By: Sean Nguyen
“In the seedy underbelly [of the Internet], there’s an unwritten rule… Rule Zero. And Rule Zero is ‘Don’t f**k with cats.’”
“Don’t F**k with Cats,” a Netflix original documentary released in Dec 2019, asks two very real questions: How far would you go to achieve fame, familiarity, and glory? On the other hand, how far would you go for justice?
This documentary reimagines the Luka Magnotta investigation that tackled the globe by storm in 2012 from an internet sleuth’s perspective. “Don’t F**k with Cats” follows Baudi Moovin and John Green, the frontrunners of the online cat killer investigation, as they navigate through landmines of links, puppet accounts, and digital footprints in the open terrain of Facebook.com. Baudi Moovin is Deanne Thompson’s Facebook pseudonym which she uses to protect her identity; in real life, she’s a data analyst for a casino in Las Vegas. John Green preferred to keep his pseudonym for the entire documentary.
In 2010, a video went viral of a young man who caresses two kittens on a bed and places them in an air-seal plastic bag, suffocating the kittens. Although the documentary does not explicitly show this clip, the descriptions and the reactions of Baudi Moovin are disturbing enough to make you squirm. This video sends Facebook spiraling and the public goes feral. Comments flood through the video like an open dam, wanting to strangle the cat killer. However Baudi skeptically questions, “What is anyone going to do about this?” She stumbles upon a Facebook group page plotting to discover who the cat killer was, which launches the documentary into full throttle.
The documentary follows the online sleuths’ techniques and clue-solving skills that would make Sherlock Holmes shed real tears. In the Facebook group dedicated to solve the cat murders, they analyze the video to a T, including dismantling the video frame-by-frame, studying the wall outlet to locate the video, and even locating the vacuum cleaner in the background. This montage of cyber-investigative work shows how profound the Internet is, it displays the power of Internet dwellers and the wide amount of knowledge that the Internet is capable of.
Something particular this documentary does is recreating the Facebook interface in order to backtrack Baudi and John’s thoughts as they watched the murder unfold. The creators of the documentary creatively utilized this interface to construct a narrative, crafting characters through their algorithms and cookies that help us imagine us in their shoes. For example, Baudi Moovin’s password is short, but John Green, someone who is more tech savvy, has a longer, more complex password. It’s in these small, personalized niches of Facebook that we don’t notice daily that the directors use to narrate this crime case.
The Luka Magnotta case seized world headlines from news outlets like CNN, The Sun, and Global News. However, all news seldom discussed the Internet’s role in this case, who solved the murder far before the Montreal police could. They simply lacked authority. “A lot of people ask me, ‘Are you upset with law enforcement?’ No, I’m frustrated by the system… But I’m not upset because law enforcement has a certain set of parameters that they can abide by. They’re not going to put a lot of effort into someone who’s killing cats on the Internet,” Deanna (Baudi) said in an interview with Variety.
The documentary especially highlights Magnotta’s obsessive ambition for fame, depicting him as someone who was very vain and luxurious. It’s no doubt that this documentary feeds into exactly what Luka Magnotta wanted; to bask in the infamy, no matter the cost. In the last seconds of “Don’t F**k with Cats”, Baudi pierces into the TV screen and asks if we’re accountable for his murders by watching this documentary, and suggests that we “turn off the machine.” It’s a scene that shattered the fourth wall and took me aback. The question she asked held onto me weeks after, standing out as one of the most psychological and impressive true crime documentaries I’ve ever seen. This review only describes half of the Luka Magnotta case and is definitely worth watching (in one sitting, too).