Streaming Availability: Rental
Vampire’s Kiss is the funny meme movie! Look at all those silly faces Nic Cage is making. What even is that accent? Check out these wacky scenes spliced together in Youtube compilations of Cage freak-outs. Easily Top 3 Cagiest Cage movie that has ever Caged, up there with Face/Off and the remake of The Wicker Man.
Only is that all Vampire's Kiss is?
We’re in the middle of something of a Cage-aissance. Cage has been an ironic guilty pleasure for years, but ironic joy turns quickly to real joy. Lately there been quite a few truly great Cage movies that make use of his talents, like Mandy or Pig. We have also seen less legitimate movies just throwing Cage in as cheap hipster cred, basically asking him to play a parody of himself. It recently hit a kind of unfortunate crescendo with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a movie I do not like at all. It felt like beating a dead horse, and the horse in question was a real person turned into a punchline in a thoroughly mid action comedy anyway. I do not think of Nicolas Cage as a joke. He’s a truly great performer with a vast skillset, one of those skills being nearly unmatchable levels of ham.
I did not pick Vampire’s Kiss for Spooky Month because it
was a comedy. I picked Vampire’s Kiss because it is a legitimately disturbing
picture of a man in the process of disintegrating. Nicolas Cage is not “so bad he’s good” in this
movie. He's fantastic. It is funny, there are scenes played for laughs.
It is also horrible and sad. You have to remember, in 1989, Cage did not need to
make Vampire’s Kiss. He was a red hot A-lister having just made a series of heartthrob
movies in Peggy Sue Got Married and Moonstruck. Then he makes this gruesome,
nasty horror movie full of humiliating moments for his character. It is such a bold,
interesting career decision and he is fully committed to pulling it off.
In Vampire’s Kiss we again have the serial killer craze intersecting
with vampire fiction, just like in Romero’s Martin. Where I thought Martin was
a great match for Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Vampire’s Kiss is a
perfect pairing with American Psycho. They’re both stories about Manhattan Yuppies,
Patrick Bateman and Cage’s Peter Loew, who are as disturbed as they are
handsome. They’re both operating in a complex reality, they're our main POV but lost in dark fantasies. Both films are discussing how the power of class, gender,
and body type can be a protection in of itself, allowing dangerous people to
remain dangerous for far too long, as every lever of society that should stop
them looks the other way. And they’re both films that have been meme’d to ridiculous levels.
The difference is that American Psycho, which only released
ten years later, was by then already a period piece. It is a satire laughing at those
goofy Eighties. Vampire’s Kiss is shooting on the streets of the real
Manhattan in the real 1988, no Simpsons or Seinfeld on TV yet. Nicolas Cage is running
down the actual East Village of the time going to actual hip bars and restaurants of the era like Mondo Cane. Not every person in the background is an extra as Cage screams "I'm a vampire, I'm a vampire, I'm a vampire!!!" American
Psycho is a cartoon world, it never stops being an exaggeration of the
time. Vampire’s Kiss has authenticity the other lacks.
We also get a clearer idea of the real world outside our
vampire’s POV. Loew’s poor, abused Cuban assistant, Alva (María Conchita Alonso)
is our other lead, and she gives a lucid view of the nightmare that is Loew’s
life. But even outside those scenes, Vampire’s Kiss alternates between Peter’s
imagined vampire world and the real world. We see him whispering sweet nothings
to an empty bed. A moment where Peter is in hysterics that he cannot see himself
in his office bathroom’s mirror is framed so that we see Nicolas Cage in no
less than four different mirrors. This is one of those scenes played for the
biggest laugh, as an unseen man on the toilet yells back “I'm trying to take a
dump, so will you shut up??”
Unlike in Martin, which still tried to keep some ambiguity, in Vampire’s Kiss there are no vampires. Peter is in the middle of a catastrophic break-down, already losing grasp on reality several times. Speaking with his psychiatrist (Elizabeth Ashley), it's clear even from the start that he's had troubles separating reality from fiction. He tortures Alva with finding a decades-old Der Spiegel contract in a giant mess of files their literary office needs. However, we clearly hear on the other end of the phone that his client is understanding and in no rush. Still, Alva is harassed, and eventually assaulted as Peter relishes inflicting pain on her.
As for Peter's vampirism: his teeth are plastic that he bought from a store, his coffin is an upturned couch, sunlight does not harm him, and he cannot swallow blood from a woman he murders without retching pathetically. He takes on an exaggerated high-shoulders posture after seeing Nosferatu on TV. We do see Loew survive shooting himself in the mouth, but we know the gun was full of blanks. That effect looked dangerous as all Hell too, Cage actually had a prop gun in his mouth which shoots sparks out the back. Goddamn, that was a terrifying stunt.
The closest thing to maybe a real vampire is a woman Peter
believes he is in love with, Rachel (Jennifer Beals) bites him on the
neck multiple times and transformed him into a monster. Peter is craving domination and humiliation in his fantasies, while being the inflictor of pain in real life. Whatever Rachel we
see in vampiric form is probably imagined. In his mind, she's a cruel sexual
demon. The one time we see Rachel from outside Peter’s perspective, she is as
confused by Peter’s behavior as anybody else. Or maybe that’s part of the act.
(OOooooooooooooooooooo…)
By the end of the film, Peter is wandering Manhattan as little more than a homeless streetwalker talking to nobody. His perfectly quaffed hair has
now turned into a New Wave mess (it goes full Flock of Seagulls at one point). He’s been degraded into nothing, incapable of living either
as a human or a vampire. Even the newest fantasy woman he conjures for himself cannot
stand him. This is punishment, sure, for the awful things he’s done. A more direct punishment comes when Alva’s
brother murders him in his apartment in revenge, appropriately stabbing him through the heart with a wooden stake. This is as pathetic as
any existence as we’ve seen so far in Spooky Month. Vampire’s Kiss has taken
everything from its protagonist, even his fantasies.
Next Time! We have had tons of bat-themed vampires. How
about cat-themed ones? And they’re incest energy vampires from the mind of
Stephen King? Sleepwalkers.
No comments:
Post a Comment