“I’m a Vampire”: Cage Circa 2000

I understand Nicolas Cage's professional life from Peggy Sue Got Married (Coppola, 1986) through his late-1990s success as an action star as a series of attempts to identify the genres and plots that would balance the actor's excesses.1 Or, in terms he would likely prefer, the actor's long 1990s comprised a sustained, self-conscious effort at fashioning a career. "Not only do I like to change characters," he remarked just prior to the release of Face/Off (Woo, 1997), "I also like to change the style of movie. I want to do everything. I want to have a career where I can look back when I'm in my 70s and say: 'Well, I did do everything.'"2

The experimentation yielded various solutions — the surrealism of Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1990), the melodrama of Leaving Las Vegas (Figgis, 1995), the lunatic violence of The Rock (Bay/Simpson/Bruckheimer-Buena Vista, 1996) that proved his action flick viability (an improbability after the disastrous Fire Birds (Green, 1990)). Meanwhile, he revised earlier missteps to find the right match between star and scenario, as when he inserted into Con Air (1997) the famous line "put the bunny back in the box," a reference to his "legendary" performance as Little Junior Brown in Kiss of Death (Schroeder, 1995).3 Where the brutal, asthmatic Brown, alternating between savage assaults and puffs on his bedazzled inhaler, seems to exist outside of and against Kiss's grim neo-noir sensibility, Con Air counterpoises Cage's long-haired, drawling Cameron Poe to the deranged cruelty of John Malkovich's Cyrus the Virus and the plane crash that helped demolish The Sands casino on the Las Vegas Strip.4 Miraculously, Con Air's consummate wackiness, the aesthetic equivalent of Three Stooges Syndrome, works.

Again and again during this period, Cage invoked the vampire to bind the episodes of his acting life into the narrative of a career. Flourishes modeled on Max Schreck's titular ghoul in Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922) appear as early as Peggy Sue, where Cage performed the trademark claws-and-grimace while pursuing his unhappy girlfriend; at the end of Moonstruck (Jewison, 1987), he arrived at the Castorini house as a beatnik Dracula with love bites visible on both his and Loretta's necks.5 But it would be in Vampire's Kiss (Bierman, 1989) where the monster would become the emblem of his star persona. Playing Peter Loew, a yuppie literary agent who believes he has become a vampire following a tryst with a fanged Jennifer Beals, Cage committed the indelible act that crystalized his public image: eating a live cockroach on-screen. Mention of that incident became a journalistic convention in the years that followed, a shorthand acknowledgment of the actor's commitment to his roles as well as a sign of the strangeness of the man himself. Cage knew, or claimed in retrospect to have known, the method in his apparent madness: "I did that because I knew then that people would still be asking me about it now."6 Through the vampire, suspended between life and death, Cage could, as Manohla Dargis put it in 1995, remain poised between character and star: could keep in dynamic equilibrium his centrifugal impulse to take on every kind of project and dissolve into every kind of role, and his centripetal impulse to be "Nicolas Cage."7 While all stars perform their personae at the same time that they take on their character-roles, Cage treated this fact with a rare degree of explicitness and intensity.8 It is perhaps because of the vampiric gap — that eccentric character-actor Cage, as Dargis would have it, is not quite a star despite evident stardom, like the vampire is not quite alive despite its animation — that he succeeded so thoroughly in Face/Off, impersonating John Travolta's FBI agent Sean Archer impersonating Cage's terrorist Castor Troy. At any rate, Cage deemed his own performance successful because its outlandish expressiveness followed from his work in Vampire's Kiss: "I felt really proud of [Face/Off] because I was able to go back to what I had learned on Vampire's Kiss, which was sort of my experimental laboratory where I tried things out, facial expressions and attitudes."9 

After inverting and ironizing the figure as Bringing out the Dead's Frank Pierce (Scorsese, 1999), a nocturnal paramedic harried by visions of the young woman he couldn't save, Cage seemed to be on the verge of exhausting the vampire's possibilities: a crossroads for his career. In interviews he flirted with a Jekyll-and-Hyde "one for them, one for me" route, proposing a split persona where he would keep "Nicolas Cage" for studio ventures like Gone in 60 Seconds while taking on riskier projects under the name "Miles Lovecraft," a moniker appropriate to the kind of jazz-horror concoctions he might pursue.10 That didn't happen. But, at the same time and more clandestinely, he experimented with another path that must have looked to him at the time as the culmination of a professional trajectory over a decade in the making. Like many of the bona fide stars of the era, he became a producer, hanging his Saturn Films shingle at Disney, which had distributed The Rock and Con Air.11 His first project was Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a property that had languished unmade for over a decade and which, as Variety's Braden Phillips aptly put it, Cage "raised . . . from the dead."12

Shadow of the Vampire presents the production of F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu with a metafictional twist: Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe) is an actual vampire. Murnau (John Malkovich) casts Schreck in a quixotic attempt to make a "completely authentic" fantasy, describing the "actor" to his crew as a student of Stanislavski who will never break character. Murnau offers starlet Greta Schröder (Catherine McCormack) to Schreck as a sacrifice in exchange for his participation. Antagonism between director and player amplifies throughout, as do parallels between them: Schreck attacks cast members and Murnau pushes forward, propelled by megalomania and laudanum. At story's end, Murnau photographs Schreck feasting on Greta and killing both producer Albin Grau (Udo Kier) and cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner (Cary Elwes), and then turns his lens on the vampire, exposing him to sunlight and causing him to sublimate in a puff of overheated celluloid. 

If all movies made during what J. D. Connor has called Hollywood's neoclassical era (1970-2010) are "movie movies" — that is, works that allegorically "capture the interlocking agendas of their contributing authors" — then low-budget, metacinematic passion projects like Shadow of the Vampire, where control is distributed among fewer participants, should give rise to especially vivid figurations of those agendas.13 That's just what we find in Shadow of the Vampire. Three years after the movie wrapped, and freed from promotional responsibilities, screenwriter Steven Katz pulled no punches when disparaging Elias Merhige, whom Cage had chosen to direct after seeing his experimental feature Begotten (1990):14

Here, purposely or not, Katz explains his conflict with Merhige in terms drawn from the movie he disliked; in his grumbling, director, producer, and star merge into Murnau who, maniacally committed to a theory of realism, triumphs over true vampire Schreck at the cost of the vampire's nonlife, a fitting analog to Katz's forsaken genre film screenplay. While promoting Shadow, Katz transformed that subtext into an interpretation of that original screenplay, emphasizing the parallel between monster and modernist artist: 

Just as Katz bombastically equated his own work with Coppola's, here he implicitly indicts Merhige as a modernist epigone, the kind of veiled insult one might expect from a Columbia English M.A. who, at the time, had no screen credits to his name. 

Merhige, for his part, unabashedly embraced his modernist sensibility, discussing the film's cataclysmic conclusion in terms that acknowledge an explicit investment in the protocols of his medium. "Murnau is now, y'know, in this sort of orgasmic frenzy," he says of Shadow's ending,

Implicitly riffing on André Bazin's influential paired observations of the photographic camera's automatism and of cinema as "change mummified," Merhige figures Murnau as the modernist artist in extremis.18 So committed is Nosferatu's director to creating a work based on the specific ontological properties of his artform that he has given himself over to the medium and to the apparatus. Murnau's figurative self-immolation before his god reaches its completion in the literal immolation of the film itself; Merhige gets to see Murnau's work to its logical conclusion, culminating in homage to nitrocellulose stock's famous flammability.

At odds — Katz with his commitment to low genre pitted against Merhige's high modernist aesthetics — the sensibilities of screenwriter and director converge at a crucial moment just past Shadow's midpoint. As Grau and scenarist Henrik Galeen trade drinks of schnapps at the foot of a campfire, kibitzing to cope with the increasingly fraught production, Schreck appears out of the darkness; emboldened by booze, they ask him to assess "the technical merits" of Bram Stoker's Dracula, testing, they believe, the extent of the actor's preparation. Schreck's explanation, initially taken to "miss the point" of the novel, ultimately persuades them with the depth of his identification with his character. Merhige: "This is a scene when I first read Steven Katz's script that I just thought was absolutely something so special and so wonderful that I really wanted to do it justice on the screen" (49:38-49:55). Schreck explains that Dracula "made him sad" because the Count had no servants for four hundred years, but he nonetheless must convince Jonathan Harker that he is a man: "can he even remember how to buy bread? To select cheese and wine? . . . the loneliest part of the book comes when the man accidentally sees Dracula setting his table." What Galeen and Grau construe as a virtuoso elaboration of a fictional backstory — Schreck preparing his character — is in fact a description of Schreck's own inability to remember what it meant to live like a man. What the scenarist and producer construe as a display of acting from emotion memory — the means, according to Stanislavski, of investing a role with vitality — is, for Schreck, the ironic opposite: the confession of painful, shameful forgetting that accompanies having no life at all. 

Acting as a vampire and being a vampire, for the moment juxtaposed to both humorous and poignant effects, collapse into each other as Schreck grabs a bat from the air, bites its head off, and sucks its blood. Merhige, immodestly: "this is probably one of the great, great moments of any movie that I've seen" (52:37-52:40). The ostensibly thespian gesture, the commitment to actorly artifice ("Schreck, the German theater needs you!" Galeen exclaims) is ultimately indistinguishable from eating, among the most fundamental and instinctual of actions. Character and person, comedy and pathos, Katz's commitment to genre conventions (sucking blood) and Merhige's commitment to a modernist elaboration of the features of an artform (acting): all oppositions dissolve amid the astonishing act. Whether Schreck is a man or a monster, in either case his performance for his audience is remarkable. 

Unlike the vampire he plays, Dafoe practiced no version of the Method, instead devising his behavior from the outside in, conforming his performance to the makeup and corset that constrained his movements and enabled his embodiment of the character. But in appearance — the grim, determined, ashamed-and-blissful face, framed in close-up — Dafoe-as-Schreck is, in this moment, an homage to Cage's cockroach snack (Dafoe's Schreck follows his bat with a swig of Grau's schnapps; Cage cleared the bug guts from his mouth with vodka). For a fleeting moment, Shadow of the Vampiretransmutes its off-camera conflicts and on-camera ontological confusions into a single image in order to transcend them, and it's both appropriate and telling that that image should be Cage-haunted. 

Appropriate and telling because Shadow of the Vampire proposes a new solution to Cage's then-career-long problem of imbalance between performance and context by removing himself from the literal picture and dismissing the problem entirely. That solution manifests at the start of Shadow's mesmerizing conclusion, when Murnau tells his doppelganger Schreck "if it's not in frame, it doesn't exist." The merging of person and performance, story and backstory that Schreck's bat-eating indicated is here exaggerated and transformed in Murnau's wish to obliterate all the world that isn't part of the authentic horror movie, the real fiction, that he's made. But Murnau isn't the invisible artist-god he would be for the simple reason that he continues to appear in the movie in which he unwittingly stars. Nosferatu and Shadow have not become the same movie, and Murnau and Schreck have not become the same monster; they face each other framed in not-quite-matching closeups, one in orthochromatic black and white, the other in color, suggesting their mutual movement toward the asymptote of identification. But they merge only outside the world of the film in the image of their vampire-producer, refined out existence but imbuing each performance with caginess, his horrible fingernails likely unpared. 

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Two years after Shadow of the Vampire received its acclaim — two Academy Award nominations, for Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Dafoe) and Best Makeup — Cage explained that Saturn Films presented an opportunity to continue his film career without necessarily being in them. "Maybe I should take more time in between parts," he told interviewer Michael Fleming. "[I]t might not be a bad thing for me to have a company where I can go to the office and make phone calls and meet people that are interesting, to try and find projects for other people to do. That way I don't have to constantly be acting [in] back-to-back [projects]."19 At the time, Cage had no inkling of the squeeze he'd feel at the end of the decade from his reckless spending and a $6.2 million back-taxes bill. The Nicolas Cage of today acts more than ever, and with some frequency playing a version of himself; Tom Gormican's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a movie starring Cage playing Cage reprising past roles, is set for release in April 2022.   

Fittingly, his conception of his career has changed; that is, he no longer maintains a belief in a career at all. In a 2019 New York Times interview, Cage told David Marchese: 

With the fiction of a career forsworn, the vampire figure, with its atavistic, aristocratic valance, no longer fits; he hasn't played one in decades.21 But given his compulsive recapitulation of his star-self for a paycheck, can a zombie Cage — a turn as the unglamorous proletarian undead — be long in coming?22

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Jordan Brower (@jordanrbrower) is an assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where he teaches film and media studies. He is completing a manuscript about Classical Hollywood and American literary modernism, provisionally titled Hollywood Signs: A Literary History of the Studio System.

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