Wednesday, April 9, 2025

Jason Statham as a pet big cat

In my April 5 post "Pet lions, professional cats and pirates, and Tim Curry," I begin by mentioning two Jason Statham movies: A Working Man (2025) and Meg 2: The Trench (2023). I also discuss the meaning of the Statham character's name in A Working Man: Levon Cade. Levon is the Armenian form of the name Leo or Leon and means "lion." One of the meanings of the English word cade is "an animal brought up or nourished by hand." In the post, I simplified this by saying that Levon Cade means "pet lion." This was discussed in the context of the ongoing theme of work vs. laziness and lazy lions.

Today, Statham was brought back to mind when I saw this on the wallpaper of the new-to-me restaurant where I had lunch today:


In my April post "Jason Statham and the Nine and Queen of Pentacles," I mentioned that people have often said I look like Statham. The first person to say this to me was the woman I would later marry, and the context was that we had just watched two videos: Crank (2006) with Jason Statham and The Killing Fields (1984) with Sam Waterston. She said that Statham looked like me, while Waterston looked like my father. Thus it was that seeing a random reference to "Killing Fields" today made me think of Statham.

I looked him up on Wikipedia and was surprised to find this little tidbit:

In the Twenty One Pilots song "Pet Cheetah" released in 2018, Statham is mentioned in the lyrics.

A pet cheetah is obviously a close conceptual cousin to a pet lion, so I looked up the song. Statham isn't just mentioned in the lyrics; he is the pet cheetah, just as he plays the pet lion in A Working Man. The key lines are:

I've got a pet cheetah down in my basement
I've raised him, and bathed him, and named him Jason Statham



"I've raised him" means the cheetah us not just a pet but a cade. The reference to bathing the cheetah is also a sync, since Leo's interpretation of my recent dream "A bathtub full of books" is "you need to be washed, baptized, but you first have work to do."

The chorus of "Pet Cheetah" is directly relevant to the work vs. laziness theme:

No, I move slow
I want to stop time
I'll sit here till I find the problem
No, I move slow
I want to stop time
I'll sit here till I find the problem

Here's the whole song:


As you can see from the thumbnail, this song is from an album called Trench -- the same name as the other Jason Statham movie we have been discussing. The album Trench was released just two months after the original The Meg movie starring Statham.

3 comments:

WanderingGondola said...

Ohh, that "cheeter" is... certainly something...

While "Killing Fields" reminds me of a line from MJ's "Earth Song", what really gets me is the NBN Co section of that wallpaper. The NBN is Australia's broadband network, and the Co is a government-owned corpo set up to build and run that network, replacing many of the old copper phone lines with fibre and wireless tech for better internet speed. It looks like the "planned availability" section is linked to the NBN bit (maybe they were taken from a blog or something?); coincidentally, my area got NBN access (fibre to the node) in 2019. Maybe there's something here in having to go slowly, waiting or taking time for nodes and connections to appear, until the kairos arrives for moving like a cheetah.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

That's a good interpretation, WG. "Pet Cheetah" seems to be about the experience of writer's block, with the pet cheetah in the basement representing creative talent waiting, as you say, for the right kairos.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

This ties in with the Nine of Pentacles, too, which highlights both slowness (the snail) and an extremely fast pet (the hooded falcon).

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