‘He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world’: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain and the origins of cat

Will Sharpe, director of The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021), suggested that the subject of his biopic ‘understood what a cat meme is.’ This perception shapes his portrayal of the Victorian-era artist, an illustrator famed for his drawings of anthropomorphic cats. Cats are depicted communicating in meme-like ‘lolspeak,’ and the film’s aesthetic, a collaboration involving various artists, evokes the reworking and remixing which drives meme creation. The companionship which cats provide for Wain recalls the anthropomorphic ‘cuteness’ embedded in present-day digital services to soften their impersonal nature. These characteristics reflect the tendency in biopics to represent artists as outsiders, figures who suffer in a cruel world. However, the suggestion that Wain’s mental illness shaped the nature of his illustrations is more problematic: forging close links between Wain’s illness and his work divorces him from his contemporaries whose own anthropomorphic cats could have influenced Wain and current meme culture. Representations of cats throughout history have presented these creatures as both familiar and strange, and this duality is evident in the film: while presenting Wain’s work as the forerunner to the cat meme, the film relies on the tired discourse of the suffering artist which divorces him from the world in which he lived.