Age of Cage Offers a Thorough and Humanizing History of Nicolas Cage
As someone who’s done a Nicolas Cage deep-dive or two (and written plenty about the performer’s unique and thrilling displays of tragicomic ability), Age of Cage spoke to me from the outset. Written by longtime A.V. Cluber and Dissolve founder Keith Phipps, this insightful book is perhaps the clearest and most direct record of a generation’s most electric screen presence. It’s a biography of a worker at the top of his field and the field itself, all by way of career analysis—which you have to imagine (given the endless, fun-poking media attention from prestigious outlets, blogs and random GIF-tweeters) is the way that Cage himself would want it. Living up to its subtitle, Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career, Age of Cage tracks the industry and its demands on those foolhardy or arrogant enough to play inside of it while it watches the rise, fall and slowly orbiting return of a true movie star.
Cage himself has entered an era that deliciously complicates the text. This resurgent time has seen him quietly snuffle (however briefly) into the awards conversation with last year’s Pig, while this year’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent wowed literally every critic that saw the self-referential comedy’s SXSW premiere (Cage plays a version of himself to great effect). Phipps anticipates this, noting the performer’s increasing acceptance of his place in pop culture. Mandy revitalized his career; time renewed his confidence.
Coming out of the VOD trenches, slowly but surely, Cage’s successes are twofold: Experiments in performance like his near-silent Pig, Mandy and Willy’s Wonderland roles, and his vampiric turn in the upcoming Renfield; and broad meme-centric silliness in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent that is even more metatextual than Spider-Man: No Way Home’s pandering. All of this makes perfect sense after reading Phipps. Not only because we better understand Cage—an industry kid wanting to break free and prove his own worth—but because we have insight into a cyclical business and the ways it interacts with its actors. Even more importantly, we start to see the difference between how it interacts with its actors (Cage in Valley Girl), its movie stars (Cage in The Rock) and its out-of-fashion fodder (Cage in USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage). Cage has done it all, clearly out of love. Nobody acts like him. Nobody acts as much as him.