the trailer has sparked comparisons to George Galloway’s cat impersonation on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006 and the Norwegian hippophile who taught herself to run and jump like a horse.
And yet for all the sleep-thieving images the Cats trailer squeezes in, those two minutes and 24 seconds simultaneously tell a heartening tale of how culture evolves, charting its own willy-nilly path, joyfully unheeding of distinctions between highbrow and low. Because the ultimate weirdness here rests in the material’s provenance.
Before it became one of the longest-running shows in London’s West End and on Broadway, Cats was a collection of light verse penned by a dusty bank manager for his godchildren. Not that we’re talking any old bank manager: TS Eliot was also a remote, tortured Nobelist with some unsavoury views on Jewish and black people. In stark contrast to an oeuvre filled with staid sadness and nihilism, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is a playful collection, and from its first publication in 1939, it was a hit. Whimsical and eccentric, the poems tap into the very English tradition of nonsense verse (leave it to a Yank), featuring the likes of Mr Mistoffelees “the original conjuring cat”, Macavity “the mystery cat” and Bustopher Jones “the cat about town”.
Andrew Lloyd Webber was a fan from childhood and in the late 1970s decided to set the poems to music, lifting many of his lyrics directly from the poems, as well as adding characters plucked from unpublished drafts and grafting on a slightly morbid plot about rebirth. Nobody saw it during rehearsals, but the resulting show was such a runaway success that it spawned the phrase “better than Cats!”.
“Based on the legendary Andrew Lloyd Webber/T.S. Eliot stage musical” are words that flash up towards the film teaser’s end, in an instant recasting the author of The Waste Land as a song and dance man. But if you’re thinking this all simply reinforces the dynamics of trickledown culture and the idea of artistic entropy – an idea gloomily embraced by Eliot himself – think again. Yes, Hooper is vying for a Christmas blockbuster, but he seems to have unwittingly restored some of the subversive, overwrought oddness that pervaded the life and work of the Jellicles’ originator.
Etymologically, the word “culture” is rooted in the idea of growth and, despite its strong links to cultivation – despite, too, the best efforts of academics – there remains something invigoratingly rampant and untameable about its progress, as this episode illustrates.
And what would our inky-fingered bank manager have made of it all? It comes as a pleasant surprise to learn that Eliot was a bit of a prankster, fond of whoopee cushions and exploding cigars. Also of note is an under-sung contribution he made to the English language: the OED credits the title of one of his early poems as being the first time the word “bullshit” appeared in print, rendering some of the Twittersphere’s less artful responses slyly apt.
• Hephzibah Anderson is a writer and critic
