It’s 11 a.m. on Saturday and it already feels like 102º and yesterday was my birthday and even though I don’t drink anymore I feel hungover anyway and I’m wondering if that’s just how you feel at age 32, like that’s just the default setting.
Or maybe it’s because I saw the Cats trailer and the sight of “cats” with human-esque faces and boobs moving with a grace that is decidedly reptilian instead of feline permanently ruined my brain.
I can’t stop thinking about the Cats trailer. Maybe it’s the heat. I know I was going to write about something else, but I genuinely can’t remember what that was. Was there life before the Cats trailer? What was it like?
We all had an inkling that the Cats trailer would be insane, because earlier in the week a Behind the Scenes Featurette was released that made everyone go, “Wait, what.” And still, we were not truly prepared for the use of Digital Fur Technology, the fact that some cats wear clothes and some don’t, the weird positioning of the tails, the body horror of fur-covered human hands, the incorrect proportions (the cats seem to be more like the size of very large rats). Whereas the problem with the new Lion King is that the lions are incapable of conveying human emotions because their faces are animal faces, the problem with Cats is that the faces are too human and also not completely human and it’s just a mess.
My best friend and I had a very long conversation—after watching the trailer together at a dessert place that eventually kicked us out for sitting too long talking about Cats—in which we tried to figure out why most stage-to-screen musical adaptations are so bad, and at some point when my body isn’t trying to sweat out every molecule of water in it I will put that theory down into words here, but for now here is one thing that seems to be a consistent problem:
The songs in a stage musical are a way of bridging the physical distance from the audience, a way to connect with audiences that may not be able to see the emotion on an actor’s face. If you’re in the nosebleeds, you need Javert to belt out his turmoil. In a movie, though, the camera and the edit can take you right there without the artifice of song. So the songs in a movie need a purpose beyond their original one—whether that’s turning them into a fantasy sequence (Chicago, one of the few stage to screen musical adaptations to completely work) or having the songs be pretty much entirely diegetic (Cabaret). But most of these adaptations don’t do that, and the language of filmmaking ends up feeling like an intrusion; the final product a strange Frankenstein’s monster of stage and screen.
Anyway I’m going to stick my head in the freezer for a few hours.