My favorite scene in Christine Smallwood’s adjunct novel The Life of the Mind (2021) takes place at a graduate school colloquium featuring the protagonist’s academic rival, Alexandra. As their shared dissertation advisor…
Contemporaries Essays
The Eyes of Nicolas Cage
In 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas, Nicolas Cage is Ben Sanderson, a terminal alcoholic closing out his remaining time on earth with sex worker Sera (Elisabeth Shue). In their first meeting, Ben…
“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…
Pedagogy of the Obsessed
One of our first encounters with Nicolas Cage in Alex Proyas’s 2009 film Knowing takes place in the university classroom. His character, Professor John Koestler, is giving some astrophysics students an impassioned…
The Call of Cage-thulu: On the Unspeakable Frenzies of Nicolas Cage
What opposes Lovecraft to the representatives of good taste is more than a question of details. HPL would probably have considered a story a failure, if in writing it he…
The Iron Cage
Heroes, as far as I could then see, were white, and not merely because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were…
Between The Rock and a Hard Face: On First Encounters of the Cage Kind
Even if you’re a true film buff, there’s always that one classic movie that you haven’t seen. Admitting it at parties is a reliable form of self-deprecating small talk: I…
On the Brink of Breakdown
1 “Brandy was her name.”1 The pig’s, that is. The one that acted across from Nicolas Cage in Michael Sarnoski’s directorial debut Pig. The titular sow. She was untrained, and…
Cage Register
In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate…
Introduction to the Cage
Who is Nicolas Cage? The name itself is enough to conjure a whole host of associations not easily reconciled. There’s the star of beloved indies like Raising Arizona (1987) and…