Cat Soup and Abuse
By Naren Varadarajan
TW: Discussion of domestic abuse
Cat soup is…a really weird movie. Watching it is something of an experience, since plotlines emerge and disappear in the blink of an eye, all the while fast-paced trippy imagery makes it hard to really understand what’s even going on. Drawing some kind of overarching analysis out of it and claiming that to be the point of the film would be disingenuous because there isn’t really a point to be drawn or a moral to be learned. Still, its imagery is far too interesting to leave alone, and prodding at it until it vomits something up makes for some interesting discussion, whether intended or not.
The film follows two cats, brother and sister, and begins with the latter’s death. As the grim reaper arrives to take her, her brother refuses to accept her death and attempts to wrest her from the reaper’s grasp. He manages to retrieve half her soul, and much of the film follows the two cats as they journey through a series of increasingly bizarre landscapes to find the other half, hidden in a flower.
One of the images that comes up time and time again is that of destruction, and, more specifically, the destruction of some kind of body or the other. For example, one part of the film is set in a circus, where there is a large bird with a transparent body, filled with clouds. When the bird is squeezed, it lets out fireworks, and each time it is squeezed it grows more and more agitated, until it is finally killed. Upon its death, a great flood is unleashed upon the earth that leaves behind a vast desert once it finally dries up. Stuck in this desert with only a pig as their companion, the two cats resort to morbidly using their own friend for food. They carve out parts of his body and eat it, with the pig even cannibalizing his own body at one point.
The pig dies soon after, but the cats manage to make it to a large mansion in which a tall bald man lives. Much like the witch from Hansel and Gretel, he fattens them up with food before throwing them into a large cauldron and attempting to cook them. The cats manage to escape just in time, throwing him in and running away. All of these examples, of the bird, the pig, and the man, are all of bodies being destroyed or maimed in some way. The question is though, what ties them together thematically? More importantly, why is the film doing this, showing us these sometimes horrific images of arms and legs being cut off, or animals being abused?
Well, in each of these situations bodies are not destroyed for no purpose — there is something being extracted from this destruction. The bird provides entertainment, the pig provides food, and the cats when cooked and eaten serve as a way for the man, long past his prime, to vampirically consume youth and thereby become youthful again. Destruction is here a tool to create useful things for some people at the expense of others. Weirdly enough, the cats seem to enjoy and/or partake in this destruction themselves. After all, when the bird is being tortured for entertainment, they clap along just as excited as the rest of the crowd, and they are the ones responsible for the death of the pig. Even with the man, the only reason they really dislike what’s happening to them is that they are the ones at the receiving end of this destructive extraction.
But…why? Why on earth would they not question these things as they happen? As an observer it’s obvious that these things are, on some fundamental level, wrong, or at least morally questionable. The answer to this lies all the way back in the beginning of the film, where we get a brief glimpse into the kind of household the cats grew up in. We see that their father is an alcoholic, and their mother either ignorant, scared, or both. It wouldn’t really be much of a stretch then, to say that there was probably some kind of abuse going on, whether that be physical or mental. Abuse is, in some way, something that tears you down and destroys parts of you, exploiting you in some form. Your body becomes a thing from which your parents ‘extract’ something, such as physical or emotional labor.
As a child, these things are often accepted and internalized uncritically, and so witnessing the same being done to others might be seen as normal, or expected. All of this explains why the cats are partially oblivious and tacitly endorse destruction — they grew up with it, after all. The film ends with the brother finally finding the flower, and making his sister whole again. This is the only act in the entire film where something is created without anything being destroyed. No one had to die or be tortured for it to happen, and symbolically it represents the cats breaking out of their cycle of internalized abuse, to strive to be better than their parents, and better as people.
