Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lindsay Gibb
Read between
December 18 - December 20, 2019
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.
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.
“In dreams, oftentimes, things are weird and distorted. So I thought, here was an opportunity for me to attempt some surrealistic acting,” said Cage of his choices. “The reason why I come off as being weirder than the others is that no one else had that same perception as I did. So they are vertical and I’m sort of horizontal — going in a different direction.”
While Cage’s idea to make Charlie surreal may have fit with his idea of the film, in the end he did it against the will of many collaborators.
There was a reason for every little gesture I made, as awkward as they may have seemed at first . . . I went into the film wanting to try something new.”
Surrealism looks at realism as a limited way of depicting truth. While realism favors interpretations that best mimic our outward visions of what is “real,” surreal filmmaking uses dreamlike states to approach an inner truth that may look strange but does more than just approximate outer versions of reality. Cage, who worked with surrealist filmmaker David Lynch on his 1990 film Wild at Heart, felt that this approach was the way forward for him.
As a child, Cage witnessed his mother’s mental illness, something that drove him to pursue a more unfiltered, abstract truth.
Cage’s most successful roles are often about finding a director who supports his experimentation.
In a conversation with online interview magazine The Talks, Cage explained that he sees operatic and “outside the box,” acting as part of a choice of how big you decide a performance should be. “I’m not the first one to do it,” he pointed out. “In the ’30s it happened quite a bit. Look at Cagney, was he real? No. Was he truthful? Yes.” It’s a theme that will come up again and again when studying Cage: realism isn’t the only way to truth, as any opera lover would attest.
When Cage re-evaluated his approach to Johnny Blaze in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, he went to an acting style he dubbed Nouveau Shamanic, which involved integrating Afro-Caribbean techniques. For Cage, being Nouveau Shamanic meant sewing thousand-year-old Egyptian artifacts into his clothing, gathering “onyx or tourmaline or something that was meant to have vibrations,” and painting his face white and black in a “voodoo priest” style to inspire him to be the Ghost Rider character. He explains that this technique is meant to trick him into believing that he is a character from another
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In 1999, Nicolas Cage’s colleague and one-time friend Sean Penn took a dig at Cage’s experiments: “Nic Cage is no longer an actor. He could be again, but now he’s more like a . . . performer.” At the time, the criticism angered Cage, but by 2013, in an interview for his film Outcast, Cage came to agree with the statement. “When I act, I hear the dialogue like music and the movement’s like dance. So to me music and dance are performing arts and, by the way, so is acting.” He designs his performances through movement before going on set and then, in the moment, fills those performances with the
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Perhaps Cage’s performance seems “self-indulgent” in comparison to the rest of the film because Bierman kept most of the film naturalistic, but he did that as contrast to Cage’s emphatic movements, to emphasize his increasing loss of reality. This was a considered collaboration, not an act of sabotage by a loose cannon actor out to see how much he could get away with.
approximations of reality are the performances most awarded by Hollywood’s standards. Portraying a real person in a film is often the best route to an Oscar, and Cage himself is proof of that. His only nominations have been for approximations of real people: his character in Leaving Las Vegas
For Cage, acting is the same as any other art form. “If you can get very outside the box — or, as critics like to say, over the top — in a Francis Bacon painting, why can’t you do it in a movie?” he asked at a London press conference for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.
When directors like Lynch and Herzog make surreal choices, audiences buy in. In large part this is because they’ve cultivated an audience around their respective styles, and Lynch in particular has created a dreamlike world that we expect to see each time out. Meanwhile, Cage receives criticism because his audience is splintered. He works within the world of each new director and often aims to find the absurdity in places viewers don’t necessarily expect it.
