Fritz the Cat

Post-punk pioneers Fugazi once sang "cool's eternal, but it's always dated". I don't have to explain that, right? Despite what seems like an inherent contradiction, it makes perfect sense. The same thing goes for the concept of transgressive art. At some point, the elements that make something transgressive will (with a few exceptions) age like milk in the sun. Movies like Baby Face, Easy Rider, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and Psycho were all considered boundary-pushing or offensive to then-modern sensibilities. Elvis' swinging hips couldn't be shown on national TV for fear it would turn the nation's young ladies into a mob of sex-crazed lunatics. The idea that you were the criminal and not the cops in Grand Theft Auto was a step too far for some people. Looking back on it now, it seems quaint, almost hilarious, that a movie about a woman using sex as a weapon to get what she wants (Baby Face) or married people exploring sexual boundaries outside monogamy (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) could be taboo. It's hard to grasp the impact of art that transcends previously unexplored borders when one exists in a time where that border is decades behind. Which brings us to Fritz The Cat. Fritz The Cat is, roughly, a satire of late 60's or early 70's culture (the movie contradicts itself here, saying both at different times despite years most definitely not elapsing in the narrative). The titular feline is a college student who is trying to find himself and, in the process, stumbles through caricatures of many groups and ideas present at the time. Imagine the cross-section of Holden Caufield and Forrest Gump, blithely bumping into and through history, but instead of mental handicap, it's bourgeoisie-driven ignorance. There is no plot, and no real attempt at a character arc; just this privileged jerk pinballing through a quarter-life crisis, and he ends his journey in the same place he starts it. If that sounds about as fascinating as your last dental check-up, trust me, the journey along the way makes it much, much worse. Ralph Bakshi never conceived of a group he didn't want to skewer or offend, and Fritz The Cat makes sure to take aim at everything in the late 60's/early 70's had to offer. White, hypocritical, hippie leftists who come from backgrounds of safety and privilege claiming to know how minorities feel and feeling put down? They're here. A brutish, oafish, right-wing totalitarian police department that crushes anything outside the declared orthodoxy, and is literally represented by pigs? Check. Every AA-coded character is represented as a crow, which I'm sure Bakshi thought was some clever attack on Jim Crow, but comes off as lazy. So does all of them being jive-talkin' soul bros, or how they're easily manipulated into rioting and violence. There's also shots taken at the hedonistic pleasure-seekers who just want to get high and have sex, especially painting young women as morons who can be convinced into an orgy with a C-grade messianic speech about "finding the truth" and a hit off a joint. And let's not forget the extreme-left anarchist groups like the SDS or Weather Underground, painted as murderous terrorist groups akin to Al Qaeda. And for good measure, there's a joke about Jews controlling New York City and Los Angeles! And plenty of cartoon nudity. Bakshi has envisioned a world where every female stand-in has firm, gravity-defying breasts and can be convinced to put out with all the effort of selecting a breakfast cereal. And through it all, there's Fritz, the epitome of the carefree, suburban-soft, limousine liberal that understands what the black man goes through because he's "read the books". I'll give the movie this, it never paints Fritz as a good person; far from it, he's a clueless, egocentric putz, constantly on the look-out for some life-affirming epiphany that may or may not exist between the legs of every woman he encounters. He decries the world's injustices, but from the comfort of a sheltered college student whose biggest worry has been if the espresso machine is jammed at the local coffee joint. Taking all these elements and looking at the sum of the parts is bad enough. If Bakshi's intent was satire, the problem is that there's no straight-man in the middle of it all to be the audience's barometer of normality against the crazy. He's created a world where everything and everyone is the worst version of itself, and then exaggerates that another few degrees. But if you step back and take it as a whole, view the story (and I am using that word so loosely, the word is threatening to float apart like a bunch of helium-filled balloons) as one thing, it presents new problems. Fritz starts the movie as an embittered, horny jerk, and after becoming a fugitive, starting a riot in Harlem, falling in with a terrorist group, and almost dying, he comes out the other side having learned nothing. He is still an embittered, horny jerk. The entire 80 minute journey amounts to nothing. Anybody who didn't live through 1969 will be left especially wanting, as everything Bakshi is "satirizing" here is so firmly rooted in the culture of the time, there is no point of reference for a modern audience (assuming they can get past the crude stereotypes and casual racism). I grew up with parents who were at ground zero of the hippie culture, and who told me all about Fritz The Cat and how subversive and hilarious it is, so I have at least a one-degree-removed understanding of what this movie is talking about, and it still leaves me as cold as a meat locker. Effective social satire either pokes fun at concepts that are timeless (see Heathers' attacks on cliques and conformity), or knows how to transcend the dated aspects with a timeless message (UHF still manages to deliver its ideas about outsider art and community over corporate greed despite the fact that late millennials and every generation after doesn't have the slightest clue what UHF means). And to top it all off, the satire never lands because it isn't really satire. It's mockery. It's as satirical as Nelson Muntz pointing and bellowing "HAW HAW". It's misanthropy disguised as satire, a curmudgeon opening his curtains and deciding to boil down everything he sees to the crudest, most baseline stereotypes and declaring himself the one true genius who sees through the veil. Bakshi is not a Carlin-esque outsider who laments having to stand outside the broken system; he's not even Tommy Wiseau, ret-conning his artistic output so it fits the idea everyone already has of it. He's a high-falutin' moralist, wagging his finger like he's the almighty parent and everybody else is a stupid child, all the while sitting on a pedestal made of matchsticks that he built and wearing the emperor's new clothes. Other than the quality of the art itself, nothing about Fritz The Cat enlightens or offers new perspective, which is what good satire should do. It just feels like a grumpy old man bitching about the world around him, but then turning around and using the world around him to make a quick buck. What Bakshi left behind was a movie that might've been subversive for its time (I don't know, I wasn't there), but now not only feels like a relic, but a mean-spirited one that misunderstood the assignment.