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Correction: Jason says Victoria is played by Cynthia Erivo and Paul says yes. She is not. The actress is Francesca Hayward, who is a ballet dancer. And I feel bad for her because this was supposed to be her big film debut and they barely even have her dance. Here she is starring in the Nutcracker.

Well this episode and this forum has really fucked with my browser algorithm as this is the link that was recommended to me when I opened a new tab. https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-cats-show-you-their-butt-according-to-science?utm_source=pocket-newtab

damn Cats

I have been thinking about WHY I thought this for awhile now. And I don’t know what to say. Maybe it just says more about me (and Paul!) than anything else. There is the line that she went off with Macavity, that is what happened to her. And I don’t know why I interpret that to mean he was her pimp and not just that he was abusive or stole all her stuff or any other scenario. I guess the world seems so dark and it seemed like she was out on the street waiting for someone to come pick her up. I thought that was what she was doing. And everyone was like, “oh there she is on her corner again.” What’s weird, and what I have been thinking about it since you brought it up, is that there shouldn’t be prostitution in a Cat world. That is a human vice. So maybe it just says I was never convinced they were actually cats is the problem. But I don’t know, maybe if the world felt more silly and joyful (and I have seen clips of the stage show that seem that way) then my brain wouldn’t have gone there.

Or it could be that the point being made is that we (the audience) are supposed to make superficial assumptions about her because we're all just a bunch of lousy cats, too. I think this might actually be pretty likely. I still think she's just a stray though.

I hate to disagree with you, forum Paul. But I do think that is a logical conclusion based solely on the film. Sure the poems are for kids and it’s a family musical, but in the FILM the cats are weirdly sexualized. And the Taylor Swift song , if I recall correctly, has catnip and it is sort of implied she is bewitching them. I don’t know. I got the impression she was once like the Taylor Swift cat and then she sort of fell into prostitution. Why else is she out on the STREET? She became a streetwalker! I don’t think Andrew Lloyd Webber would say she’s a sex worker... but, again, the movie is weirdly sexual in a way that I don’t like. And that is what I thought she was as well until I fell down the poetry rabbit hole (still mad at T.S. Eliot).

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I'm not sure that this was mentioned in the episode but -- there actually is a Heaviside Layer. The Kennelly-Heaviside Layer, to be exact. Apparently this layer is reflective of radio waves, and bouncing these waves off the sky makes it possible for them to reach beyond the horizon. I suppose this could mean that sending a Jellicle to the Heaviside Layer for a new life could literally mean just sending them into the stratosphere so that they'll land somewhere far away, thereby beginning a "new" life? The layer was discovered by British physicists in the 1920s, which is around the time Eliot started writing poetry, so odds are this was a word he overheard at a tea party sometime, and 20 years later, he used it in his cat poems. EDIT TO ADD: the dumbest thing about this is that it was named for the guy who discovered it -- Oliver Heaviside.

I'll admit that I like "Prufrock" -- not because it's a particularly great poem, which it isn't, but because that post-war nihilistic stuff is what I most enjoy reading. It's basically the only thing Eliot wrote that I ever enjoyed reading ("Wasteland"? More like "waste" of time, amirite?). I put Eliot in the same category as Matthew Arnold -- their poems are pretentious and melodramatic and pedantic because they're critics on top of being poets, so all their work has the air of self-gratification and certainty in how brilliant they are. Their poems are so much "uncontainable expression of self" and more "flexing what I know about good poetry." Eliot reminds me of what I remember someone saying about Axl Rose during the Use Your Illusion records -- every song has to do everything that that Axl Rose knows how to do as a musician, just to show that he knows about great music.

What I don't understand is why this movie is so dark and serious. CATS is meant to be fun and silly. Heck, the stage show breaks the fourth wall all the time. This show is meant to be for kids, so I have no idea why this movie is so sexual. It's alienating your biggest market! I heard many parents walked out of this thing after 10 minutes.

Wait -- Are you asking for four candles, or fork handles?!?

I know I'll never be Haile Selassie but, if I concentrate, I feel I could become at least somewhat Selassie.