Hang In There Baby (How A Dead Cat Explains Futility)

One of the most inspired examples of a character confronting a haunted image in The Simpsons occurs in the Season 8 episode, "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson" (original air date January 19th 1997), in which Marge attempts to set up her own pretzel business and encounters setback after setback. At one point, when her spirits are feeling particularly dampened, she looks to a motivational poster affixed to the wall of her makeshift office. This features a cat hanging from a washing line, with the slogan, "Hang In There, Baby!" Marge takes momentary comfort in this kitschy image, only for her bolstered spirits to be immediately ruptured when her eyes wander down to the smaller print: "Copyright 1968...determined or not, that cat must be long dead. That's kind of a downer..." Indeed. A fundamental component of hauntology is the notion that the future we once anticipated has failed us and that we are left with a shattered timeline, compelled to look ever backwards to the past for solace as all of our unresolved anxieties continue to stare us in the face, the past, the present and the cancelled future converging in a chaotic mishmash of omnipresent disturbance. And what could be more disturbing than a dead cat peeking at us from beyond the grave, reminding us of that all is lost? And you thought Pet Sematary was a bit unsettling.

Marge's poster has a real-life counterpart - throughout the 1970s, images of cats clinging on for dear life were plastered all over homes and offices with the intention of spurring humans on through their day-to-day troubles, although the earliest specimen dates back to 1971, not 1968. The original "Hang In There, Baby" poster was the creation of Los Angeles-based photographer Victor Baldwin, and was originally featured as an illustration in a children's book, The Outcast Kitten, which was written by Baldwin and his then-wife Jeanne and published in 1970. (Incidentally, if you're thinking of scurrying over to Abebooks and bagging a copy...best of luck, baby. I took a gander and the cheapest one was listed for over £750 - about $980). The black and white image showed Siamese kitten Sassy (given the name Wiki in the book) hanging onto a bamboo branch with her forepaws, with the caption "Chin up". The image struck a chord with the public, and attracted such an enthusiastic reaction that Baldwin decided to market it as a poster with the revised caption, "Hang in there, baby!" It proved such a hot seller that for a time Baldwin was able to put his photography career on hiatus and live solely off the profits generated by Sassy's likeness. Naturally, a slew of rip-offs featuring cats in similar poses, and with the same tagline, were rapidly ushered into being, although Baldwin was extremely vigilant against unauthorised use of the original Sassy image and brought successful copyright infringement cases against any and all bootleggers he happened across. The world took Sassy's battle with that infernal branch to their hearts, and the image of the suspended cat became one of the ultimate cliches of motivational paraphernalia, a classic artifact of 1970s kitsch. As such, it was always inevitable that The Simpsons would have their say on it eventually.

Marge's observation is brilliantly astute, but also disturbing, in that she seems to be mourning for more than Sassy's long-deceased Simpsons counterpart. Within that twenty-nine year gap, the cat has acquired new significance as an emblem of the faded hopes and dreams of an entire generation. Countless people projected their individual plights onto this memorable image of a frankly very uncomfortable-looking feline, and Marge's despairing remarks imply that the struggle was all for nought, prompted by her sudden realisation that the cat, once hailed as the embodiment of determination, isn't there any more. All we are left with is a static, two-dimensional image that has slowly decayed, in the words of popular website Know Your Meme, into "a symbol of corporate coldness," symptomatic of everything glib, impersonal and odious about the dubious cult of the motivational poster. The poster becomes a classic example of a haunted image - Marge looks to the cat and sees not inspiration for enduring the present but the ghost of a dead and defeated past warning her of the sheer futility of her endeavors. In this light, the tagline becomes more of a sardonic taunt, a reminder that, just as the cat remains permanently frozen in its position, a static entity doomed to dangle forever from its fragile lifeline, so too Marge may have little choice but to hang in there for all eternity, waiting for a victory that will not be coming. It is a witty deconstruction as it utterly inverts the entire purpose of the poster, a characteristically Simpsons assertion that those who put their trust in corporate images and mass-marketed philosophies are setting themselves up for disappointment.

What makes the Sassy poster troubling, particularly when viewed with Marge's observations in mind, is that, stripped of all context and chintzy taglines, it's actually a terribly unsettling image. Baldwin, who had previously worked as a humane officer and was a great cat lover, assured anyone who raised questions about the welfare of his subject that he had not forced Sassy into the pose in question but had instead taken numerous shots of the kitten playing naturally and that she had yielded the goods by herself. Nevertheless, I don't think there's any skirting around the fact that Sassy blatantly does not look happy in the above image - on closer inspection, her facial expression is one of wide-eyed anguish, the branch pressed up tightly against her chin as gravity takes a hold of her body and threatens to pull her down to a drop of god knows how deep, and her extended claws struggle feebly to keep her atop her flimsy platform. It's the snapshot of a cat who has been caught off guard and completely lost control of her situation. The black and white aesthetic only makes the plight of the cat seem starker (and all the more ghostly). Indeed, it seems a downright morbid moment to keep a cat frozen and suspended in for all eternity, which is precisely what Baldwin succeeded in doing when he captured the image and transformed it into a lucrative cultural icon. Perhaps Sassy's tortured expression was crying out our inevitable doom all along and we were too entranced by what we'd convinced ourselves was an adorable image to see it? Perhaps the below image, another witty parody of the "Hang In There, Baby" mantra, is a far more accurate reflection of really goes on inside the head of a cat, and those of their human counterparts, as they find themselves dangling powerlessly from their literal and figurative branches?