“You do a lot of cats,” my girlfriend said the other day. Perhaps she’s right. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I have to say there is something appealing with the cat-and-mouse motif that goes well beyond liking fuzzy animals.
I always hated the Tom and Jerry cartoons as a kid. That kind of a struggle frustrated me deeply. Granted, the “chase” cartoon is everywhere, and I certainly liked the Roadrunner/Wile E Coyote cartoons, but Tom and Jerry was different somehow. Tom, the cat, was supposed to be the bad guy. He’s out to eat that poor little mouse who, realistically, would never stand a chance if he didn’t have a ton of tricks and a bag full of cartoon magic behind him. I think we’re supposed to root for Jerry—the David to Tom’s Goliath—but I sympathized with Tom instead. Tom was just a cat, doing cat stuff. He needs to eat and Jerry just happens to be what he eats. He’s not evil, he’s just acting in his cat nature. Jerry, on the other hand, is a smug little ass who seems to delight in, not just escaping with his life, but in psychologically torturing Tom.
This is a fair amount of words for one little piece. I think I’m finally starting to understand this series of cut-outs. They’re about seeking but not finding. They’re about an instinctual hunger that never gets a taste. They’re about a fleeting childhood and the urge to go back in time to reclaim what was lost.
More soon…
