The Iron Cage

I remember Nicolas Cage as a hero. Not a personal hero — not someone I admired and self-consciously emulated — but a hero in the abstract sense, a recognizable figure who performed heroic acts on a screen. Given the mercurial trajectory of his career, it may be difficult to remember that Nicolas Cage went from indie darling to action hero par excellence in the mid-1990s. But, as a ten-year-old, I wasn't aware that Cage existed as anything other than the hero of the most exciting movies I had ever seen. I still remember leaving Movies 10 in Nelsonville, Ohio, talking excitedly with my friends about the moment in The Rock when Cage had to inject himself in the heart with a needle and whether any of us could do the same. A year later, my friend Dana purchased Con Air with his remote control — the only time in my childhood I actually saw someone use pay-per-view — on a TV bigger than my home refrigerator, and we watched Cage subdue an airplane hijacked by monstrous prisoners. Later that year, I went with my friend, Sergio, to the Premier Video in Athens, Ohio to rent Face/Off for his birthday party, a modest pop-and-pizza affair, and we watched Cage swap roles with John Travolta, going from villain to hero and back again.

As an adolescent, I loved these films, and I still have fond memories associated with them. For this reason, I planned to contribute an essay to this cluster about an upcoming Cage film: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. As I understand the plot, Cage plays a fictional version of himself. He begrudgingly accepts one million dollars to make a personal appearance at a superfan's home. This superfan happens to be a drug kingpin, and, for some reason, he kidnaps Cage's wife and child. In response, Cage recreates several of his most iconic characters in order to save his family. Given the turmoil of the past several years, writing an essay on a film that trades in pre-packaged nostalgia sounded very nice. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is clearly for people like me: people with fond memories of Cage's films, specifically his outrageous action films. Fortunately or unfortunately, COVID-19 pushed the film's release back to 2022, so I turned to the action films themselves — movies I hadn't thought much about for twenty-five years.

Over the course of three nights, I watched The Rock, Con Air, and Face/Off in the order of their original release. On the first night, after my wife went to bed, I purchased the films with my remote control and relaxed on the couch to revisit The Rock. In the darkness: a car chase through San Francisco. . . . Tearing through steep and narrow streets, a yellow Ferrari chases a black Humvee, demolishing a vegetable market, derailing a cable car (which, inexplicably, explodes), and crushing a Volkswagen Beetle decorated in psychedelic art and peace symbols. The following night, I turned off the lights and returned to the couch for Con Air. In the darkness: a firefight in the desert. . . . A military and police convoy rolls through an aircraft graveyard, and armed fugitives ambush them with assault rifles, grenade launchers, and propane-tank bombs. On the final night, I settled in for Face/Off. In the darkness: a bomb beneath the Los Angeles Coliseum. . . . A terrorist flees in an airplane, and an FBI agent, giving chase in a helicopter, crashes the plane. Three nights, three silly plots, and three tidy endings.

Viewing the movies with adult eyes, I understood why I loved these films so much as a child. They still excite and titillate. But, after returning, my memories of them left me uneasy. I vividly remember my first exposure: where I saw them, when I saw them, and with whom. I remember their general plots. I remember several actors and their performances. I remember specific scenes. But I had no memory of their racial politics, of what the films said to me about me. This surprised me: I can vividly remember cringing at racist moments in films, TV shows, and cartoons at a much younger age. But apparently I was ill-equipped to recognize, let alone parse, Nicolas Cage's action films. I had to confront the fact that, at one time in my life, I loved three films that hated me.

Turning my attention to the looming deadline for this essay, I thought about the films' huge box office numbers, Cage's status as a cultural icon, and the nostalgia-peddling of the upcoming Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. I wrote an essay with the goal of reminding readers of the troubling ideological content that the upcoming film will recycle. The argument ran thus: Nicolas Cage's action films are problematic, the end. My editors pointed out that the critique is so obvious and uncontroversial that my argument did not hold weight. They were correct, but I was ashamed. And yet, my inability to remember this aspect of the films nagged at me. Cage's trio of mid-90s action films delivered their messages into my psyche without my awareness or reservation, and there they remained untouched for over a quarter century, unacknowledged but not unfelt. These films add to an extraordinarily dense mass of images, narratives, symbols, and codes — not to mention personal experiences and history itself — that holds me in its gravity, and I want to know what it is and how it works upon me. Hopefully, I can then begin the much harder work of changing it.

Beneath Cage's idiosyncratic and over-the-top performance style, the dialogue's cheesy puns, and the narrative's preposterous subject matter, The Rock tells a simple passing-of-the-torch narrative. A rogue general (Ed Harris) threatens to blow up San Francisco from a makeshift base on Alcatraz Island. A neurotic but charming FBI agent, Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), has the technical know-how to disarm the rockets, but lacks the experience needed to breach the impregnable fortress and the martial skill required to defeat the terrorists. A dangerous prisoner, John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery) — a British former secret agent once imprisoned on Alcatraz — aids Goodspeed. Wary of one another at first, Mason protects and aids his young American apprentice until Goodspeed discovers his own latent courage and transforms into a fully realized hero by the end of the film.

Mason and Goodspeed's mentor-pupil relationship fascinated me, and thanks to my father's VHS collection, I remember recognizing Connery as a former James Bond. As such, Connery finds himself on familiar terrain in The Rock: rogue generals, rockets, hostages, and insurmountable odds. If Connery's image and the plot were not enough to make the connection, the film regularly alludes to his character's past as a spy, his former work with British Intelligence, his time spent with Her Majesty's S. A. S., and so on. In the mid-1990s, the surrogate James Bond, John Patrick Mason, comes out of retirement to school his American apprentice on everything he will need to know as an agent of empire in the post-Cold War era — from sex appeal to hand-to-hand combat to cracking cheeky puns that sanitize violence — to reaffirm the justification of his rule, assert his authority, and dominate the global order. Eldridge Cleaver, writing in the wake of the decolonial movements of the 1960s, argued that the James Bond character arose in order to fulfill its white audience's wishes, providing "what many whites want desperately to hear reaffirmed: I am still the White Man, lord of the land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at my feet."1 Mason not only passes the torch of heroism but also the racial ideology that validates and justifies his behind-the-scenes global domination. The film signals a changing of the guard, an American version of a European idea, at the dawn of a new historical epoch.

The new guardian of the new global order requires a new racial ideology to support him. Incidentally, The Rock masks the racial implications of its narrative by deploying a "colorblind aesthetic" — a combination of race-neutral language and race-conscious imagery.2 I learned, early in my life, to notice how Black people appear on screen, and I do not recall noticing anything amiss in The Rock. But it is precisely the film's colorblindness that effectively masks its imperial ideology. The rogue general treats his Black and white soldiers, as well as his Black and white hostages, exactly the same. This seems reasonable, except that the film dramatizes a conflict over whether American imperialism will take a neoliberal or fascist form. By presenting the general's individual and colorblind interactions, the film sanitizes his ultranationalism and militarism. This aesthetic sleight of hand masks what might otherwise appear obvious: the pseudo-democratic establishment, its covert agent Stanley Goodspeed, and his mentor John Mason clash with fascists not over their politics but over the proper formula for American imperialism. In the end, Goodspeed marries his sweetheart after restoring order to the land: Goodspeed recreates American imperialism in his image, simple but benign and charming, while nullifying the possibility of racial impropriety.

In a well-known and brutal example of colorblindness's masking of racial oppression, people of color make up a disproportionate number of the incarcerated population in America. But Michelle Alexander notes that the system of mass incarceration conceals its disproportionate racial impact by imprisoning working class whites to advance the false image of a fair and equitable institution.3 Against this historical backdrop, Con Air opens with Cage, a working class Southerner and army recruit named Cameron Poe, accidentally killing a man in a fistfight, and a judge sentences him to seven-to-ten years in a federal penitentiary. Poe corresponds with his family, reads voraciously, learns Spanish, meditates, and sculpts his body with exercise. He grows his hair and beard from a tight crew cut until he resembles a white Jesus. Having served his time, Poe tags along on a plane transporting prisoners to a supermax. They hijack the plane, setting the plot in motion.

One of the film's central conflicts does not involve Cage and the cartoonish villains, but lies, hidden and unspoken, between Poe and his Black friend and cellmate, Baby-O (Mykelti Williamson). Baby-O is diabetic, and the illness causes him to regress into a helpless, childlike state. Poe forgoes a chance to escape to stay with Baby-O, and the film would have us believe this is an act of selflessness and love. Poe procures Baby-O's insulin and saves his friend's life, suffering and giving of himself so that Baby-O might live. Poe's act is a life debt Baby-O must carry. He saves Baby-O because the film wants the life debt to empty the impending sacrificial Negro trope of its racial content — which, of course, it cannot. A few minutes later, Baby-O takes a bullet for Poe. Dying, he laments, "All I can think about is, like, there ain't no God. That He don't exist." But the film cannot allow Baby-O to die or lose faith because either scenario compromises the hero's redemption. Poe responds: "I'm gonna show you God does exist!"4 The invigorated hero fights his way to the cockpit, brings the plane to a crash landing on the Las Vegas strip, and gets Baby-O to an ambulance, underscoring Poe's power, righteousness, virtue, and morality.

I remember watching Con Air for the first time and recognizing Williamson from his role in Forrest Gump. But again, I can't remember my impression of his character or my feelings about his relationship with Poe. I imagine that, in Mykelti Williamson, I saw the actor's Black body, but in Baby-O, I did not see a Black character. I cannot imagine identifying with any aspect of Baby-O for the simple fact that he does not resemble a human. Humans suffer, but I don't know anyone who exists only to suffer, and I damn sure don't know any "sacrificial" Black folks. In Baby-O, I see an outgrowth of a condescending, and thoroughly American, imagination. Reworking Huck and Jim's dynamic, Con Air disguises Poe and Baby-O's subservient relationship as an equal partnership.

It's an old trick that transforms the brutality, selfishness, and injustice of an oppressor into the vengeance, magnanimity, and righteousness of a savior. The same childish fantasies that motivate Cage's films also distort reality, and I witness, with uncanny disbelief, the ongoing struggle between fascism and pseudo-democracy in this society. In fellowship applications, I find myself encouraged to put my suffering on display in personal letters and diversity statements for, I presume, predominantly white review boards so I can prove their virtue, their "commitment to diversity." When I read the news, I see perpetrators of racial terror assume the place of heroes. Despite my best efforts, I find myself in the orbit an ideology I despise, and it, in turn, despises me even when it pulls me close.

Whether I like it or not, Cage's films are a part of my past. When I revisited and confronted my childhood experiences with Cage, my temptation to lie about my memories and reactions nearly overwhelmed me. My professional side attempted to write an academic essay about the films, but mystification resolves nothing. My aggressive side wanted to denounce the films, but that would not satisfy my anger. My human side wanted to hate the films because they hate me, but that would not relieve my embarrassment. The truth is, Cage's films present me, indirectly and directly, as subhuman, and I didn't realize it. In fact, I must have uncritically accepted it. An essay won't fix me or the culture, but I've heard it said that honesty is the only place to start when fixin' a lie, and I've tried to be honest. It was harder than I expected because the dominant culture fights with all its might to stay within the cage of lies it built around itself, and it tries to drag me inside. But, I'm ready for something new. I'm ready to grow up.

---

Kenton Butcher is a graduate student in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in African American and South African literature. Gloom and paranoia keep him from joining Twitter and all other platforms, otherwise he would happily share social media handles here.

---

References