A celebration of Nicolas Cage — the man and the meme
Nicolas Cage: leading man or character actor? Action hero or goofball comedian? Internet joke or one of the greatest actors of his generation? Beyond the gif bait and easy punchline, Nicolas Cage continually frustrates easy categorization or understanding. In National Treasure, pop culture writer Lindsay Gibb studies Nicolas Cage’s acting style and makes sense of the trajectory of his eclectic career. In the process, Gibb debunks the common claim that Cage makes bad choices.
While his selection of roles is seemingly inscrutable, Cage challenges critics and audiences alike by refusing to be predictable or to conform to the Hollywood approach to acting. Much like one of his mentors, David Lynch, Cage aims for art in movie-making. Is there a method to his madness? Is he in on the joke? In this clear-eyed and well-argued volume of the Pop Classics series, Gibb answers both questions with a resounding hell yes.
A celebration of Nicolas Cage — the man and the meme
Nicolas Cage: leading man or character actor? Action hero or goofball comedian? Internet joke or one of the greatest actors of his generation? Beyond the gif bait and easy punchline, Nicolas Cage continually frustrates easy categorization or understanding. In National Treasure, pop culture writer Lindsay Gibb studies Nicolas Cage’s acting style and makes sense of the trajectory of his eclectic career. In the process, Gibb debunks the common claim that Cage makes bad choices.
While his selection of roles is seemingly inscrutable, Cage challenges critics and audiences alike by refusing to be predictable or to conform to the Hollywood approach to acting. Much like one of his mentors, David Lynch, Cage aims for art in movie-making. Is there a method to his madness? Is he in on the joke? In this clear-eyed and well-argued volume of the Pop Classics series, Gibb answers both questions with a resounding hell yes.
Paperback(Media Tie)
-
SHIP THIS ITEMTemporarily Out of Stock Online
-
PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
A celebration of Nicolas Cage — the man and the meme
Nicolas Cage: leading man or character actor? Action hero or goofball comedian? Internet joke or one of the greatest actors of his generation? Beyond the gif bait and easy punchline, Nicolas Cage continually frustrates easy categorization or understanding. In National Treasure, pop culture writer Lindsay Gibb studies Nicolas Cage’s acting style and makes sense of the trajectory of his eclectic career. In the process, Gibb debunks the common claim that Cage makes bad choices.
While his selection of roles is seemingly inscrutable, Cage challenges critics and audiences alike by refusing to be predictable or to conform to the Hollywood approach to acting. Much like one of his mentors, David Lynch, Cage aims for art in movie-making. Is there a method to his madness? Is he in on the joke? In this clear-eyed and well-argued volume of the Pop Classics series, Gibb answers both questions with a resounding hell yes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770412361 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 10/13/2015 |
| Series: | Pop Classics Series , #5 |
| Edition description: | Media Tie |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.70(w) x 6.80(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Lindsay Gibb is a librarian and journalist with a specific interest in zines, film, and comics. She co-programs the Toronto Comic Arts Festival’s Librarian and Educator Day and her writing has appeared in Shameless, This Magazine, and Playback. She was the editor of Broken Pencil magazine and co-founded Spacing magazine. Lindsay lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Read an Excerpt
National Treasure
Nicolas Cage
By Lindsay Gibb
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Lindsay GibbAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-761-4
CHAPTER 1
Dualing Cages
"Right smack in the center of a contradiction — that's the place to be. That's where the energy is, that's where the heat is."
— Bono paraphrasing Sam Shepard, 1993
There are two Nicolas Cages. (At least.) There's the original — Nicolas Coppola, born into a large Italian-American family in Hollywood in 1964 — and there's Nicolas Cage as we know him: the character the young Coppola created to navigate the challenges of nepotism in Hollywood.
Nic took on the Cage moniker to avoid the attention the Coppola name drew. The nephew of acclaimed film director Francis Ford Coppola, he faced conflicting problems using his family name. On one hand, people expected him to easily get roles because his last name was synonymous with the movies, but on the other hand, he felt casting agents had higher expectations of him because of his celebrated uncle. At casting sessions early in his career, agents obsessed over his famous connections and wanted to talk about his uncle's body of work, to the point that Cage felt he was seen more as a representative of his uncle than an actor in his own right. Nicolas Coppola could never be certain he could get roles on his own merits, so he chose a new name — not a popular decision with his family. His father, a literature professor, wasn't happy that he wanted to be an actor at all, while Uncle Francis Ford was famously offended that Nic wanted to distance himself from the family name.
His chosen name had inspirations: comic book hero Luke Cage and avant-garde musician John Cage. "I thought [Cage] was interesting as it had two sides, the popcorn side and the more thoughtful side," said Cage in a 2014 interview with the Independent.
What Cage finds interesting — contradiction, duality — often confounds audiences and critics, inspiring polarity: inept/genius, best actor/worst actor, auteur/hack. This divided response has oftentimes reduced him to a punch line, but it's also arguably his greatest strength, enabling the breadth, diversity, and longevity of his career. Those who appreciated his "artier," more thoughtful work (Vampire's Kiss, Birdy, Wild at Heart) often feel he sold out with his action films, or the more popcorny side. Meanwhile, some moviegoers who know Cage for films like Con Air and National Treasure have no interest in Raising Arizona or Bringing Out the Dead.
In 1997's Face/Off and 2002's Adaptation, films that often make the evolving top ten list of Cage's best, the actor's duality is on very literal display as he plays two characters. In John Woo's Face/Off, Cage and his co-star John Travolta share the roles of the villain Castor Troy and the hero, Sean Archer. In Spike Jonze's Adaptation, Cage plays both lead roles for the entire film: twin brothers. Anyone who argues that Cage is one note, doing the same freak-outs over and over again, should look to his characters in Face/Off and Adaptation. While the films are extraordinarily different, in both the story follows the relationship between opposing and complex characters created by Cage.
In Face/Off, Cage starts off as Castor Troy, a terrorist for hire who, with his brother Pollux, has been dogging Travolta's FBI agent Sean Archer for years. Like many of the best movie villains, Cage's Troy is exuberantly diabolic. In the first present-day scene for the character, Castor Troy has just planted a bomb in the L.A. Convention Center. Cage, dressed as a priest, closes up the bomb cabinet and dances away, twirling and skipping proudly in his long black cassock. When he gets to the floor where a white-robed choir is performing Handel's Messiah, Cage claps, puts his hands on his knees, and head bangs heartily. Yep, he head bangs and struts to the Messiah.
Being "over the top" is right at home in a Woo film. Woo's work is highly stylized, often featuring extreme emotional juxtapositions, heavily choreographed shootouts, and elaborate clothing and weaponry. While his films are ultra-violent, they're also like a ballet. In Face/Off, these ballets are choreographed gunfights that take place on glass floors, set to "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," or during a high-speed chase featuring a speedboat as the stage. For Cage, working with someone like Woo — who wouldn't dream of stifling his imagination in the name of pure "realism" — is a perfect opportunity to stretch his abilities, playing both hero and villain in this heightened world of Woo.
Psychological turmoil abounds in Woo's characters once the film's central face-theft has come to pass: when Castor Troy awakens next to Travolta's preserved face flesh, Cage hacks, sputters, and shrieks a guttural birdlike squawk as he realizes his own face is missing. Later, when he's over the initial shock and straight into plotting mode, Cage-as-faceless-Troy smokes a cigarette and makes a phone call, using a muffled lisp that convinces us that his lips are missing. (Critics should pause: he is acting without a face, generally considered an important tool of the trade.) Cage remains staunchly committed to the absurd situation, and as a result, audiences buy in.
In a DVD commentary track for Face/Off, writer Mike Werb points out that while Travolta has to play two roles in this film (Archer and Troy-impersonating-Archer), Cage has to play three: Troy, Archer-impersonating-Troy, and Archer-being-Archer-in-Troy's-body. While Travolta's Troy enjoys the privileges and power of wearing Archer's face, Cage's Archer is horrified that he is trapped inside his enemy's body.
Even though Troy is such a fun character (in Entertainment Weekly Cage says he was playing him as the "Liberace of crime"), it isn't until Cage is playing Archer masquerading as Troy that the actor really shines. Second act Archer-as-Troy is confused, scared, and sensitive as he's shipped off to the sci-fi prison. The peak moment of Archer-as-Troy's inner turmoil hits when he beats up a fellow inmate to prove he is the volatile Troy. He screams in rage while he smashes his rival, then pauses between screams to cry.
In the same audio commentary, Woo explains that for him the most important preparation for a film is not the action sequences but the emotions of the characters. He likes to give his actors a lot of creative freedom. He gave Cage the freedom to decide how Archer would react to seeing himself as Troy for the first time. Cage improvised laughing, then crying, then smashing everything and yelling "fuck you" at everyone involved in putting him in Troy's body. For certain scenes in both Face/Off and Cage's second film with Woo, Windtalkers, Woo would set up three cameras around Cage to make sure they caught him from all angles, just in case he did anything unexpected. Perhaps the mirror-smashing, fuck-you-yelling scene is extreme, but so is having your face stolen. Cage and Woo work well together because neither is afraid to go out on that limb, experiment, and create a heightened reality.
As deliberately over the top and fun as Face/Off is, Cage's performance also includes moments of great subtlety. Take, for example, the scene where Archer-as-Troy visits an old friend of Troy's, a man who he's dragged in for questioning on multiple occasions, and in posing as Troy he must behave like this is a welcome reunion. When the friend, Dietrich Hassler (Nick Cassavetes), kisses him in greeting, Cage smiles through gritted teeth and accepts it halfheartedly, pushing him away before there's any chance to linger — Archer's contempt thinly veiled behind Troy's grateful embrace. When Hassler begins reminiscing with Troy about selling him the bombs because he "can't say no to a friend," Archer/Troy responds with a half-jovial, half-contemptuous "you drug dealer" in the same tone one might say "you old dog." Cage is acting on two levels simultaneously and manages to stay true to both characters.
Face/Off proved Cage's ability to be more than one thing at once, and five years later, Spike Jonze's Adaptation allowed him to go that one step further: he plays two characters, but this time opposite himself.
The film's premise is real screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's struggle to turn a book about orchids into a Hollywood motion picture. There's no drama or conflict in flowers, and Charlie wants to be faithful to the book (which, according to movie-Charlie, is written like "sprawling New Yorker shit") without injecting Hollywood clichés to make it more appealing. Enter a twin brother, the fictional Donald, who also wants to be a screenwriter and is more open to mainstream archetypes; he plays against Charlie's rejection of Hollywood's rules.
Here, Cage's duality — his popcorn side and his thoughtful side — is made flesh in Donald and Charlie. Donald is popcorn Cage, the actor who does action flicks, is dismissed as hackneyed by critics, but draws money at the box office. Charlie is the thoughtful, artistic side of Cage who seeks out films like Adaptation that challenge audiences.
Unlike in Face/Off, which Cage started filming three weeks later than Travolta because he was wrapping up Con-Air, Adaptation had a long rehearsal period before filming started, which allowed Cage to fully develop the characters and their relationship through improvisation. Cage's preparation and ultimate performance allows for the audience to instantly tell Charlie and Donald apart, despite similar hairstyles and modes of dress (... and the fact that they're both played by Nicolas Cage). Charlie comes with a furrowed brow, his unhappiness and anxiety written in his eyes. Donald has a light that rarely goes out, smiling more often and wider than Charlie, and he looks more inquisitive, while Charlie seems like he already has it all figured out. "Even at the first reading he had the two characters beautifully delineated," said Jonze during press for the film. "When Nic was Charlie he was a little more irritable and a little more difficult to direct. As Donald he was much freer and more open to suggestion. It really was like directing two different actors."
In a 2006 Cineaste article entitled "Performances in Adaptation: Analyzing Human Movement in Motion Pictures," Cynthia Baron uses Laban Movement Analysis (a multidisciplinary method used to describe movement) to analyze the ways in which Cage makes Charlie and Donald truly distinct characters through physicality. Baron says that, as Charlie, Cage uses "pressing movements that are direct, sustained, and strong," meaning that he more or less pushes himself through the space. He hesitates more than Donald and only moves when he's sure of what he's about to do. Meanwhile, Cage portrays Donald's naiveté and carefree nature by using free-flowing motion, a style of movement that can "reveal vulnerability and convey a sense that a character approaches life not expecting errors or the need to adjust." In the press kit for the film, Cage explains that he did focus on the physicality of his characters before anything else: "I approached it from the British school of acting, creating the character externally and then working inward, rather than the Method school, in which you work from the inside out." Cage described Charlie as "morose, hypercritical, and joyless" while he saw Donald as "amusing, easygoing, and optimistic." For Cage, the key to initiating the differences between their movements was in the spine. Cage made Charlie hunched over and tense while Donald was more upright and loose.
Cage has demonstrated such mastery over movement and ability to convey character through physicality throughout his career. Cage is adept at physical expression and brings very specific movements to each of his characters. H.I. McDunnough in Raising Arizona moved like a real-life Wile E. Coyote; Terence McDonagh from Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is stilted because of a back injury that informs the character's entire personality; Eddie from Deadfall moves like an enraged Ed Grimley. Cage is great at going big, but he's also accomplished at using subtle movements to help him delineate his characters.
His physicality in Adaptation even translates in a motionless context. In a still used to promote the film, the two Cages sit next to each other in a hotel room. The Cage on the left reads screenwriting teacher Robert McKee's book; on the right, Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. Even though it is Charlie who is writing the adaptation of Orlean's book and Donald who is taking McKee's course, it is clear from just the still that Charlie is holding McKee and Donald is reading Orlean. Charlie looks quiet and contemplative and is clearly ignoring Donald, who leans toward his brother with something to say. Donald's eyes are wider than Charlie's. He's barefoot. Charlie doesn't seem like he'd ever be comfortable enough to take off his shoes, even when lying on a bed.
Perhaps it's Cage's attraction to doubled characters (and his own personal duality) that explains his affinity with Superman. Superman is one of the most iconic dual characters, and Cage — one-time owner of the original printing of the character's debut in Action Comics #1 and father who named his son Kal-El, Superman's Kryptonian name — almost was Superman in the late '90s. He was signed on to be the next Man of Steel in Superman Lives, written by Kevin Smith (later replaced by screenwriter Wesley Strick and then Nightcrawler writer/director Dan Gilroy) and directed by Tim Burton, which would have given Cage the opportunity to dwell on the psychology of being an alien raised by humans. If it wasn't for investors' "fear of trying something new, something that wasn't just more of the same" (which is how Jon Schnepp, director of The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened?, framed the film's demise in an interview with Everything Action), we would have seen Cage depict Clark Kent dealing with his alien status. Cage's Superman would have been emotionally torn between a relationship with Lois Lane and his anxieties around his identity, no doubt bringing hitherto unseen strangeness and depth to a character that we've only seen (on film) as the all-American hero. Perhaps we see a glimpse of what Cage had planned for Superman Lives in Ghost Rider. Superman's internal struggle would have been front and center, and in Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze tries to run from his identity as a fiery creature before learning to accept and take control of his inner demon.
In these roles, as in Cage's film choices, it's not about one side triumphing over the other: it's about coexistence, not consolidation. Perhaps these roles get the closest to the fundamental reality of Coppola/Cage: he refuses to be reduced to an either/or proposition and instead embraces the contradiction.
CHAPTER 2Being Cagey
"Unless you're a total cynical dick, you have to embrace the fact that Nicolas Cage is a pretty good actor."
— Dan Harmon
Even though Cage is a man with a wife and children, like Jack Campbell from The Family Man, he is more often thought of as his character from Drive Angry: a man come back from hell who can turn the dial on his personality up to 11 at any moment. It's this (mis)perception that led to the label Caginess. Caginess (with a small "c") is already a word, meaning shrewd carefulness — a definition that is arguably the opposite of capital-C Caginess. Capital-C Caginess refers to a manic intensity that includes epic highs and lows, sudden outbursts of intense emotion, and surprise character traits (like Johnny Blaze's need to "drink" jelly beans from a martini glass and listen to Karen Carpenter before attempting to jump his motorcycle over six running helicopters). Moments of Caginess inspire people to compile clip reels of Cage's filmic outbursts, karate chops, and crying fits. This popular, punch line definition of Cage's acting style usually centers on one clip in particular: a scene from Neil LaBute's 2006 remake of The Wicker Man that isn't in the theatrical version of the film. Bees are poured into a cage on Cage's head while he screams, "Not the bees! Arghlaglargh." Audiences mock this clip because they see it as Exhibit A in an earnest and failed attempt to remake a horror classic.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from National Treasure by Lindsay Gibb. Copyright © 2015 Lindsay Gibb. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.