Over at The Daily Beast they do some serious investigative journalism, and keep an eye on the important problems affecting the world today. It’s hard not to chuckle a bit over this one – it’s both so unexpected and completely expectable. Before we dig into it, why don’t you pause and think for a second and ask yourself “what would be an unexpected problem making a movie out of Cats?”
Maybe you figured it out, but I didn’t. When I read the piece over at Beast, I almost choked on my coffee.
Here’s just the title, because that’s enough: [beast]
Editing the Buttholes Out of ‘Cats’ Was a Total Nightmare for VFX Crew
Fascinating. Anyone who spends time around domesticated felines knows that they are fond of walking about with their tails up, winking at you with the single “back eye”. When they’re not sitting on your pillow with it… And somehow ‘cat people’ say that dogs are dirty creatures while cats are all clean and sleek. But I digress.
Cats was already halfway complete when the buttholes first showed themselves, a source who worked on the film’s visual effects recalled in a recent interview: “When we were looking at the playbacks, we were like, ‘What the hell? You guys see that?!'”
“We paused it,” the source said. “We went to call our supervisor, and we’re like, ‘There’s a fucking asshole in there! There’s buttholes!’ It wasn’t prominent but you saw it… And you [were] just like, ‘What the hell is that?… There’s a fucking butthole in there.’ It wasn’t in your face – but at the same time, too, if you’re looking, you’ll see it.”
I’m inclined to think this is a uniquely American problem. Epistemology is not a part of the educational curriculum, and it should be. 
The statue of ‘Perky Justice’ represents her as half undressed (today, she should be represented as totally naked) and that apparently upset chucklefuck attorney general John Ashcroft so badly that he insisted the statue be hidden behind a curtain when he gave speeches. I’m sure Mike Pence won’t even go into the building. Meanwhile, the topless male statue on the other side of the room draws no attention. Geeze, look at the calves on that guy, what does he do to work out? America is full of religious dipshits who, seriously, would look at a statue of justice represented as a mostly naked body-builder guy and think “I looked at that statue; am I gay now?” That’s the sophistimacated theological morality of a John Ashcroft or a Mike Pence and it’d be laughable except that they are in positions of temporal power.
See, here’s the thing: there are no buttholes in Cats. There may be digital representations of buttholes in Cats. But, so what? It’s a bunch of pixels and it’s not full of bacteria and cat poop and it’s not on some cat that’s sticking it in your face.
Why do buttholes bother us? Well, without committing an act of evolutionary psychology, it would appear that humans understand that poop is dangerous, so buttholes where the poop comes from are unsanitary (unless you’ve spent a lot of money on Goop! sanitary butthole products!) because otherwise it’s just a little bit of puckered skin and muscle. A digital rendering of a butthole is just pixels that evoke the appearance of a little bit of puckered skin and muscle. As I’ve mentioned before [stderr] it does not seem unreasonable to eroticize a statue that is intended (or otherwise) to be sexually stimulating – the confusion sets in when a person starts to get confused (or disgusted) about the representation of the thing in lieu of the thing itself. I suppose with a population the size of the US’ that someone somewhere might wind up eroticizing cat buttholes if they really wound up enjoying Cats and confused the digital cat buttholes with the real thing. The real thing is attached to a 10-15lb armed apex predator that does not like having its butthole played with; it will put its butthole where it damn well wants but you leave the butthole alone, mmm’kay?
This foolishness is part of the weave of American society; we get G.I. Joe “alpha male” dolls that represent violence but have an evocative bump where their penis ought to be. Because, apparently, American kids are going to grow up twisted if they see a plastic penis, but they aren’t going to be twisted if they play endless shoot-the-arab in online games. What’s sad and funny about all of this is that it’s religion that made people like John Ashcroft and Mike Pence grow up twisted. Religion and power not pixelated buttholes.
“Religion and power” – religion is a mechanism for controlling and creating power. I called them out separately because otherwise I wouldn’t have had a sentence to end the posting on, but that doesn’t mean they’re not aspects of the same thing. Per Mark Twain: religion was invented when the first con-man met a politician.
There is a rather obvious opportunity for the porn industry to do an erotic version of Cats with 3D overlay fur and buttholes and gigantic cat penises and all the things. If you’re not a “cat person” and you don’t know what I am referring to: cat penises have spines on them that trigger ovulation in the female when they pull out; that’s why the female yowls – it is not pleasant. Won’t someone think of the kids?
I know “expectable” is not a word. But I went there.
“pixelated buttholes” – good name for a punk band. And you know what their logo would be and it’d be 8bit.
The most striking thing about the statues is how amateurish they look when compared to what the ancient greeks were doing.
Also, the male status looks like something out of 1930s germany.
This raises an even stranger question – why were the sphincters put in in the first place?
I mean, okay, if they were taking live footage of actual cats then I can understand why there might be an effort to edit out their toilet parts for the sake of those delicate flowers who can’t tolerate the notion of the feline alimentary canal. But some digital artist had presumably spent days creating these ones in the first place.
Why is this portrayed as an effort to edit something out rather than a refusal to put it in in the first place? It’s like digitally creating smartphones for your Victorian Era period drama, then having to go the the trouble of removing them. Do digital anus artists have an incredibly strong trade union, such that they cannot be dispensed with?
I think I’ve found another good band name.
Parenthetically, in all the thousands of Western movies, with their thousands of horses and cattle, I have never seen a horse or cow shit or piss. How many scenes must have needed retakes when a dramatic shootout was photobombed by a horse raising its tail?
There is already a band from way back called the “Butthole Surfers”, so the shock value has already been removed.
Has anyone pointed this out to the MRAs yet? It seems like an obvious angle: “Even our toys were designed to erase our masculine manliness and turn us into metrosexual ken dolls. It’s a conspiracy!”
Honestly, it would make more sense than most of their ideas.
I think butt holes would be even more obvious if they’re missing, LIke, “Hey, that cat has no asshole.”
I mean, It isn’t a cartoon. Everyone is used to seeing the single puckery eye, even kids. Try imagining the back end of a cat without it. They don’t edit out dog assholes, do they? I’m pretty sure that Lassie had one, Rin Tin Tin, too. And I’m pretty sure that dog dick has been seen more than once on camera (maybe Turner and Hooch?) in a totally normal, humorous way. Seriously, kids love poop jokes and who among us hasn’t poked a cat or a dog on their butt at least once in heir life. Sheesh!
I think in the case of Ashcroft and Pence, at least some of this has to do with people trying to “out-holy” one another. “Look how virtuous **I** am! I won’t even look at a STATUE!” – while gazing piously up into the sky. It’s to impress other people. Personally I’m impressed with what a jackass such a person is.
As far as the movie Cats it’s incredible to me how horrified people are that animals have genitals and other body parts. Furthermore, they use them. And right in front of the children, too. I’ve known of several farms that have had to build big solid wooden fences around their property, because as the suburbs sprang up and people moved out to the country, their children could clearly see the bull breeding the cows and so on. They complained about it so much the poor farmer was forced to try and stop them seeing it. I like to point out to such complainers that birds do the exact same thing, right in front of everybody, and no fence is going to stop you seeing that.
Javier@#1:
The most striking thing about the statues is how amateurish they look when compared to what the ancient greeks were doing.
Also, the male status looks like something out of 1930s germany.
Yes, it turns out that the line between “art deco” and “neo-soviet brutalist” art is shorter than most people think.
The artist obviously lavished time and attention on sculpting her boobs, then just threw the male statue together. I have been thinking about the calves on that thing: wouldn’t you want body parts closer to the viewer’s eye-level to be smaller and the head larger so the proportions look right from where they will be seen? That’s one of the things that makes Michaelangelo’s sculpture so amazing: he got all those details right. Consider The Pieta – it looks just fine and the proportions are glorious until you realize that Michaelangelo just sold you the idea that a woman has upper thighs big enough to comfortably rest a full-grown heroic male on, with leg-space to spare.
The whole point of a narrative is that it elides everything that is unnecessary. People shitting is not the only thing Dickens leaves out of the Scrooge’s story, hours and hours of uninteresting time during which Scrooge adds up numbers, or snores peacefully, or consumes eggs, are simply dropped out.
Sure, you can argue that they dropped the buttholes out because Americans are a bunch of shitty prudes, but it is also the case that the buttholes probably were not exactly moving the story forward, and anyways these are not actual cats anyways. Do intend to go to Furry conventions and harangue people who don’t have anatomically correct fox anuses on their costumes, now?
Yes, there is a point that American Puritanism as a) a thing and b) not a great thing. Not sure this is a particularly good horse to ride to that fight, though.
Cartomancer makes a good point – if they didn’t want cat anus in a digitally generated image, why did they create it and then have to remove it? Weird.
A bit of a tangent, but I don’t think that religion as a whole was invented entirely to justify power and hierarchy. I’m not an anthropologist, but I’m pretty sure that even most relatively small, non-hierarchical societies have some kind of religious beliefs (correct me if I’m wrong!). Religion to me seems more like a common way of thinking and feeling and behaving among humans that was later exploited to justify hierarchy and political power, in a similar way to how other patterns of thought and emotion and behavior can be exploited.
cartomancer and springa73:
Cartomancer makes a good point – if they didn’t want cat anus in a digitally generated image, why did they create it and then have to remove it? Weird.
I suspect someone didn’t micro-manage things right. Imagine that the producer said “we need digital cat transformations” and did not specify “no buttholes” and some artist in whatever poor bastards agreed to do the digital cat transformation looked at his cat, who just then raised his tail and jumped off the desk. “Oh,” the artist shrugged and added more detail to the texture map.
kestrel@#7:
I think in the case of Ashcroft and Pence, at least some of this has to do with people trying to “out-holy” one another. “Look how virtuous **I** am! I won’t even look at a STATUE!” – while gazing piously up into the sky. It’s to impress other people. Personally I’m impressed with what a jackass such a person is.
I think that’s right.
“I’m such a good husband I don’t even look at a statue.”
That’s what I always loved about Rodin’s Naiade – it’s pretty unabashedly worshipful of the beauty of (I believe it was supposedly Camille Claudel) and it was shocking at the time because it didn’t apologize at all. These things make posturing assholes confront their pose and they don’t look good, doing it. (Seriously, would John Ashcroft throw a sheet over the Naiade? Barbarian!)
Andrew Molitor@#9:
Do intend to go to Furry conventions and harangue people who don’t have anatomically correct fox anuses on their costumes, now?
There was some mention on the Worst Year Ever podcast about going to a furry con where someone used a litterbox. So… let’s not jump to any conclusions.
Of these two statues, the female one is obviously better made. The pose looks more natural and the torso form looks anatomically correct, with various bumps and curves in proper places (and I do not mean the boobs). The male torso looks like a plastic action figure.
What Charly said. Also, the short forehead of the male figure bothers me. Perhaps it’s the laurels, but his head looks incomplete.
What does it say about me that I am replying 2 times to a post about cat anuses (ani?). I can dimly remember this hoax as a kid, when humorist Buck Henry started a society to promote dressing animals to prevent indecency. Some people apparently really fell for it.
http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_society_for_indecency_to_naked_animals
What!? Don’t you like Pomeranian dogs?
I seriously don’t get people who have a problem with looking at buttholes, either human or animal. I suspect that most of them secretly watch anal sex porn at home and then publicly proclaim that butts are icky to look at, which is just hypocrisy.
Discussions of statuary & John Ashcroft always bring two things to mind, one of which our esteemed host has illustrated above.
The other concerns reports from ’01, describing Ashcroft’s own inimitable creativity:
That seemed to me then and even more now an archetypal artwork of our time, but I have – then and now – failed to find any pictures thereof online.
A new opportunity for the subtitles people:
“CLICK HERE TO TURN ON ANUS VIEWING”
I’d be willing to bet a big part of what really bothers people like Ashcroft and Pence is that the statue’s pose is neither shy nor submissive. It’s more along the lines of “what the fuck is wrong with you people?” Or maybe a touchdown pose after she kicked someone like them in a delicate place for being a creep.
I mean… dogs aren’t exactly shy in that regard. No dog I’ve ever shared a living space with was reluctant about sitting on my pillow, either.
I don’t know about Ashcroft, (he seems like the pervert type to me), but poor ol’ Pence wouldn’t know a pussy if one sat on his face. He was one of those kids who, when the other guys were looking at Playboys, he was off somewhere praying for forgiveness. And, personally, I don’t mind looking at a woman’s asshole, (within reason), but guys and cats? Uh uh.
I can actually imagine that the software created them itself. They probably fed tons of data into the system to model things and that’s what they got. I remember that back when they created the big battles in Lord of the rings they gave their computers lots of data so it could model movement and individual skirmishes and they got deserters…
Giliell @22,
So then, this computer program waging mock war is smarter than most people fighting in real wars. We’ve finally achieved true artificial intelligence! Or are people just that dumb? Or, perhaps, both?