Introduction

My idea to make a diary on the films of Nicolas Cage has had a long life; so long that it now seems a lot childish. I like to think of myself as a grown man (I'm twenty-five) and different in many fundamental ways from the thirteen-year-old who once declared that 1995's Con Air not only a great movie but my favorite movie and Cage my favorite actor. 

It's easy to forget after we leave all the bullshit of middle- and high-school behind us but to a thirteen-year-old stating an opinion that flies in the face of accepted social norms can take a small measure of bravery. Youthful codes of conduct are shifting tides to the shy and socially awkward; it's much safer to put up one's sails and drift quietly along the current of popular opinion than to row against the wind. Any strong opinion that has not been approved by the council of one's peers could potentially tar you as the strange outsider you fear yourself (and secretly know yourself) to be.

This meditation on what seemed like courage as a youth speaks both to how good Con Air actually is and to Nicolas Cage's appeal to the teenager I was. In the early 2000's he was incomparable to anyone else in Hollywood, in part by his unabashed weirdness. David Lynch reportedly once referred to him as "the jazz musician of acting" and indeed, Nic Cage's performances have the loose-limbed excitement of jazz.. I had a pet theory I put forward to my friends at the time that Cage's films weren't just good or bad. Some transcended our notions of what good and bad films are to a separate artistic plane that could only be called "awesome". Part of this has to do with the projects he picks and part of it has to do with his performances. Even at his most phoned-in, Cage seems to effortlessly imbue his characters with emotional depths, alluding to thoughts and emotional undercurrents in the way H.P. Lovecraft hinted at stranger realities just beyond our comprehension. There's something rippling under the surface of Nicolas Cage that gives simultaneous impressions that he is an actor of ineffable talent and also potentially unwell.



More fascinating to my thirteen-year-old self than Nic Cage the actor was Nic Cage the career man. He appeared driven by dark, questing impulses to follow his yen wherever it would lead him. As I devoured his "back catalogue" a narrative formed of a young heartthrob (Valley Girl, Moonstruck) who earned the mantle of celebrated, courageous actor (Wild at Heart, Red Rock West, Leaving Las Vegas) only to chuck it off for an odd mix of Jerry Bruckheimer spectacles like The Rock and sideline oddities like Bringing Out the Dead. He could be seemingly anything he wanted and appear in anything he wanted without sacrificing the eccentricities that roiled under his surface. In fact, I liked to think that those eccentricities is what led him to directors like Lynch, Martin Scorcese and the Coen brothers.

Nicolas Cage seemed uncompromising in his weirdness and invention and I wanted the same kind of free hand with myself. I nurtured a sense of kinship with him because I felt those impulses in me, too. I felt driven like a beast by my creative curiosities and eccentricities and I was nursing the courage to let them lead me where they would, be it to the metaphorical mountaintop or gutter. Nicolas Cage had been to both and continued questing. I needed a patron saint of creative journeys to the center of oneself and Nicolas Cage the actor was just the symbol for me.

I'm not alone, either. It's hard to mentally go back and think of Cage as he was regarded then – as a ham whose best days are behind him – to a legitimate cult figure. Thanks in large part to YouTube compilations of movies like The Wicker Man and Deadfall, reverence for Cage's particular brand of madness is almost de rigueur on the internet. So much so that, after beginning this diary, I discovered not one but three blogs that have attempted to do literally the same thing. This is unsurprising - the internet loves spectacle, especially spectacle it can view from a place of ironic detachment and superiority – but not unimpressive considering that Cage hasn't been in more than three or four widely acclaimed films in the last decade. No other actor inspires such a cult of fascination.

The peculiar thing is that, as his cult appeal grows, Cage seems to be tiring of his own shtick. Thanks, I imagine, to a combination of his much-publicized money woes (he had to sell his German castle!) and general not-giving-a-shit-ness Cage now averages three movies a year and has become stingy with his trademark mania. I certainly stopped seeing his films with any sense of regularity yet I still hold onto my teenage idea of the wildman who reportedly uttered a context-less quote that's been circling the internet forever: "I am not a demon. I am a lizard, a shark, a heat-seeking panther. I want to be Bob Denver on acid playing the accordion." The thirteen-year-old part of me still wants Nic Cage to be all those things. The twenty-five-year-old part of me wants to visit and revisit these films and see what I take away from them. What that is I can't say as of this writing but hopefully, dear reader, you'll take something away, too.

Sincerely,

David C. Bow