Cats, Lost and Found

Robert Altman’s 1973 neo-noir cult classic The Long Goodbye, adapted from a Raymond Chandler novel, begins with an orange cat pouncing on a scruffy Philip Marlowe, asleep fully dressed on a rumpled bed in a shabby apartment. It’s 3:00 a.m., and the cat wants to be fed. Specifically, he wants to be fed Courry brand cat food. Marlowe is all out, so he tries to whip up a substitute meal, stirring a dairy-based concoction with his finger. But it won’t do, and the white slurry is batted to the ground with a disdainful paw. Grumbling, Marlowe sets out for the 24-hour supermarket, but they’re all out of Courry too. “All this shit is the same anyway,” a stocker tells Marlowe, gesturing at a wall of cat food cans. Back home, Marlowe attempts a switcheroo, spooning an off-brand food into an old Courry can from the trash. But the cat isn’t buying it, and he ditches the unsatisfactory Marlowe, leaving through a handmade egress in the window—“El Porto del Gato” scrawled on it—not to be seen again for the rest of the film.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

The tone of this opening scene is captured perfectly, I think, by the German word Katzenjammer. Translating literally to “cat’s wail,” it’s used to describe a hangover. Glimpsed through an ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke, Altman’s Marlowe does look hungover. But he’s not the only one. The Long Goodbye captures the metaphorical hangover of American society in the 1970s; it is, in the eyes of some critics, an anti-nostalgia piece—well-timed for the age of Watergate, the beginning of the “long downturn” (a term of economic historian Robert Brenner’s), and the disappointing end of 1960s counterculture. The idea that a society could experience a cultural Katzenjammer also occurred to Karl Marx. He wrote of the “bourgeois revolutions” of his century that they “are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly.” The cat’s wail may be a protest against imperial excess, capitalist glut, or bourgeois intemperance—or just the consequence of enjoying those things in excess.

I first encountered the term Katzenjammer and the Marx quotation above in Marx for Cats (Duke University Press, 2023), a strange and captivating hybrid of Marxist primer and modern bestiary written by Leigh Claire La Berge. A longue durée account that spans the years 800–2020, Marx for Cats takes as its “gambit” that “the history of Western capitalism can be told through the cat and that doing so reveals a heretofore unrecognized animality at the heart of both Marx’s critique and Western Marxist critique.” For student or non-specialist readers, the book’s chapters offer a crash course in modern history through Marxist eyes, beginning with the feudal relations of production and moving through those of merchant capitalism, industrial capitalism, and whatever stage of capitalism we are in now. For more seasoned readers, these chapters also uncover the feline motifs that, like medieval marginalia, are everywhere on the edges of this history but have mostly escaped notice until now. Like a cat with a ball of yarn, La Berge unspools all things leonine, tigerish, and lynxlike through the archives, searching for traces of the “interspecies Communism” that, she hopes, will one day bring humans and animals together as comrades.

The book’s subtitle is A Radical Bestiary, and each of its eight main chapters is accordingly centered on a particular kind of cat representing a particular historical moment. The Middle Ages are retold as a struggle between lions (powerful, majestic, symbol of God and kings) and domestic cats (disorderly, demonic, companions of serfs, witches, and Muslims). The period from roughly 1500 to 1800, between the colonization of the Americas and the birth of the United States, is marked by the “desacralization” of the lynx, who in the Native Haudenosaunee creation story dies and becomes the earth itself, mother to all earthly life. The United States’ own creation story, La Berge argues, erased Lynx and her children, replacing them with the American revolutionaries’ lion-like aspirations for territory and power. The tiger, meanwhile, makes an appearance as the totem animal of the French and Haitian Revolutions—fierce, “burning bright” (to quote William Blake), capable of revolutionary leaps through time and space.

A sidebar here: one of La Berge’s favorite feline images (and one of mine too) is Walter Benjamin’s Tigersprung, German for tiger’s leap. Benjamin used it to describe how one might return to “a past charged with the here-and-now.” To find “what is up-to-date…in the jungle of the past” is, for Benjamin, to take a “tiger’s leap into that which has gone before.” And Benjamin’s revolutionary hope is that that metaphorical tiger might come to leap, not in “an arena in which the ruling classes are in control,” but in “the open sky of history.” La Berge’s own method in Marx for Cats is modeled after the Tigersprung. “The historian who seeks a revolutionary past to guide her to an emancipatory future,” she writes, “cannot simply leap forward; rather, she leaps backward to retrieve a new history. Once she has secured it she begins to reorder the world.” According to La Berge, each archival cat, cat lover, or feline figure of speech, however apparently minor or fragmentary, must be rescued, for it might just be the clue that this future prehistory of interspecies Marxism needs to solve its case.

Returning to the bestiary, La Berge makes the wildcat the symbol du jour of nineteenth-century North America. It lent its name to the notoriously unregulated, unreliable wildcat banks, and lost its skin to trappers as Americans used animal pelts for currency. But the wildcat also lent its name to Wild Cat, a Seminole leader who fought the United States during the Second Seminole War, was forced into Indian Territory, and founded a new Native and Black community in Mexico. Meanwhile, the new bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century was falling in love with domestic cats, whose old associations with devils and witches were by then forgotten. Marlowe’s orange cat in The Long Goodbye, with his exacting taste for a particular brand of canned food, might be the descendant of those pampered bourgeois pets. The twentieth century, however, witnessed the rise of a much bristlier domestic cat: the “sabo-tabby,” immortalized in radical writer Ralph Chaplin’s cartoons and song “That Sabo-Tabby Kitten” (sung to the tune of—really—“Dixie”). A black cat signifying sabotage, the sabo-tabby was the emblem of the Industrial Workers of the World’s organized fight against capital.

The final chapter of Marx for Cats turns to the middle decades of the twentieth century, the same era that gave us film noir, the hardboiled detective novel, and The Long Goodbye. For La Berge, the most important symbolic cat of this era is the black panther, the sharp-clawed and powerful creature after whom the radical Black Panther Party named itself. Angela Davis, a student of Frankfurt School luminaries Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, onetime Black Panther, civil rights activist, communist, queer woman of color, and vegan, helps La Berge make a case that animal liberation should be a plank of left-wing political movements. Davis described her veganism as “part of a revolutionary perspective” and asked, “how can we develop more compassionate relationships with the other creatures with whom we share this planet?” This question is the real driving force behind Marx for Cats. It is not ultimately one that La Berge can answer, for to do so, to “transform allegorical impulse into material manifestation” and rhetorical figures and fond thoughts into actually existing interspecies commune, would require another tiger leap, of the sort that a book alone cannot do. Yet it is always the guiding star of this sweeping, funny, and teacherly book.

It is perhaps the reviewer’s obligation to offer criticisms of the work under discussion, highlighting its limitations and minor shortcomings or remarking sadly on its failure to be a different book. I, however, will leave that task to other, more dutiful reviewers, and instead return here to The Long Goodbye. The detective story is, as La Berge points out in a discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” a genre that has become “a favorite of Marxist literary critics.” Detective tales stage “the very play of capital,” their protagonists “on a fantastic search for the guilty parties of the various crimes of capitalism.” Altman’s film fits this bill rather nicely. His Marlowe, living in a crummy apartment (at least by Hollywood standards), nicknamed “Cheapie” by the local gangsters, tries to untangle the mysteries of friends and clients living in a swanky, gated beachside neighborhood in Malibu. Beneath the genteel manners, behind the beautiful ocean views, these bourgeois elites turn out to be no better than the gangsters—they are just as corrupt, dishonest, greedy, and violent. In the film’s final showdown, Marlowe tracks down his friend-turned-enemy Terry Lennox, a wealthy playboy who has committed murder, escaped the law, gotten the girl and the cash, and disappeared to a Mexican villa. An unrepentant Lennox tells his old friend, “You’re a born loser.” “Yeah,” replies Marlowe grimly, “I even lost my cat,” and then he pulls out a gun and shoots Lennox point blank.

That Marlowe never abandons the search for his cat—he asks his neighbors to look out for him before leaving for Mexico—makes me like him to the end. That the two are never reunited is apropos for the bleakness of neo-noir; it also casts a different light on the film’s title, making me wonder if theirs is the real “long goodbye.” In the universe of the film, the cat’s departure is the first of many, followed by Lennox’s, suspect Roger Wade’s, and femme fatale Eileen Wade’s. All of these abandonments leave behind a Marlowe adrift in and at odds with the world around him. Yet the cat is alive somewhere, and he might yet come back or be tracked down. As La Berge taught me, lost cats past may still be found by a clever, committed detective.

Caroline Hovanec is the author of Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism (2018) and Notes on Vermin (forthcoming in 2025). She teaches English and Writing at the University of Tampa.