The Jellicle cats, one and all, came out to Hyperreal Film Club’s recent Jellicle Ball, and one truly worthy Jellicle cat climbed the stair and ascended that night to the Heaviside Layer.

If you didn’t understand that sentence, it’s ok. It just means you haven’t watched Cats and there are probably nine-lives worth of reasons why you’ve been wary to. In the past, I would have shared those reservations, and the release of the new Cats did nothing to change that, but I have since seen the light of the Heaviside Layer. So, if you’ll allow me to be your Munkustrap and navigate an understanding of Cats through my personal journey, I invite you to leave the normal world to the Pollicle Dogs and maybe, just maybe, the true meaning of Jellicle will reveal itself to you.

To do so, we must first travel back in time …

Way back to November 2nd, 1998 …

… when a young me was excited that I was finally going to see the musical Cats on television. The scope of television at that time was still limited enough that if a station heavily promoted a televised special broadcast, chances were, many people tuned in at the same time and shared the same experience. Cats aired as part of a PBS anthology series, Great Performances, dedicated to the performing arts. Growing up in Texas, I was not privy to many theatrical performances as a child. My experience of musicals was limited to VHS tapes I watched with my Grandma, and a handful of popular shows we happened to catch at the Houston Hobby Center (such as Beauty and the Beast and Peter Pan). Cats though, was something equally alluring and elusive. Having opened on Broadway in 1982 and London the year before, the musical by 1998 had fully insinuated itself within popular culture and given me ample time to build expectations based solely on the concept that there was a whole musical about felines. Without any real idea what the musical was like, Cats had been slinking around in the dark fringes of my imagination for years.

After several commercial teasers leading up to the broadcast, by the evening of November 2nd, 1998 I was ready to FINALLY witness Cats. I remember sitting on the brown carpet in front of the entertainment system, holding my toes in excitement, and after the long overture with a bunch of floating animated cat eyes, the Jellicle cats introduced themselves to me.

I had approached it expecting a certain thing. I can’t accurately recollect what that thing was, but it certainly was not what I got. I finished Cats that night angry, confused, and a little bit frightened by what I had spent the last few hours watching. I was upset by how cruel all the cats were to Grizabella the Glamour cat;

that they honored the two aged male cats but shunned and humiliated the old lady cat, and when they finally touched her, she was elected to immediately disappear into a bright light. They all seemed to be happy about it, but I didn’t trust their motives. Having watched two hours of cats mostly just introducing themselves, I was pretty convinced that Jellicle cats don’t rush through anything, which made their rapid turnaround concerning Grizabella all the more suspect.

To be fair, it had only been a year and a half since the shocking tragedy of Heaven’s Gate, which had been my first introduction to cults. It’s likely that I only caught snippets of the news as it was unfolding, but I absorbed enough to be terrified of the imposing abstract notion of cults. It almost certainly had a huge impact on how I interpreted Cats, and the Jellicle cats came off very culty to my young self; with their scary chanting, repetitive lyrics of nonsensical words, all their weird Jellicle names, obvious humans moving in unnerving cat-like ways, and then the choosing of one cat to “ASCEND.”

It all percolated through a Heaven’s Gate filter where one cat was selected to abandon her vehicle and catch a ride on the Hale-Bopp comet.

And that is how I was very comfortable leaving it; for many, many years … that is, until René Newman chose the 1998 television film of Cats to share at Hyperreal’s Family Movie Night. René had a different reaction to the film, one of childhood obsession. This was not the first time I had encountered someone that loved this movie as a child, who also knew all the songs, had posters, and watched it on repeat. The discovery of such a great existing disparity of childhood opinions made me immensely curious, especially with all of the notoriety the new film was receiving, to revisit the original film with a group of people and see if I still found it as off-putting.

What I felt during that screening surprised me: Cats is still bizarre and disturbing and culty, but instead of being averse to it, I really enjoyed it! The movements of all the performers are incredible, and whereas they never fool you into surrendering to the idea that they are actually cats, they do convincingly transform themselves into something that is not altogether human either. Rather than witnessing the secret lives of true cats, it feels more like we’ve stumbled upon a ceremonial court of mythical fairy-like creatures that just so happen to bear a distant resemblance to the cat-animal.

The music is equally strange. The triple marriage of choreography, costume, and music with its repetitive lyrics and musical motifs, work seamlessly together to hypnotize and indoctrinate the audience within the facets of their world. The “Song for Jellicle Cats” at the beginning, conditions the viewer for the rest of the show. The continued emphasis on the unfamiliar word “Jellicle” at unexpected points in the phrase, erodes away all expectation, preparing the viewer to accept everything after as “just so.” Even within the same song, when “Jellicle” is substituted by other adjectives, I find myself less challenging to the thought that a cat can be “allegorical” or “hypocritical” or “political.” I find myself nodding and thinking, “Yes of course, the political cat has opinions.”

The musical then moves into “The Naming of the Cats” which honestly, still scares me; the way it gets quiet and threatening as they recite their different names in sync. Nothing feels more eerie and culty than quiet voices in perfect unison. But if doesn’t scare us off, and we can appreciate that they not only have their human given name and there unique formal name, but also their mysterious and secret “effanineffible” name, then it serves as our initiation and we are welcomed into the Jellicle Ball.

Then the roll call begins. Each of the main cats gets a whole musical number extolling their personalities; the character of the music, whether playful or ponderous, matching the peculiarities of each cat as they claim their time in the spotlight.

With how well the music is arranged and how masterfully the musical motifs re-emerge at their most effective moments, I found it surprising to learn that 40 minutes of the score was cut from the traditional stage production to make a more digestible television experience. It feels like a complete piece of art, and there is no dialogue at all to disrupt the musical flow, unlike in some other Jellicle movies ...

It has now been over a week since Hyperreal’s Jellicle Ball and I still have not been able to banish “Mr. Mistoffelees” from playing on loop in my brain, and my roommates have begged for me to stop singing fragments of “The Jellicle Ball.”

“Memories” is the obvious showstopper, but it’s not as much of an earworm as pretty much everything else in the show. Is Cats my favorite musical? Probably not, but I am immensely fascinated by it. It’s fascinating that a musical with such a bizarre premise that transports the audience to a completely unfamiliar and uncomfortable space could have captured popular opinion in such a successful way. It is an incredible piece of art, but it is challenging and does not pander to a passive viewer. I am grateful that I got an opportunity to revisit this movie and I now have a better understanding why René and others love it so much. With my new found appreciation aside, after attending a Jellicle Ball, and listening to the word over and over again, and even writing it several times myself, I can safely say, I still don’t know WTF “Jellicle” means.

An Invitation to the 1998 Jellicle Ball