#do you really think Macavity broke every human law?

[victorian-vampir]

Hey.

Jekyll and Hyde is not about a DID system (it's about duality of mankind and repression)

Grizabella was not shunned from the jellicle cats because she was a sex worker (We don't know why she was shunned because it's not important. Also she's a cat, how the fuck is she a sex worker when she's a cat. Promiscuity is not an issue for the clan regardless.)

Victor Frankenstein is not at fault for his monster leaving. (He stood in his back garden for six hours waiting for the sun to rise before going for a walk. When he got back to his house the monster had left)

There are multiple interpretations of text and stories. However there's also times where the text blatantly spells out what it's try to say. Or it doesn't. And you end up with a cat who maybe did sex work and I have no idea how.

[this-phenomenal-cat]

Macavity is a character who in the past I would give no thought to but now I’m obsessed. And with that I need to think of all my various headcanons and backstory for him.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

Macavity is the son of Old Deuteronomy and Tugger and Munkustrap are his half brothers. Munkustrap is the oldest and Tugger is the youngest, making Macavity the middle child. Macavity has some form of Intermittent Explosive Disorder. Throughout his youth, he was commonly seen as the unwanted child. Many people believed that he wasn’t actually Old Deuteronomy. He felt shunned and neglected which would often lead to large outbursts of anger and violence. Sometimes he wouldn’t be allowed at the Junkyard. He was very close with Tugger as they could relate with the feeling of being perceived as recalcitrant. The two also always felt they were worse in comparison to Munkustrap. But unlike Tugger, Macavity felt resentment towards Munkustrap for making him look so bad. Munkustrap had actually felt no disdain towards Macavity and felt compassion towards him.

He had a sweet romantic relationship with Demeter at first. Early on the two adored each other and seemed to be the only ones who could understand the other. But eventually Macavity became very clingy and would ignore boundaries. Sometimes he would lash out and act violent, anytime he would he would run off after from fear of hurting her, which would leave Demeter scared and alone.

Macavity had also developed magical abilities. He had the ability to appear and disappear. He is also said to be able to levitate but Demeter is the only person to have witnessed it.

One day some of the Jellicles started to conspire against Macavity. They deemed him as unsafe to be around for the Jellicles. Macavity was soon fully shut out of the Jellicle tribe. He led a life of crime because he believed that doing bad was the only thing he was good at. Also sorry to disappoint but I don’t think he literally broke every human law.

Also I have some thoughts on the Macavity fight. I don’t think Munkustrap really wanted to fight Macavity. He took it on as more of what everyone else believes is best rather than what he believes is best, similar to Old Deuteronomy. Also Tugger isn’t really present during the fight so maybe he’s keeping his distance as he’s someone who remembers Macavity at his best.

This may not be my best piece of writing or very well thought out but I enjoyed it. If you want anything to be explained further, you can ask and I am willing to explain.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Macavity

(WARNING! Macavity has broken every human law! He broke the law of GRAVITY!)

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity… except Moriarty, anyway, since Macavity is pretty explicitly based on Holmes’ greatest foe even as far back as the original poem from T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. But that’s really neither here nor there. Macavity is the “villain” of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s magnum opus, Cats. Villain is of course in quotations because Cats doesn’t even have a plot, so Macavity is really only a villain in the loosest sense, in that his “The Villain Sucks” song describes him as the ultimate evil cat and he does briefly kidnap Old Deuteronomy.

But no one told Tom Hooper this! When he decided to force a plot into a loosely connected showcase of singing, dancing cats, he also had to turn Macavity into a real antagonist! So how did he handle turning the Napoleon of crime, the fiend in feline shape, the monster of depravity, the one and only Macavity into an actual antagonizing force? And how does he stack up to the Macavity of the stage version (specifically the version from the 1998 film)?

Motivation/Goals: It can be surmised from the song that Macavity really just does what he does for kicks. The guy just revels in being evil, and so the real question is why wouldn’t he commit any given crime? On the stage, the evil we see is limited to kidnapping Old Deuteronomy and getting into a fight, but considering the song that describes him, which may or may not be exaggerated, the guy really gets around (though when you get to the scene of the crime, Macavity’s not there).

In the film, they actually managed to give Macavity a pretty interesting motivation to his constant kidnapping of cats throughout the film: he’s trying to spirit away the other Jellicle candidates so that Old Deuteronomy will have no choice but to let Macavity go to the Heaviside Layer and be reborn into a new life, a life where he will no longer be on wanted posters and can continue his crime spree unhindered. Say what you will about the rest of the alterations, but this is actually a pretty solid motivation.

Performance: Bryn Walters portrays him in the 1998 version, and with his limited time onstage, he manages to make Macavity memorable, though of course most of Macavity’s memorability comes from the song he has no part in. Of course, when Macavity does get his single scene, Walters costume and moves manage to really make Macavity a guy you’re not soon to forget.

In the movie, Macavity is portrayed by everyone’s favorite sexy British black guy, Idris Elba. Unfortunately, he is saddled with a design that makes him look like a nude man despite him having an awesome costume earlier in the film that is ditched later on so that he looks like Elba was streaking across the set, so the sexy is relegated to his voice here. Thankfully, that’s plenty enough, and it is evident Elba is having a blast as Macavity, which is always a plus for a villain no matter how good or bad the film is.

Final Fate: In the stage show, he just kind of vanishes after his battle with Munkustrap. In the movie, he tries to hitch a ride alongside Grizibella to the Heaviside Layer, only to end up stuck atop a statue. Now, you’d think this is stupid, since Macavity has been shown to have the ability to apparate throughout the film, oftentimes accompanied with him saying his own name or otherwise announcing his magical ability, meaning he has no reason to be scared or anxious since he can get out of this situation at anytime. But then you remember that despite everything, and despite the movie’s horrible ability at conveying the fact, Macavity is, in fact, a cat. And a cat would most definitely be an idiot to that degree. I think this might be the only evidence Tom Hooper has ever interacted with a cat for any length of time before.

Best Scene: Obviously his best scene onstage is his only one, since he only shows up once for his fight against Munkustrap, though his presence is foreshadowed many times ahead of the duel.

For the film, though, him joining in at the very end of the song about him is the cherry on top of a fun recontextualization of “Macavity.” Typically, the song is a “The Villain Sucks” song, as Bombalurina isn’t actually evil onstage, making the song an ode to how evil and nasty Macavity is. But in the film, she is unambiguously on his side, making the song an example of her singing his praises and turning the tune into an outright villain song, and Macavity joining in at the end really just ties the whole thing together,.

Best Quote: In the stage version, Macavity actually doesn’t speak, his only vocalizations being evil laughter – though what an evil laugh it is! In the movie, he has a lot of dialogue, but the very best bit he has is him announcing his own name like a Pokemon as he teleports. “Macavity!” I nearly had to pause the movie from laughing so hard.

Final Thoughts & Score: So Macavity is a very interesting villain in that he is just utterly incapable of being boring, though for entirely different reasons that seem baffling when you really think about it. In the stage version, he is barely onstage at all, has a single scene, doesn’t speak or sing… and yet how he’s described, how he looks, and how he moves just really ties him together and makes him into an exciting villain, one deserving of an 8/10. His actions are also the reason we get the wonderful homoeroticism of “Magical Mr. Mistoffelees,” and any villain whose actions lead to a cat prancing about a stage shooting lightning and having extreme amounts of homosexual tension with a swaggering rock star who is doing nothing but singing his praises as he does so is nothing short of amazing,

Then we have movie Macavity. This Macavity has a far stronger motivation, but the film both does and doesn’t handle it well. It kind of suffers because Cats and Macavity once again are not meant to have this sort of heavy narrative; they’re meant to be fun little bits of fluff. And that’s not even getting into how they changed Macavity from a ginger cat to a black and brown cat who, once again, looks more like Idris Elba is nude than anything, and unfortunately it’s really not as sexy as it sounds. Still, the fact Elba is having so much fun, the fact he jumps in on the song “Macavity,” and that kickass outfit he has near the start all really work and keep this Macavity from the bottom of the barrel. Much like the movie, there’s a lot bad with this iteration of the Napoleon of crime, but boy is he still fun and entertaining! That’s a 3/10 if I ever saw one.

All of this just goes to show that Macavity, no matter what way you slice him, is always going to be entertaining. Like, this character is an evil supervillain cat who is behind every single crime, and not only that, has broken every human law as well as the law of gravity! You can have a field day imagining how this cat has pulled off tax fraud, forgery, and genocide and somehow gotten away with it. Even through bad CGI, Macavity’s still there!

I would like to say I am a bit sad we never got the animated version of Cats from Amblimation, because I seriously would have loved to talk about that Macavity too. I mean, look at him!

Weep for what we have lost, because in this case… Macavity’s not there. Though, I will admit, as much as I love this design and how even if I didn’t have the name right there I’d recognize who it is, something is really lost when the character isn’t a man in cat makeup and a costume. Still, I don’t think this Macavity would be anything less than an 8 because Macavity really is just that fun of a character. Even in his worst showings he still manages to entertain and amuse, so I guess it really is true what they say:

There’s no one like Macavity.

[rin-the-shadow]

Rin Overanalyzes Cats

So watching the Lindsay Ellis video essay, “Why Cats?” and Andre from Black Nerd Comedy’s “CATS...I Have to Explain This,” I’m finding that the Cats movie adaptation did indeed suffer from the two things I expected it would:

1. Try way too hard to make the thing have a plot because people need stakes and action or whatever and form plots apparently aren’t a real thing anymore.

and

2. Over-adherence to realism and needing to explain everything because that’s definitely what you think of when you’re looking at a musical about 4th wall-breaking cats.

But I had assumed what was going to happen before seeing these videos was that they were going to really double down on the whole Jellicle Choice thing and make it like...a bigger thing that was a huge dilemma for the cats and like some of them feeling like “oh, maybe I should be trying to go for this because I’m not sure I’m the right fit for the life I got” which would probably turn into a megaton Be Yourself Aesop for Mistoffelees which is kind of unnecessary but kind of a nice sentiment which I’ve seen done well in a few fanfics and I can see where they would get the idea given how his uncertainty around his powers has been an implication in a few stage runs, particularly ones that depict him as not-quite-an-adult-yet.

I assumed they were going to try to take something that didn’t really have stakes except kind of for Grizabella and try to make it have stakes for more characters, since it’s kind of the closest thing to a through-line we have. But it sounds like the thing they went with was the Macavity threat, which I suppose also kind of makes sense. He trolls with the cats at a few separate points before actually going lol screw it, I’m actually gonna do something this time and kidnapping and trying to supplant Old Deuteronomy in the group, then picking a fight once his deception is revealed.

The area where that stops making sense to me is his motivation. Again, plenty of fanfics have taken his actions in the musical and given him the motive of wanting to take over leadership from the Jellicles. You can see pretty easily how people would get that from his whole kidnap-and-replace shtick. People who want to give him a more sympathetic motive will sometimes have him chasing the acceptance of the tribe but obviously in a twisted way. Either of these can work, considering that villainous characters often chase power, and if he’s a card-carrying villain, he may not understand why his crimes would get him kicked out in a “Sure I broke every human law and used my powers to just get whatever I wanted. But so what? I have them, I might as well use them” way.

In the movie, his motivation is apparently that he wants to be the one who’s reborn. Which strikes me as oddly inconsistent with what I’ve understood of his characterization. Since he’s kind of a cat crime lord, and nearly always a card-carrying villain, why would he want to go through rebirth and give that up? That’s not to say that he couldn’t be trying to pursue some kind of bizarre redemption arc in which the only way he knows to pursue it is to be completely reborn, but from the clips I’ve seen, that doesn’t seem to be what he’s going for. And pulling off something like that would require a lot more setup than what I assume the director/screenwriter/etc. were willing to do, so I don’t think it’s supposed to be some kind of Macavity Redemption Arc thing (also this is Hollywood. If Mac was going to get a redemption arc, they’d have him sacrifice himself for something, possibly reveal “lol, had some extra lives left” if they didn’t want to go full Redemption Equals Death).

So like, does he think he can somehow cheat the Rebirth cycle if he sees the Heavyside Layer? Because probably from my understanding, what he wants is access to the wonders of the Heavyside Layer, but that doesn’t make sense to me because he has to understand that if he sees it, he will be reborn, so it isn’t even like he gains unlimited access to those wonders. So like...what, movie?

And I am very aware that I’m massively overthinking something where probably the only line of reasoning was, “ZOMG we need PLOT because movie!” and so they just slapped the first plot they thought of, even if it probably should have been a more generic, “Some of the cats want rebirth because they need to learn to Be Yourself” or “Macavity wants to take over the Jellicles” plot.

But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop overthinking it.