The Call of Cage-thulu: On the Unspeakable Frenzies of Nicolas Cage

The curious effect of H. P. Lovecraft's prose derives in no small part from the sizeable problem he set for himself: how to describe, in the most unflappable language, the most unspeakable phenomena. The quintessential Lovecraft scenario summons a strangely methodical miasma, a creeping atmosphere of dread and awe at once unnervingly placid and thoroughly unhinged. What is weirdest in these weird tales is not so much what they describe — Lovecraft's rhetorical strategies render it all but impossible to specify the exact nature of his ordeals — as how they are told. Seething with ineffable aberrations and grotesqueries, Lovecraft's tales are recounted by narrators who, rhetorically speaking, barely break a sweat. 

In his splendidly acerbic study of the author, Michel Houellebecq addresses the question of why, in his mature writings, Lovecraft's protagonists lie so flat on the page, undistinguished in characterization and all but interchangeable from tale to tale. "Only progressively," Houellebecq notes, "did he come to see the futility of all psychological differentiation."

Lovecraft's 1927 tale "The Colour Out of Space" exemplifies this proposition with unusual force, predicated as it is on a fundamentally chromatic horror. The title effectively summarizes the plot: a meteor lands in rural Massachusetts and begins to slowly radiate the environs with an enigmatic toxin. It is a twice-told tale: an unnamed narrator, seeking to account for the accursed history of the place, tracks down an elderly local, Ammi Pierce, "whose head has been a little queer for years."2 The narrator ventriloquizes Pierce's account, and Pierce ventriloquizes in turn that singularly Lovecraftian voice as it conjures the affliction: "Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective of chiaroscuro were awry."3 "The color, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it color at all."4 What to say of this "insidious . . . daemonic tint,"5 of "the shapeless stream of unplaceable color,"6 of "that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well — seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromatism"?7

And how, moreover, might one depict such things in a film? 

This is the task — and not the greatest — that Richard Stanley set himself in his adaptation Color Out of Space (2019). The source material offers Lovecraft's most explicitly optical scenario yet this scarcely helps the case; how might one direct a cinematographer to evoke an undimensioned rainbow? (The answer, in this case, is to flood the scene with prismatic effusions of magenta and turquoise — a luminescent orgy, in effect, of intergalactic bisexual lighting.)

But there is a greater challenge at stake in the problem of narration. Mediating his story through a first-person narrative of a secondhand account, Lovecraft is even more detached from his nominal protagonist: the farmer Nahum Gardner, whose great misfortune it was to abide in closest proximity to the meteor. "The Colour Out of Space" recounts what happens as the alien chromatism gains in force, contaminating the water supply and ruining crops, livestock, and the bodies and minds of the Gardners. Yet Lovecraft tells us next to nothing of these folk. "He was a lean, genial person of about fifty, living with his wife and three sons on the pleasant farmstead in the valley"8 — thus, and with not one further word, does the author characterize his protagonist. Nahum remains a cipher, even a banality, as he is pulled deeper and deeper into dissolution. His role is to establish some perfunctory human interest amid the emergent horror, whose elaborations and mutations are the essential concern of Lovecraft's imagination. Never mind daemonic tints, what is a filmmaker to do with a non-entity like Nahum?

Adapting Lovecraft takes chutzpah. One way to dramatize an affectless cipher is to flip the script and give us a protagonist who does the absolute most. The decision to cast Nicolas Cage as Nahum Gardner is an audacity so exquisite it merits Lovecraftian epithets. 

The prospect of a Lovecraft adaptation starring Nicolas Cage is irresistible for enthusiasts of unhinged cinema and Color Out of Space does not disappoint. Renamed Nathan Gardner, Cage shifts the character center stage and proceeds to devour the scenery, emanating his own unfathomable miasma of restlessness and oppression, the unreal and the grotesque. Cage, too, is a riot of luminous amorphousness; Color Out of Space is a major contribution to the ongoing phenomenon of Late Cage, in which the actor appears to have gazed into the unspeakable depths of his art, contemplated the cosmic void of his persona, and emerged in the grip of some ineffable impulse, committed to a style of acting unburdened by any reality principle. Behold the Call of Cage-thulu.9 

If there is no film too preposterous for Late Cage to embrace (a recent vehicle, Willy's Wonderland [2021], finds him at war with the possessed animatronic mascots of a family entertainment center), there is also a sense that the fundamental condition of each character — Cage Degree Zero — is an erratic and inexplicable mania prone to erupt at random. There are, to be sure, circumstances in which such manias are warranted by the premise (see Mom and Dad [2017] or Mandy [2018]), yet even in moments of narrative normalcy one can feel powerful reserves of craziness chomping at the bit. Cage has fashioned this incipient hysteria into something of a brand. It is impossible to know what kind of movie he'll turn up in next but certain that he will, at some point, go batshit. In Lovecraftian terms, we might say that Cage functions less as a protagonist emptied of interiority and reduced to a state of rapt fascination, than as a Lovecraftian object that we contemplate, transfixed, as he begins to go off the rails.   

Early in Color Out of Space Nathan prepares a cassoulet for the family dinner. Tempting his children with the promise of future stews featuring alpaca meat (the film's wackiest derivation from the source text is to populate the Gardner farm with alpacas), his grumpy daughter (Madeline Arthur) quips that people own alpacas to make sweaters, dad, and, like, why do we even have them anyway? Cage goes silent for just long enough for the scene to get palpably weird(er) and offers the stone-faced reply: "Because they're the animals of the future, remember? Those Mayans knew what they were talking about." This exchange, which has no bearing on anything to follow, is quintessentially Cagean: an ordinary moment (small talk over dinner) in which something unaccountably absurd is declared, performed in a manner whose strenuous effort to act normal renders the whole situation even more bizarre because Cage's character is so obviously nuts. The meteor will strike the Gardner's front lawn later that night, but the mere effort of Cage playing it straight instantly suffuses the movie with a dissociative effect. Cage embodies the principle that J. Hoberman observed of David Lynch: he is "weirdest precisely when attempting to be most normal."10

Normal, such as it is, does not last long, although special mention should be made of the casual scene where Nathan, milking the alpacas, informs an onlooker that "of course you have to be very gentle with the, uh . . . boobs."11 Soon enough the alien toxin is suffusing the landscape, giving bloom to peculiar flowers, hatching bizarre insects, rewiring the mechanisms of space and time, and eventually, disastrously, mutating animal and human bodies. (Shout out to the practical effects team, whose icky prosthetics are worthy of old-school John Carpenter.) Color Out of Space updates and accentuates the ecological theme of the original story, while foregrounding — as Lovecraft does not — the human toll. The film achieves a genuine sense of Lovecraftian dehumanization of legible humans. And yet, amid an eminently credible cast who manage to ballast the increasingly psychedelic proceedings, Cage remains anomalous.  

For the others, the color out of space is something that progressively warps their reality; for Nathan, the color out of space feels more like an especially vivid manifestation, or perhaps externalization, of a pre-existing condition. Weird things happen to Nathan, but Nathan himself is weird from the jump. The flamboyant tantrum he throws when his car won't start is pitched at the same intensity as his gore-spewing slaughter of the mutated alpacas. Sampling his engorged crop of tomatoes and peaches, Nathan suffers a meltdown more extreme than when he later discovers the body of his wife and son fused into a single gibbering, incapacitated entity. Cage is the exemplary case of an actor abandoning all sense of scale and proportion, willing to (over)react massively to anything. Perhaps he is, after all, a kind of vacant Lovecraftian protagonist. Who can say what is going on in there? By what criteria can we possibly account for his spasmodic body language, his eccentric line readings, his baroque maximalism? What on earth is Nic Cage doing? 

But then why appeal to earth in these Lovecraftian speculations? I'll leave the last word to the narrator of the tale, whose theory works for me: Nicolas Cage is "a color out of space — a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes."12

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Nathan Lee is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Emory University and a former film critic for Film Comment, The New York Times, and The Village Voice.

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