Flak Magazine: Review of The Cat in the Hat, 12.01.03

Dr. Seuss has already been canonized by phonics-centered elementary educators and the National Right to Read Foundation, but this sort of deification is based on an incomplete portrait of Theodore Geisel's legacy. Less insouciant than subversive, St. Seuss' entire body of work is itself a political plate of green eggs: His children's stories preach inclusion and tolerance, yet Geisel's political cartoons for the left-wing New York weekly PM in the '40s render the Japanese with all the cultural awareness of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's. This is not to say that Geisel was a bigot moonlighting as a children's author, but as Richard Minear's "Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodore Seuss Geisel," has shown, there's a lot more to Geisel than funny stories about Whos, turtle kingdoms and cats with big hats.

Much of Geisel's '40s political work (also signed as "Dr. Seuss") attacked isolationism and other conservative policies of the era and — though he drew war bonds propaganda — still reflected disenchantment with the war. He reached back to this era and its culturally defining themes — racial tolerance, the futility of deterrence and the corruption of democratic institutions — for his absurdist rhymes of the '50s, infusing a little anarchy into the stultifying, conservative childhood of the decade. In short, Geisel anticipated the political and cultural revolt of the '60s. For instance, "Horton Hears a Who" (1954) spins an allegory about imperialist occupation (involving elephants and eagles, no less), "Yertle the Turtle" (1958) admonishes dictatorial rule and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" (1957) satirizes the commercialization of the holidays long before the rise of the Mall of America.

"The Cat in the Hat" (1957) might be Geisel's most intriguing absurdist symbol. Geisel portrayed the Japanese as sneaky, slinky cats in his post-Pearl Harbor cartoons, but in this book, the cat sports the Uncle Sam top hat that Geisel used to portray American strength and power. In the book, the Cat basically invades the children's home and shows them the fun and virtue of Westernized consumerism (by balancing virtually every dry good in the house while standing on a ball), which is vociferously protested by the fussy, traditionalist fish hopelessly trapped in his fishbowl. The kids do not acquiesce to the Cat's antics until the Cat opens an ominous box and drops Thing One and Thing Two on them. Once the Things destroy the house, the Cat must swoop in and clean up all the mess, even though the children asked the Cat leave when he had worn out his welcome.

This, and many of Geisel's children's stories, are political parables, so despite the protests of the Seuss-as-phonician crowd, there shouldn't be any problem with "adding meaning" to "The Cat in the Hat," as long as the recontextualization is respectful and appropriate to this generation of children. To this extent, producer Brian Grazer's two Seussian adaptations (this one, along with Ron Howard's The Grinch) are almost adequate in conception: Where Geisel's stories unlock the imagination of repressed '50s kids, these movies deal with multiplex-bred, spoiled suburbanites. In The Grinch, Whoville might as well have been Stepford in a snowflake — the Whos power-shopping as if preparing for an air raid, the cramped design of the town capturing Christmas at the mall. The capitalist rant extends to the rat-nosed Whos firing a machine gun of Christmas lights, and The Grinch's declaration that the "meaning of Christmas" is "Vengeance!" The idea could have worked, had the film's message not been undermined by a multi-million dollar advertising alliance with Visa and relentless media campaign.

Grazer and director Bo Welch's live-action The Cat in the Hat plays with a similar idea. Here, the kids are virtually ignored by their workaholic real-estate agent single mom (Kelly Preston), a Seussian Carolyn Burnham who needs the house to be perfect because she's hosting a networking party for her agency. The villain is mom's smarmy boyfriend, who is, of course, played by Alec Baldwin. The boyfriend wants the obnoxious son (Spenser Breslin, the husky boy from Disney's The Kid) out of mom's house and into Colonel Wilhelm's Military School for Troubled Youths, while the uptight daughter (Dakota Fanning, I Am Sam's little girl) punches away on her Palm Pilot ("Stuff-to-Do List: 1. Make Stuff-to-Do List"). The camera flies over their suburban neighborhood, which resembles an even more candy-colored version of The Truman Show's Seahaven, and there's something profoundly unsettling about the image — the cartoon isn't necessarily that cartoonish, evoking the subtle cultural fascism of Disney's Celebration, Fla. The grass is cut twice daily and at Mom's work, a large electronic billboard demands that "Employees Must Wash Hands Constantly." So far, so good. Welch, a longtime production designer, has constructed this town so that the need for the Cat is very obvious: These kids have no imagination because they're governed by the need to keep up appearances for their parents; they're bored because they're repressively overstimulated.

The problem here is the same sort of hypocrisy as in The Grinch: How can the film decry parental placation of basic creative urges when a family trip to the film itself does just that? If the film persuasively argued for parents to rededicate themselves to the facilitation of imagination, creativity and spontaneity in their children's lives, perhaps then it could find its voice. In the Seuss book, the Cat is a Hermes character who swoops in to bring dreams and imagination to the mortals, but Mike Myers' Cat is a randy creep whose hat stiffens at the sight of the kids' mom. The Cat is supposed to teach the kids — one a control freak, the other a rule breaker — to find the proper balance of fun and responsibility in their lives, but he mostly just mugs for the camera as it sweeps from set piece to set piece. After this potentially great set-up, Welch has no idea how to put together any sort of consistent narrative because he doesn't have a moral to expound, so he resorts to playing the ironic, hipster card by letting Mike Myers be Austin Powers in a catsuit, and trying to go the Shrek route with sex and bodily function jokes.

Geisel's "The Cat in the Hat" works because, despite the absurdity of his images, he has a clear idea of what they're supposed to mean. Welch and Myers haven't worked it out yet (in character, Myers admits to the audience: "I'm no good at rhyming"), so Myers just yells like Fat Bastard, employs his fake New York Jew accent and sometimes pays homage to Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion. There are a few amusing scenes, as when Myers performs a live infomercial involving really sharp knives and his tail, but the act wears thin because there's no narrative to support it. Instead, Welch goes after smut jokes: mucousy hairballs, crotch-level pumping of liquid soap, shots of Kelly Preston's cleavage, a contraption whose acronym spells out "SHIT," a prosthetic of Baldwin's fat hairy gut, and it goes on. In fact, the movie teeters dangerously close to becoming a kiddie "The Man Show": There's an extended shot of Kelly Preston jumping on a trampoline, and the Cat bumps into Paris Hilton — Paris Hilton — at a rave.

Like Shrek, The Cat in the Hat assumes that today's kids and adults are too hip for those old square "family" cartoons. That's not only wrong, it's condescending and a little fascist — certainly Geisel would not approve of the idea that kids so lack imagination that it must be provided for them. Pixar's enormous success (including this year's Finding Nemo) proves this untrue, and to strip kids' movies of their innocence and naïveté denotes cyncism and doltishness on the part of the filmmakers. The wide-eyed nature of children's stories isn't a reactionary sheltering of kids; in skilled hands, this worldview develops the larger themes, such as Geisel's corrupt capitalist Whoville or the despotic Yertle. What really damns movies like The Cat in the Hat is that our kids will be smutty if they are shown that smutty is the thing to be. One scene captures the whole of this enterprise: The Cat, pretending to be a piñata, gets clubbed in the nuts by a bunch of spoiled suburban kids. That's what Grazer has done to Seuss.

Grazer's confusion is thus: Kids' stories like Dr. Seuss' books are "for adults too" because they use childlike qualities as a vehicle to communicate larger truths about worldly, political themes — but in the 21st century, "for adults, too" has come to simply mean "somewhat raunchy." The notion that "adult" equals "sophomoric" is, well, childish. Not only is Hollywood willfully perverting childhood by making raunchy kids' movies (sure to be the case with Shrek 2), but adulthood as well. Never mind concern for the children — moviegoers need to punish trashy perversions of childhood fantasies and steal back an adult's simple joy for a great kids' movie. In skilled, sensitive hands, children's stories can be both pure of heart and intensely political, like Mack the Turtle belching and shaking the throne of King Yertle, making "all the turtles free, as turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be." In the hands of Grazer and Welch, though, all of this noble mania is reduced to a walking hard-on gag.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)