The Dr. Seuss Deity Mystery
Posted by 7th on June 06, 2005

I can't really say why, but I rather loved Ron Howard's Jim Carrey vehicle "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas." Even as a kid, I wasn't a huge fan of the animated special. I think it was Chuck Jones' animation more than anything else, but whatever it was, I found the Grinch's Scroogelike cynicism (and the Whos' sickening optimism) to be more than a tad bit creepy. Still, I liked the Grinch movie, particularly the backstory that explained (to some extent) where the Grinch came from and why he grew to be the... well... the thing that he was.

So when I visited the local Wal-mart one fine day, and saw that Mike Myer's take on The Cat In The Hat had hit DVD (at the all-too-tempting price of 14.95) I dared to hope that lightning might strike twice, and shelled out some of my hard-earned buckage. Suffice it to say, it would have served better to feed my constantly starving gas tank.

Now first off, let me state for the record that I am not, nor have I ever been, a fan of the Cat In The Hat. In fact, when it comes to 70'/80's era children's fiction, Dr. Seuss books weren't even on the bottom of my childhood reading list. hey were just too damned surreal for my liking, full of what still appears to me as LSD-fueled imagery and nonsense rhymes. To me, books that rhyme (short of excerpts from The Divine Comedy, Beowoulf, and Mad Harry's ballad of William Wallace) come across at about the same level of consciousness as the "entertainment value" of street mimes. I'm sure that, on some level, both pursuits take talent. But as Michael Keaton has shown us since Batman, wasted talent can be a sad, sad thing.

Regardless, even if I were a diehard Seusshead, I'd walk out of the film with a bad aftertaste. Sure, The Grinch took several liberties with the original work, but its heart was in the right place. Jim Carrey clearly worked hard to become the Grinch, just as much as he became Andy Kaufman, or Count Olaff, or any one of his memorable characters that isn't "Oddly Likeable Man Gets Stuck In An Outrageously Offbeat Situation" Guy. Myers, on the other hand, seemed to think that the makeup itself was more than sufficient to bring the character across. He didn't even make a valiant attempt to sound like the Cat. Instead, he gave us ninety minutes of his decade old Linda Richman character from Saturday Night Live.

Sure, every part is open to an actor's interpretation, so perhaps I might've let Meyer's dialed-in performance slide. Hell, I'd even be willing to overlook the fact that the film was marketed as a family picture, even though the Cat comes off as an amalgamation of Willy Wonka, Ted Bundy, and Will Ferrell's character from Old School. But the inclusion of Sean Hayes, the actor who plays the more annoying of the two limp-wristed fags from Will & Grace as an anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive boss (he's also the voice of the fish) took the film to levels of suck that even I, proponent of bad cinema that I am, cannot in good conscience forgive. That character makes Sean's portrayal of Jack look like Bogart in Casablanca by comparison.

The only redeeming feature of the film (besides the kids, who were spot on) was Alec Baldwin, whose role was so against type that I have to say he could have a rejuvenated career in comedy, were he to give up being the direct-to-video Carey Grant and bad anime voice overs to pursue it.

But perhaps the real reason that I loathed the film to such a degree lies in a realization that came to me as I watched Myers tear through the sets, wreaking havoc and laughing like a yenta on mescaline, cracking off colored jokes and accurately portraying the sexual obessions of a teenaged boy who just got his first issue of Penthouse.

Call me crazy, but it seems to be that many of Seuss's most popular works stand as a not-so-subtle metaphor for the writer's (perhaps subconscious) views on God. Hear me out, now. Let's take the Cat, for example. These two children are polar opposites. On one had, there's the girl, a control freak who obsesses over quantifying and scheduling every aspect of her life to perfection. Then on the other and is the boy, who is written as the living spirit of anarchy. The Cat arrives like God speaking from the burning bush, and sets them free of all restraint, showing them what true chaos is, what life without rules is really like. And once Pandora's Box is quite literally opened, like God abandoning the Hebrews to wander in the wilderness, the Cat leaves them to their own devices, only deciding to intervene when they realize they are powerless to solve their problems without his help. Hence, much like the Biblical God, the Cat allows mischief to befall this pre-teen Adam and Eve, but performs a miracle to set their lives on the right path.

Once the boy discovers this, and chooses to accept all responsibility for what happened, the Cat (Yahweh) appears and cleans up the whole mess, letting them in on the fact that he'd planned it all (in true "Let's allow the Devil to royally fuck with Job" fashion) just to teach them a lesson.

This tendency to focus on the consequences of one's actions, culminating in understanding and forgiveness, ranges throughout several of Seuss's, shall we say, more cerebral works. The Grinch's eventual embracing of Christmas ana overall change of heart is not only derivitive of Dicken's Christmas Carol, but also seems to hearken to the story of the Apostle Paul. And let us not forget, brothers and sisters, those poor, downtrodden bare-bellied Sneetches who learn the importance of individuality and the superfluous merit of outter appearance, which not only seems to borrow from the Civil Rights Movement, (not to mention a rather disturbing visual wink at the Jews during the horror of Nazi Germany) but also portrays the scheister salesman as not so much a villain as a guy who's out to teach the Sneeches the meaning of tolerance... and if he makes a few bucks in the process, so be it... Sometimes I could almost stake my life on the belief that this character was the inspiration for Leland Gaunt from Stephen King's Needful Things. And it's still a prevalent story, even today. All of 2004's Super Bowl nonsense might've been averted if Janet Jackson had just taken a run through the star-remover machine.

Maybe I'm wrong though. Maybe I'm just reading too much into the works of one of the world's most reknown children's authors. But even if I am, it doesn't excuse the fact that The Cat In The Hat was a lukewarm piece of foul-smelling ass hair (is there any other kind?) Perhaps Myers should have steered his cleaning machine towards the editing room and sucked out all of the shit. The trouble is, that most likely would have left his film as little more than a short subject tied onto the beginning of another lame film, possibly a political satire exposing the ridiculous nature of the war between Islam and Judaism, which all boils down to a matter of personal faith and taste, and how persistance and brute force will eventually make converts of us all. They could call it "Green Eggs And Ham."

-=7th=-

7th@the7thlevel.com