Grumpy Cat, Or: Why Memes Should Not Be Movies

I'm sorry guys.  I had a big post planned for today because it's my 29th birthday and I was going to give the "old guy on the front porch" treatment to a bunch of different topics, but then a dozen people in my news feed informed me Hollywood's doing a Grumpy Cat movie and everything got completely derailed.

Some of you might know I worked in social media for several years.  Some of you may have read my now-defunct blog, State of Affairs, and those who did should see some glaring parallels between my writing there and my writing here (sans Microsoft Paint-edited pictures; you're welcome).  But part of what comes with working in the cesspool of me-first shilling, buzzword branding, and corporate cockery is an acute understanding of memes and how they work.

Let me be transparent (which is more than I can say for many of my previous employers): memes are to the internet what puns are to comedy.  They're funny in a very limited way for a very short period of time, and if you oversell them even a bit, people want to beat you to death with morning stars (and they're right to do so).  Memes are like the barnacles on the underbelly of the Good Ship Facebook (or MySpace if you're still into rafts with bedsheets tied to a broomstick for propulsion).  They represent the most lazy form of comedy ever to exist, because memes are a template medium.  Take one photo of a cat doing something stupid (because cats are almost uniformly stupid) and plug in some misspelled sentiment about fast food, and suddenly you're George Fucking Carlin.  

Further to that point, memes glorify the people who found them, not the people who made them.  It's the YouTube "first" race anthropomorphized by bored housewives and asshole teenagers who don't actually understand the definition of the term "condescending" before they start filling out the fields to put words in poor Gene Wilder's mouth.  It's a terrible trend and 99% of the time it's badly mishandled, poorly executed, and generally infuriating.

The other 1% of the time is Grumpy Cat, a meme started by people I don't care about because their cat is infinitely more interesting than they are.  You've all seen this disgruntled feline scowling out from under captions like "Dashing through the NO" (a Christmas favourite) or "I had fun once / It was AWFUL".  This cat combines Dylan Moran's Bernard Black with Woody Allen's worldview and angry eyes that could only have been concocted by some Anonymous troll artist.  This cat hates absolutely everything with the world-weary derision of a Socratic stoic asked with chortling irony to bring the hemlock to a Jonestown reunion.  

In short, this cat is the closest thing I have to a spirit animal.  

And for a short time, Grumpy Cat filled me with the kind of glee that can only come from what the Germans called schadenfreude but I call solidarity.  We had an understanding, that cat and I.  We hated all the same things (which is to say, most everything) and you can ask my partner for confirmation - and confirm it she will - when I say we got the exact. same. look on our faces when something made us angry, disappointed, or vengeful (again, most everything).  It was a golden age, the halcyon days of the Grumpy Cat meme.  And now it's all fucking ruined.

See, just like everything else cool in the animal kingdom, a bunch of greedy bipedal opposed-thumb jackoffs had to come piss all over everybody else's moody birthday cake - in this case, I'm referring to whatever slack-jawed drool receptacles who own Grumpy Cat.  They have merchandised the everloving hell out of this poor animal, and now they've committed the ultimate expression of selling out: licensing Hollywood to make a Grumpy Cat movie.

Let's just pause to deal with this for a minute, and for me to get my blood pressure under control. 

Look, didn't we learn anything from the past?  Taking a short piece of entertaining media and turning it into a feature-length film has worked, by my count, exactly twice: they were called "Wayne's World" and "The Blues Brothers", respectively, and they were perfect.  That should have been it.  But no.  Instead we thought it'd be a good idea to make more films based on SNL shorts, and when they became bafflingly successful, we took it a step further and gave the Shit My Dad Says guy a TV show starring T.J. Hooker that tanked before they hit the first hashtag.  

And now a Grumpy Cat movie.  Leaving aside the fact that it's basically Garfield with more use of the word "fuck" (and anybody who's read Garfield Minus Garfield knows that premise only shines when you remove the fucking cat), they've apparently signed both Jack "I'm so much better when I'm not the main protagonist" Black and Will "How the fuck do I still have a career" Ferrell to take part in this shit festival.  Because nothing sells me on a meme-movie like putting the dynamic dunces in the lead roles next to what I am absolutely certain will be a CGI cat that cracks wise with the same tooth-grinding smugness of a secondary character in a Joss Whedon show.  

This isn't just a bad idea a priori, guys: this represents the absolute nadir of Hollywood's creative tank that has been scraping the bottom for sequel fodder for the last ten years as it is.  Every so often I'm lucky enough to watch a really great movie that came out of a major Hollywood studio, and every single time I am dumb enough to think "hey! maybe this represents a new direction! maybe we'll start making interesting, clever, engaging films again!" and then they do this to me.  Or Kangaroo Jack.  Or Baby's Day Out.  Or whatever.  

And you know who I blame?  You.  Yeah.  Somebody here, statistically speaking, is going to go see this movie.  In fact, a lot of somebodies.  And it's your goddamned fault that we're living in a culture where creativity has been remanded to the realm of bread and circuses, a pseudo-apocalyptic cognitive nightmare where Will Farrell making seal noises at a camera while Jack Black vibrates around in the background like a coked-out Pudding Pop constitutes cinematic success and generates a box office taking to make a '20s beer baron blush.  You own this, you bastards.  I hope you're pleased with yourselves. 

THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.

And a happy birthday to me.