I watched the first thirty minutes of Don’t Fuck With Cats. I said I wasn’t going to watch it, and I did.
Each review I was given was some iteration of, “It’s super disturbing… Like really fucked up. You should watch it.”
To which I would reply - “Absolutely not.”
My last blog post was about how I needed to stop consuming media to be part of short-lived public discourse. My goal this year is to create more than I consume. That being the case, I can’t spend my precious consumption time on things that are not bettering me as a person.
You are the summation of the things you consume, the experiences you have and the people you surround yourself with. I don’t need to add kitten torture to the cocktail of fucked up lifelong surroundings I’ve been a part of.
So I’m watching Don’t Fuck with Cats...
And really watching it! I don’t want it to seem that I turned it off after thirty minutes out of disgust.
Much worse - I fell into a deep sleep.
Not that torturing kittens puts me at ease, or lulls me into slumber. It’s just that I was drunk, in bed, watching the show on my laptop, and eating a bodega sandwich…
Because my other 2020 resolutions were to not drink on weekdays, keep screens out of bed, and not eat late at night. We are all works in progress!
I’m not going to lie; it was concerning how quickly I fell asleep to Don’t Fuck With Cats. I rarely fall asleep that quickly.
I’ll wrestle to stay awake until 3:00AM while watching reruns of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I know the punchlines already, but I will happily let that show ruin my next day.
Don’t Fuck with Cats has me writing blog posts in the morning before a full day of work!
What if I find out that hearing people discuss kitten torture videos is my white noise machine?
I’d never be able to have a girl over again.
The show was not just a compilation of kitten torture videos. There were more react videos than actual torture.
One scene, the main lady who is being interviewed - Deanna Thompson - says,
“I have never been able to watch the whole video from start to finish. It’s just too terrible.”
Then they make her watch the whole video on her laptop, while she’s on camera!
Predictably, she’s fuckin shook. Netflix is out here manufacturing emotions!
Thompson created a fake Facebook account. She teamed up with other fake Facebook accounts and they started working together to analyze this one kitten torture video, to pinpoint the location of the kitten-torturer through context clues.
Deanna dedicated her life to finding this dude, and the producers of Don’t Fuck With Cats try to get some raw emotion out of her by forcing her to watch what she finds most traumatic.
That’s like forcing Bruce Wayne to watch the surveillance footage of his parents’ murder on repeat.
Let the record show, I do not condone the torture of cats,
BUT I understand the pressure modern society puts on us to create high-quality content.
I am getting better at creating something, and just launching it out into the ether - forgetting about it as soon as I press “publish.” But the first video I ever posted took me a long time to post. I had it uploaded with my cursor hovering over the button long enough that my screen kept turning to black due to inactivity.
Then I posted it, and thank God people seemed to like it, because if it would have got bad reviews, I probably wouldn’t have posted anything for quite some time.
First off, this kitten torture video got TERRIBLE reviews online. A whole team of people dedicated their lives, and fake Facebook accounts to tearing through his first video, attempting to find anything and everything wrong, or out of place.
As a content creator, my worst fear is that my first video ever is looked upon with that scrutiny. Say what you will about his dark soul and sociopathic tendencies, but the dude had self-confidence I can only dream about. You have to put a few pieces out before you really catch your groove, and people understand who you are.
It’s hard to find your voice through your art, and with most people it takes years of producing content before your followers understand who you are.
Not this guy - he really defined himself with his first work, and while I have not watched the rest of Don’t Fuck With Cats, it seems like it was not his last, and it did set the tone for everything that was to follow.
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