Stealing the Film: On Bud’s THREE DIFFERENT NAMES

Tonic, who plays Bud in Caught Stealing (2025).

---

I. Bud in Caught Stealing must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES

“He’s not staying here,” Hank asserts when Bud appears in his apartment. Little does Hank know, he’s not saying, either.

Bud, a cat, is one of the main characters in the 2025 film Caught Stealing, directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring the beautiful Austin Butler. Bud’s role in the film is certainly not as simple as his first name suggests.

Bud is a simple name for a cat, but there is nothing simple about the naming of cats. Bud is only one of his three names. Less obvious still is the film’s attunement to Bud’s two, less comprehensible names.

Spoilers Ahead! It’s quite unavoidable, as Bud is the key.

II. On the Naming of Cats in Cats.

The naming of cats is, as T.S. Eliot’s poem teaches us, a complicated matter. “[A] cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.” His book of cat poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, Cats: The Jellicle Ball.

Cats is currently being revived on Broadway. Directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, with choreography by Chita Rivera Award winners and New York City Ballroom icons Omari Wiles (House of NiNa Oricci) and Arturo Lyons (House of Miyake-Mugler), Cats is now situated within the rich, vibrant, audacious ball culture, invented by queer people of color. As the original Grizabella, Betty Buckley, argues, “Cats was always meant to vogue.”

Take a moment and listen to Eliot’s poem, as it is chanted in the musical (then and now).

III. A Cat’s THREE DIFFERENT NAMES: Sensible, Dignified, and Ineffable

A cat’s first name is “the name the family uses daily,” or the everyday name of a cat. It is either quite common, like “George,” or a bit “fancier” and “sweeter,” like “Plato.” A cat’s “sensible” or family name is their pious or philosophical name. It is not mysterious or hidden—nor is it dignified.

The dignified name of a cat is what keeps their “tail perpendicular,” and it inspires pride and, perhaps, affection for their pride. It is a peculiar name in that it is particular.

The dignified name of a cat, quite unlike its sensible name, never belongs to “more than one cat.” Unlike a cat’s sensible name, their dignified name reveals. Specifically, it reveals a cat’s specificity. Moreover, names of this kind provided by the poem suggest that they can be either entirely fanciful, like “Munkustrap,” or quite literal, like “Quaxo” (Latin, to croak).

A cat’s dignified name, moreover, raises several questions. First, what is meant by “never belong to more than one cat?” Does that mean never belong to more than one cat in a Jellicle pride? The poem suggests that the only singular name is a cat’s ineffable name, a cat’s “[d]eep and inscrutable singular name.”

And from whence does a cat’s dignified name come? From a human, the human-cat relationship, or from other cats? If a cat’s dignified name originates within the feline world, then it is, like a cat’s ineffable name, entirely incomprehensible in the world of homo sapiens. But the only name “no human research can discover—” but that the cat seems to “know” and will never divulge—is a cat’s ineffable name.

The poem, however, does not exactly describe the character of a cat’s knowledge of their ineffable name. Is a cat’s ineffable name like other names, save for the fact that it is a name a cat will never confess or reveal to humans? Or, alternatively, is a cat’s ineffable name always just there on the tip of their tail—a name a cat knows and doesn’t know and is often surprised by?

A cat’s ineffable name is, I think, entirely un-utterable; it’s their “ineffable effable / Effanineffable / Deep and inscrutable singular name.” A cat’s ineffable name, a literally un-namable name, is truly a subject worthy of (their) “rapt contemplation.”

IV. Viewing Bud’s THREE DIFFERENT NAMES

Bud’s character is what I find worth contemplating. So, there is no reason to look beyond the film for a clue to Bud’s THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

Looking beyond the film is an alluring option because, in Caught Stealing, Bud’s character is so well played that one asks, What is that actor’s name? The cat playing Bud is named Tonic.

It is tempting to argue that Tonic is Bud’s pious name and that Bud is Tonic’s drag—or second, dignified name. This schema, however, insults the film, Tonic, and ball culture, each for different reasons.

First, Bud is a character in someone else’s story; their name is imputed. One’s drag name is continuous with one’s life/desire rather than merely a name of character in someone else’s story, a mirror of someone else’s desire. It is a relational name, chosen by the performer and affirmed by others.

Second, Bud is a character, just as Hank is, in a film. We do not collapse the difference between Butler and Hank, and for good reason. A cat actor, like a human one, is not continuous with the characters they play. Bud is not Tonic.

Finally, looking beyond the film’s ethos for Bud’s names suggests the film is missing something vitally important. But that’s not the case. Bud’s THREE DIFFERENT NAMES—and their significance—are supplied by the film itself.

Frankly, looking beyond a film for a character’s meaning is a bad viewing habit.

V. On the first two of Bud’s THREE DIFFERENT NAMES in Caught Stealing

Bud is introduced in(to) the film by his human roommate, an eccentric punk rocker, Russ (Matt Smith). His father has had a stroke, and he is rushing to see him in London. As he is leaving, Hank happens to be returning to his next-door apartment with his human companion, Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz).

Russ asks Hank to look after Bud.

Hank refuses, “I’m not good at taking care of things.”

Yvonne confesses, “I love cats.”

Hank accuses, “He’s a biter”

Russ repudiates: “He’s never fucking bit you! He loves you!”

Russ leaves, but Hank never explicitly agrees to care for Bud while Russ is away in London.

Yvonne hears Bud meowing through Hank’s apartment wall, and she decides to check on him. Bud runs out of Russ’s apartment and into Hank’s. Surprisingly, Bud runs directly to Hank, “a dog person,” and rubs up against his leg.

Yvonne: “Ew, cat, cat loose!”

Hank: “He’s in here. [Asks Bud,] What’s wrong with you?”

Yvonne reenters Hank’s apartment and closes the door.

Hank: “No, baby, he’s not staying here.”

I am inclined to read Bud’s introduction to Hank as a birth narrative, albeit a very weird one. That’s because I have been reading psychiatrist and psychoanalyst R.D. Laing, who believes that we “remember” our birth and that it serves as a template for later relationships.

Yvonne lovingly receives, if you will, Russ’s invitation to care for Bud, and she gives birth to Bud in Hank’s life (Bud runs from her into Hank’s apartment). Surprisingly, it is Hank who becomes Bud’s freely chosen or adopted “son,” reciprocating the love Hank has just expressed for his mother.

If that’s too much for you, this much is clear: Bud is this cat’s pious name, “the name that the family use daily,” or this cat’s “sensible name.”

As only the cat’s ineffable name is one “that no human research can discover,” a cat’s dignified name is discernible to humans, although it is much less apparent to us than a cat’s sensible name.

A cat’s dignified name is, like a key, specific. It “never belong[s] to more than one cat.”

The all-important key, the key that changes Hank’s life, is hidden in Bud’s litterbox, and Hank will later hide the key on Bud himself. It’s a clever move, one that calls attention to a human tendency to disregard the significance of the non-human animals in our lives (and in the films we enjoy).

Bud’s association with a life-changing key, a key that is of ultimate significance to Hank, is more than enough justification to read Bud as the key to Hank’s life.

The key to describing Bud’s significance to Hank is also a non-human animal. The only other non-human animal of any significance in the film is a cow.

Teenage Hank is driving home after a baseball game with a close male friend, Dale. He is excited for Hank, convinced that he was being scouted and will make it to the big leagues.

Hank can’t believe in himself, so he dismisses Dale’s loving gesture. “Why are you riding me?”

Dale again demonstrates his love for Hank by changing the subject. “Love,” psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argues, “is a sign that one is changing discourses” (Lacan, Seminar XX, 21).

As Dale unbuckles his seatbelt to grab another beer from the cooler in the back seat of the car, a cow suddenly appears around the curve in the middle of the road. Hank swerves to miss the cow, colliding with a telephone pole, killing his loving buddy.

The car accident explains Hank’s hesitation to love or care for anyone, including Yvonne and Bud. It even calls the truthfulness of his claim to be “a dog person” into question, as dogs require a lot of day-to-day care.

The car accident is the traumatic backdrop of the entire film (I read the crash as an accident, rather than a drunk driving accident, because while Hank and Dale are drinking in the car, Hank does not appear to be drunk).

There is a second car crash in Caught Stealing. Hank takes the wheel, crashing the car into a cement pillar and killing the infamously violent Jewish gangsters, the Drucker brothers, who killed Yvonne (and I think the specificity of the Jewish characters, especially their likability, as opposed to Roman, the more significant threat to Hank, is how the film addresses antisemitism. T.S. Eliot was “extraordinarily antisemitic”).

This second car crash is not a repetition of the first, as it is in Hank’s recurring dream. This crash is not an accident; it is planned. It is the moment, I think, Hank decides that he is, like Bud, not staying “here.”

Bud is not staying with Russ, who uses him as a prop to hide an illegal and unwise scheme, nor is he staying in Hank’s apartment. And unbeknownst to Hank until the second car crash, Hank is not staying in a life of unending guilt and regret, nor is he staying in his apartment.

Notstayinghere is Bud’s dignified name. It means he is staying with his pride and the source of his pride, Hank.

VI. On the third of Bud’s THREE DIFFERENT NAMES; Or, The Miracle of Caught Stealing

We may parse Bud’s first two names as follows. Bud is an imputed name, what humans decide to name a cat, a cat’s sensible or philosophical name.

Notstayinghere, on the other hand, is a genuinely relational name, one reproduced by the overlap of a cat’s and a human’s respective worlds. It is the source of and reveals a cat’s pride.

Bud’s third name, however, points to what is beyond human wisdom. However, contemplation of an animal’s singularity, for example, a cat’s, is not an entirely anti-philosophical endeavor.

In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida reflects on a queer experience: his cat observing him naked. Derrida writes, “I often ask myself, who am I—and who I am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the face of an animal, for example, the eyes of a cat. . .” (3-4, emphasis original).

Derrida, like Caught Stealing, pushes us beyond a traditional Western philosophical sensibility. “Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas . . . everything in them goes on as if they themselves had never been looked at, and, especially not naked, by an animal that addresses them” (14).

Beyond traditional Western philosophy, we begin to follow after the “deep and inscrutable singular name” of a cat. Observing that God secretly and silently watches the human name animals in the Garden of Eden, Derrida wonders

whether this vertigo before the abyss of such an ‘in order to see’ deep in the eyes of God is not the same as that which takes hold of me when I feel so naked in front of a cat, facing it, and when meeting its gaze, I hear the cat or God ask itself, ask me: Is he going to call me, is he going to address me? What name is he going to call me by, this naked man, before I give him woman . . . ? (18, emphasis original).

Caught Stealing, like Derrida, takes us back “before . . . woman,” to chasing after a non-human animal’s name. How shall we address a cat, especially the one we are chasing in this film?

The final song of Cats, “The Ad-Dressing of Cats,” addresses just this question (and the song is especially clear: “A cat is not a dog.” Find my take on dogs in Luke’s Gospel here).

The question is, itself, surprising, askable, or so the musical teaches us, only upon learning that a cat is “sure to have [their] personal taste.” The recognition of a cat’s specificity is what enables us “in time to reach [our aim], and call [a cat] by [their name].”

Caught Stealing takes on a godlike character, secretly watching us, inspiring the question: by what name will they address this cat? The film inspires following after an animal in pursuit of its name rather than its hide. That’s a miracle!  

But only THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, those being the only other words in Eliot’s poem in all capitals besides THREE DIFFERENT NAMES. Only the cat, it seems, knows its THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

Following after a cat, we learn that while “cats are every much like” humans—we should “bear in mind that [they] resent familiarity.” A cat always knows something about themself that we will never know.

That’s the lesson we learn when we risk returning a cat’s gaze. Staring back, we spy “a cat in profound meditation . . . / engaged in a rapt contemplation / Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of [their ineffable] name.”

Looking back on the film, it occurs to me that Bud is not the only cool cat worthy of our contemplation. In the words of the bartender in Tulum, “Tenéis los mismos ojos.”

Film still, Bud and Hank staring at the ocean in Tulum, Caught Stealing (2025).

---