Keith Phipps - Age of Cage

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To Stevie, of course

IDIOT PUNK:

You look like a clown in that stupid jacket.

SAILOR:

This is a snakeskin jacket, and for me its a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.

Wild at Heart,
screenplay by David Lynch and Barry Gifford

Early in the 2011 film Season of the Witch, two knights whose consciences have led them to flee the bloodshed of the Crusades encounter a cardinal dying of the Black Death. His gaunt face buried beneath makeup simulating the ravages of the disease, the actor playing the cardinal looks almost unrecognizable. But theres no mistaking the voice of Christopher Lee, a sound familiar from movies featuring hobbits, Jedi Knights, superspies, vampires, and all sorts of other fantastic characters. Lee was approaching ninety when he made the film, and though the one-scene role could easily have been played by another actor, Lees presence has meaning in a film designedsincerely, if not particularly wellto evoke the spirit of the classic horror films in which he first became famous many years before. Lee arrived with a lifetime piled up behind that appearance, and that lifetime informs it, giving it meaning no other actor could have.

Lee was a childhood favorite of the star playing opposite him. Like Lee, Nicolas Cage arrived to the film trailed by a history; his was shorter than Lees, but no less colorful. By 2010, hed been an Oscar winner, an action hero, the star of quirky comedies, a tabloid target, and an internet punch line. And here he was now, making no attempt to disguise his precise diction or his California accent and sporting perfect teeth of the sort unknown to the Middle Ages, but still capturing the essence of a man whose struggle to control a malevolent supernatural force doubles as a battle with his own soul. As usual, he gave the film his all, whether or not the film deserved it.

Not that many saw it. A critical and commercial disappointment, Season of the Witch arrived in the middle of a bad-luck streak of mammoth proportions in Cages career. But Cage usually operated on a mammoth scale. Hed taken big risks on-screen from the start, steered his career in unexpected directions, and engaged in questionable financial choices (and high-profile romances) that kept him in the headlines. His name could summon up highs and lows of the sort few other actors could boast; nor could few other actors prompt so much discussion as to which were the highs and which the lows. His eccentricity made him stand out early in his career, but it also made him an odd fit for the sort of movies made by the top-level star he becamechoices that narrowed as the movies got bigger and Hollywood more risk-averse. He has been the object of criticism for the same qualities that earned him acclaim. Even those who admired him could find their opinions challenged, or find themselves wondering if the actor had, in fact, taken a wrong turn. Though Cage was entering a bumpy stretch in 2010, he showed no signs of going away or making it easier to understand who he was or what hed do next.

Its complicated, the way we think about movie stars, and it just gets more complicated over time. Some appear at just the right time in just the right place; to paraphrase The Big Lebowski, they just fit right in there. But when that time has passed and that place changes, they stop fitting in, and they fade away or move to the margins, struggling to stir more than memories of when we first saw them. Some arrive seemingly indestructible, destined to stick around forever and suffer nothing worse than the occasional dip in popularity. Some reinvent themselves from time to time, shifting with ease from comedy to drama to action. Some come and go so quickly that it takes a moment to recall why we remember their names. Some turn their weirdness and lifelong identification with misfits into a virtue.

Stars work in an ever-shifting world. In Singin in the Rain, Jean Hagen plays an actress whose beauty and expressiveness made her a star of the silent film era but whose shrill voice threatens to make her obsolete with the advent of sound. Its an extreme example of how changesin technology, in public taste, in the ways movies get financed, and in the venues in which theyre seenconspire to keep actors perpetually off balance. Pity the singing cowboy star when Westerns and musicals go out of style. To stay in the picture, a star has to adapt and hope they dont lose too much of themselves with the changes.

All the while, we change, too. A favorite actor of our youth may start to seem callow in adulthood. A star who once evoked annoyance can become a welcome presence. If we know about a stars personal life, it becomes even harder to separate actor from role. An actor can give the performance of a lifetime, and we might still be thinking of their political views or whom theyve dated or their favorite brand of shoe. As the years pile up, information and past encounters can shift the way we look at a star. An actor becomes a palimpsest; no matter how indelible a performance, we can still see the characters theyve been before and the real person beneath those characters.

Or so we tell ourselves. We can spend hours watching a star at work, but what of them do we see? A memorable film performance involves sustaining an illusion created from scenes filmed out of sequence and shots captured hours, days, even months apart and pasted together in the editing room. Public personae work much the same way. Were given access to a selection of what a star wants us to see of their lives via photo shoots and talk show anecdotes that collectively create the impression they want to give the world. Sometimes that impression gets away from them, skewed by changing tastes or embarrassing information. Yet, for all we know of them, they remain essentially unknowable. Still, we can try to sort out what they mean.

A few facts. In 1983, Nicolas Kim Coppola made his starring debut in Valley Girl under his new, assumed name, Nicolas Cage. In 1996, he won a Best Actor Oscar for playing an alcoholic screenwriter in the film Leaving Las Vegas. In the years that immediately followed, he became one of the biggest stars in the world. In 2009, financial problems tied to extravagant (and colorful) spending habits came to light. At the dawn of the 2020s, you can find the movies that made him famous sharing space with the many low-budget, direct-to-VOD efforts hes made in the past decade on the streaming service of your choice. Hes been married five times and has fathered two sons, one named after Supermans Kryptonian name, Kal-El.

If youve picked up this book, you probably know all this. Even the casual movie viewer can list a half dozen Nicolas Cage movies without thinking too hard. He has appeared, as of this writing, in nearly one hundred, usually as the star. Theyre films of seemingly every variety spread out over four decades. In the process, Cage has become iconic, in both the common and the original sense of the word: hes instantly recognizable but also symbolic of unpredictability of a kind no other actor can claim. He has served as an X factor in an industry often dictated by creative conservativism and timid choices. And though that has sometimes made him a misfit, he continually finds ways to keep working, and to surprise, that ensure that he remain in the conversation long after other stars have been forgotten.