THE OUROBOROS OF GARFIELD

...is Full of Lasagna, Nightmares and Stars

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

A few weeks back I found the cartoon above, and became immediately obsessed. It had to be a joke, right?

But then, I found someone else who had seen it on a car.

And another, this one with an equally insane second bumper sticker.

So I decided to investigate.

And what I found…well, it involves a nearly-5 hour live action Garfield film, online battles over Garfield’s gender, the Washington Post, and much, much more.

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ODE TO A LASAGNA CAT

Our story begins with two guys obsessed with Garfield.

Zach Johnson and Jeffrey Max were filmmakers who stumbled upon a nasty, human-sized Garfield costume in Los Angeles, and decided to film live-action versions of cartoonist Jim Davis’ work. They ended up making 80 Garfield shorts.

The problem was, on their own those shorts really didn’t feel like anything. “You saw three and there was no incentive to click further; which is a commentary on the strip itself, I suppose,” Johnson said in a 2017 interview with the two of them. So instead, they decided to combine their individual scenes with the then-popular genre of tribute videos, in which someone would post a montage of images from their favorite anime or actor over some kind of pop song. And suddenly they had a funny, weird hit on their hands.

They released 20 of these videos in 2008, all on the same day, under the YouTube handle of “lasagnacat” And the internet found them and became well and truly obsessed. “We always try to do things en masse,” Johnson explained. “The biggest joke of it is that there’s so much of it and that it exists.”

9 years later, in early 2017, they released a second batch, which they had been working on in between other things since the original set. 12 of them were just like the originals, their title the date of the strip’s original release, then the live action remake, then a tribute video.

But the latest was something else entirely, a 4 hour and 40 minute film in which John, Garfield and Odie answer the door over and over to find a mannequin who then tells them how many people they’ve slept with, using audio recordings from their fans.

That moment then becomes the final panel of a strip which the next character in this endlessly repeating cycle is reading when the next mannequin knocks on the door. And on and on and on.

After 4 hours and 33 minutes of that, the film suddenly shifts into a surreal short film in which John confronts himself at the door, then suddenly becomes old and confronts a naked warrior painted to look like Garfield who races in slow motion toward him, followed by a truly horrifying moment in which a young girl gives birth in a high school bathroom stall. It’s Kubrick meets King’s Carrie, but with Garfield.

Yeah, it’s crazy.

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IN THE 60S WE COVERED WATERGATE

In that end sequence, as Old John wanders the Earth, we hear Garfield creator Jim Davis answering questions about the strip. It gives the whole sequence a tremendously spooky, haunted quality.

Those clips come from a 2015 interview that Davis did with the website Mental Floss, which asked him, among other things, what was Garfield’s gender.

Here was his answer:

Now, one might reasonably ask, has Jim Davis never actually met a real cat? Because “by virtue of being a cat, he’s not really male or female” is a great big “Huh?”

Still, nobody had any trouble with that until 2017, when these two guys obsessed with Garfield put that bizarre comment into their David Lynch-style version of the Lord of the Rings, the Extended Cut, which was then seen by their fans.

The Washington Post—because this story isn’t weird enough, yes, the Washington Post covered it—reported in 2017 that one of those fans, a guy named Virgil Texas with plenty of followers of his own, then went to Wikipedia, changed Garfield’s gender to “none” and posted both the Davis quote and the change on Twitter.

Predictably, people lost their minds. They began reediting the gender entry again and again, and digging back into the strip to find evidence to support their points of view, which then led to further arguments about not just gender but orientation.

Eventually, Davis resolved the matter. Garfield is in fact male and gay.

(j/k, he’s SO clearly straight.)

Problem solved…?

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CHRISTIAN MOMS LOVE A HATE

So here’s where things get weird. (Ha ha ha.)

At some point these bumper stickers start popping up. And the obvious interpretation is, this is about Garfield’s gender. Some kooky Christians saw that debate, interpreted Davis as turning their favorite cartoon character into some kind of non-binary Trojan Horse of perversion, and decided to do Make Their Opinions Known.

But it turns out those bumper stickers have absolutely nothing to do with Christian protests over Garfield. In fact, they are a massive joke meant to ridicule the whole phenomenon of Christian groups denouncing things. On Redbubble you can get lots of different versions, from “I am a Christian Mom against Feathers McGraw” bumper sticker—Feathers McGraw is the evil penguin from Wallace & Gromit; “I am a Christian Mom against Tohru Adachi” sticker—Tohru Adachi is a character from a 1980s anime video game; to “Christian Moms Against Avocados”—avocados are a super food. (Also they’re really good for you.)

There are lots of other stickers like this, too. My personal favorite is the “Not Today Satan” stickers, which you can get for your car, your computer or your thermos.  Talk about a conversation starter.

So, rather than some kind of militant statement against a 2017 controversy that is not a controversy but just an awkwardly phrased answer repurposed by two guys obsessed with Garfield for their 4 hour and 40 minute Sartre play, this entire bumper sticker phenomenon is a bunch of other people looking on that situation and the reality of Christians sometimes randomly hating really stupid stuff, which even if it wasn’t really stupid stuff seems like, the opposite of what Christians should be doing anyway, and thought, Hold my lasagna.

So yeah, literally none of this is real.

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REGARDING THE SHAGGY DOG

Here’s the thing: I thought that bumper sticker was so believable, I actually spent quite a lot of time researching the phenomenon. It made so much sense, I tried to figure out a way to reach out to an online group of gamers called “Christian Moms Hate Garfield” to learn what it is about Garfield that so disturbs them. You have to think they would have absolutely messed with my head.

I believed that trope so much, in the early drafts of this piece I wrote that Christians actually had been attacking Garfield because of Davis’ comments, and did a whole riff on what is it with Christians and hating stuff.

Then as I prepared to send this out last night, I reread the Post piece and realized, at no point do they mention Christians. Other than the bumper sticker itself, I can’t find any Christians online that frames Garfield in this way, either. It was literally all incepted into my head from the bumper sticker itself. Maybe you felt the same way. Christians hating dumb stuff just sounds believable (which when you think about it is really eye-opening).

Not only that, but I would bet dollars to donuts that some Christians, looking on that bumper sticker thought, I better look into what’s going on with Garfield.

So, for those playing along at home, a bumper sticker that was made as a joke to parody Christian hate is actually so believable, it has the potential to radicalize real Christians to hate dumb things like Garfield, and others to hate them for doing so.

Which is horrifying (though not as horrifying as the ending of “Lasagna Cat: Telephone Sex Survey Results”). And yet I feel like those trolls would howl with laughter at that possibility. “Yes,” they’d nod. “Exactly. This is our point.”

Posted by u/hazelnutedays on Reddit. And yes, I find it horrifying, too.

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Coming Sunday: Barbie Jesus.