The Internet video known as Zoom Cat Lawyer, or Lawyer Cat, which went viral in February, has been described as bringing a moment of collective laughter to a frazzled people. In the short clip, first shared on YouTube by some canny person with the Three Hundred and Ninety-fourth District Court of Texas, an attorney named Rod Ponton’s appearance at a Zoom hearing is briefly derailed by a video filter of a kitten that appears over his face. And, of course, the scene is funny—the cat’s darting, desperate eyes; the earnest, calm encouragement from the judge as he attempts to offer tech support; the mild bemusement of the other attorney on the call, as if such sights were a daily occurrence; and, finally, the declaration from Ponton of “I’m here live,” as the kitten’s mouth moves to deliver the words, “I’m not a cat.” Yet there’s pathos in the video, too, encapsulated by the woeful, high-pitched yelp that Ponton first utters when he finds himself cruelly outmatched by technology and circumstance—“Uggghhaaaaa.”
Who knew that a cat filter could cause such anguish? Well, Paul J. Bracher did. In the short documentary “Cat-astrophe,” the filmmakers Kristina Budelis and Leandro Badalotti introduce us to Bracher, now an assistant professor of chemistry at Saint Louis University, who, in 2012, made a similar appearance as an accidental cat, this time during a Skype job interview. (He didn’t get the job.) When Lawyer Cat appeared, last month, Bracher recognized not only Ponton’s predicament but the specific kitten itself. It turns out that it lived, in earlier days, as the default filter on the Webcam software that came preinstalled on the Dell computer he had used for his fateful interview. The film tracks the long life of this sad-eyed cat avatar, featuring insights from a software-design manager named John Martin, who helped create it, and the current chief technology officer at Dell, who confirms its provenance. And the story goes a bit further still. Recently, Martin and a colleague named Irving Lu managed to track down the identity of the real-life kitten that provided its image for their original filter. Long before it was Lawyer Cat, and nearly a decade before it wrecked a young chemist’s job search, the kitten was a real-life blue-eyed fluffball named Eldest Mouse, born in Taiwan in 2003.
All in all, no one seems too bruised by their misbegotten run-ins with the digital version of Eldest Mouse. In the film, we get a word from Ponton, the I’m-not-a-cat lawyer, who’s come to embrace his fame and sums up the experience by noting, “It tickled everybody’s funny bone in the same way.” Still, might there be something a little unsettling beneath all the good feeling—what Bracher remembers from his experience nearly a decade ago as a kind of existential dread? Of being trapped momentarily in another creature’s image, he recalls, “My eyes and my fingers were desperately trying to search through every menu in Skype to figure out how to become human again.”
