It Ain't No Big Thing (But It's Growing)
🐻 ⋆ 🐫 🎀 𝐻𝒜𝒫𝒫𝒴 𝐵𝐼𝑅𝒯𝐻𝒟𝒜𝒴 𝑀𝒜𝒱𝐸 𝒜𝒩𝒟 𝒞❤𝐿𝐿𝐸𝐸𝒩 🎀 🐫 ⋆ 🐻
August 2020
“The Masks” by Colleen ft. The Mask starring Jim Carrey
“Nicolas Cage: An Essay Regarding Nicolas Cage” by Mave ft. The Cotton Club Peggy Sue Got Married Zandalee Never On Tuesday It Could Happen To You Amos and Andrew The Rock Face/Off all starring Nicolas Cage
I'm standing in line at the Silverlake Gelson's. I have beat-up white cowboy boots on with shorts. I'm watching the Trader Joe's across the street where a group of about 50 demonstrators are ending a march to demand justice for Mely Corado. They're all holding sunflowers. A voice comes over a loudspeaker: "I asked Mayor Garcetti to be here. Is he here? Is he? No. No, I don't think he is here." The demonstrators starts to boo and chant "Fuck Garcetti." I check to make sure my feet are on the red line of tape that marks where to stand in order to not infect each other with our breathing. I imagine a morning shift produce clerk kneeling down to stretch the tape across the ground at 5AM. My boots cut the red line exactly down the middle. It's 80 degrees and we're in full sun. The inside of my mask has its own tropical weather pattern.
The two men in front of me are not wearing masks. I watch as they banter back and forth and laugh and spread their saliva everywhere. Finally one of them (the one with the ponytail) reaches into a tote bag and pulls out a roll of gauze. Casually, as he continues to speak, he unrolls some of it, cuts it with a swiss army knife from his back pocket, and hands the strip to his friend. Then he does the same for himself. They tie the gauze around their mouths, reaching their hands behind their heads in an effort to make knots. I have a sudden vision of them as children trying to tie their shoes. You can see their mouths still moving through the texture of the gauze and it is grotesque. They already look like patients.
Semiotically speaking, masks are a technique for transforming or temporarily extinguishing the representation of an ego-based identity. If this definition is true, social media is a mask, getting dressed is a mask, jobs are a mask, drugs are a mask. This isn't a new connection. Here in America we're constantly engaged in 'impression management'; constantly aware of our 'selves' as separate entities that we can use, sell, and buy. We are basically the world experts of wearing masks. Is it actually surprising that we seem to be wrestling a nation-wide mask-fueled ego crisis? Kind of. We all still seem to be in shock.
Our collective human narrative is wavering behind us, a darkly transparent blob like a Miyazaki forest spirit's insides, like a long living shadow. It's coming out of all of us at once. It marks the outline of our cumulative shape. Paul Valéry wrote: "the abyss of history" is deep enough to hold us all."
Everything counts. Even if it is for not much.
For those who "aspire" to the "American Dream" of "again" and "before" and "used to be", the system remains an almost religious way of life. It provides illusory comfort, which dies extremely slowly. There’s a grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression. The brave and optimistic among us call this healing.
I've been in the Gelson's line for 10 minutes now. The protest across the street has dissipated, and all that's left is a news camera crew interviewing a beaming organizer and a row of bright sunflowers wilting against the brick wall. In the sudden relative quiet I hear the man in front of the two gauze men turn around and say: "Could you back up, pal?"
There's a pause. Ponytail man is feigning shock. "Excuse me?" As he says it, the knot he tied at the back of his head comes loose and the gauze falls down. He tries to put it back. His friend also looks surprised. "We're standing on the red line, and we're not going anywhere."
Now the man ahead turns fully around. He works out a lot. "What did you say to me, you little punk ass bitch?"
I'm trying to think. If these guys do back up, then I need to back up and I hope the people behind me will all back up ~ and if these guys don't back up, are they going to fight?
I see a tweet or a meme or a caption, I can't quite remember, circulating on social media. I think about it a lot. This is what it says, more or less: "America should make the pandemic a game. The state with the least new cases and deaths gets free pizza all month. This would, unfortunately, work extremely well."
Ego identity allows individuals to experience and enact their sense of who they are with chronology and sameness. It’s a means for continuity of the person.
Continuity is an interesting thing to contemplate. What has really ever been continuous? I suppose everything is continuous, but does not necessarily act with continuity. Chronology is not real. America is not real.
Sometimes I imagine myself running through a wild meadow totally and completely naked. It’s dusk, and there are fireflies and wildflowers and gentle deer everywhere. Depending on the day, this vision makes me feel 1. beautiful and free, my hair whipping behind me as I laugh into the navy blue sky, or 2. insanely lonely, screaming into the void.
Ponytail man has let his gauze simply fall to the sidewalk. He is now inches away from the guy who is ahead in line. His friend stands behind them, saying: "This is what the red lines are for. Can you guys please just look. It says right on them that we are already Socially Distancing." The intensity of the stares between the two men seems to have a physical weight that hangs like a dead bell in the heat.
When I was 28 in Western Massachusetts and it was mid-summer, which is all sticky and loud with bugs, I wrote a pretty bad poem with this as the last line: Is it better to live, or to know you are living?
I've tried ever since to use it again and I've never been able to do it successfully. I'm not even sure if it fits here.
With my mask on, beyond knowing that everyone is safer, do I feel like I'm gaining some kind of small privacy back? Does wearing a mask in public at all times provide me and my ego a break? It’s like one of us got called to work in a new city and we’re suddenly in a long-distance relationship. It would be silly to continue on with it.
The wind shifts a little, and the line finally moves again. Neither man says anything. No one says anything. The friend has already cut another piece of gauze for Ponytail man as he arrives to stand once more on his designated red line. He ties it around his face, muttering. Then he turns to me and says, apologetically: "You should mind your own fucking business little girl."
Nicolas Cage: An Essay Regarding Nicolas Cage
August 2020
-I’d like to dedicate this essay to all the Virgos, Lirgos, and Leos of the world. Keep on doing you. Also I have literally spent the last few months dwelling exclusively in Nicolas Cage films and roping those who will tolerate my obsession into watching them with me. Thank you all.-
A ton of articles, Reddit posts and blogs have been written about Nicolas Cage. He also has a very busy life as an Internet meme. This is, of course, because he is a genius, and his body of work is worth viewing and reviewing. If you spend a few minutes researching him, you will find that many fans have podcasts or have blogged about “challenges” they’ve undertaken which involve watching all of his films. This essay is not the first to address ‘the one true god’, as he is known on Reddit, nor is it the most comprehensive.
There is a book, beside my bed, called “National Treasure, Nicolas Cage” written by a woman named Lindsay Gibb, which I have not read yet. But, it exists, which furthers my point that a good amount of thought has been given to Nicolas Cage’s work. I’m peeved that Gibb beat me to writing a book about him, but I’m also relieved that there are others out there who get it and have made the point that he is brilliant already so that I don’t have to spend this essay doing that work.
(づ☯◡☯)づ
Filmmaking is personal, and watching a film is personal. Physical bodies make the film and physical bodies watch the film. One afternoon, as my roommate and I discussed our roles as consumers of film, she made that point that the continuing life of a film depends upon who is watching it in the present day.
Our lives are lived based upon the ideas, objects, people and physical spaces that we have access to. They are also lived based upon the images and stories we see and hear both fictional and real. Enter, Nicolas Cage.
One morning, my favorite radio DJ, Charlie Bones who does the breakfast host on NTS, (a wonderful London based radio station), mentioned Nicolas Cage’s need for warm yogurt to be poured on his feet while he filmed the love scenes for the 1989 dark comedy Vampire’s Kiss. I was both repulsed and intrigued by this piece of trivia. The story followed me all day and into the night until I decided to see the result of his method for myself, so I ordered the VHS from eBay. Buying that film marked the beginning of my Nicolas Cage collection on VHS and I’ve been collecting and watching his films almost exclusively, since. The most rare VHS of his that took months to become available to buy, is called Never on Tuesday, and it was released direct to video in 1989. He has a cameo in it that lasts about a minute, but since I am a completist, I ordered it, and justified the $80 as an acceptable price for a 30th birthday present to myself.
I’d seen Raising Arizona and Valley girl before, and loved them both, but didn’t delve further into Nicolas Cage’s filmography beyond those two films. I had vague memories of Face/Off and Snake Eyes from my childhood, but dismissed them as silly blockbusters when I’d see them at the thrift store. Instead I spent years seriously crushing on Keanu Reeves, who seemed to be the eternal king of my heart until he went on the back burner to make way for a monumental crush on Brad Pitt.
To me movie stars are like long lost friends or family members who exist in our lives but are only available while they’re on the screen. We can’t jump into the scene to interact with them ourselves. Instead we get to know them, movie by movie, as we watch them get asked on dates, blow out birthday candles, eat cereal, escape from prison, drink, fall in love, catch the bus, answer phones, hold hands, defuse bombs, trade faces, lose their minds, smoke cigarettes, have sex, drive away in fast cars, and attend dinner parties.
Andre Bazin, the French film critic, suggested that “The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.” Before Vampire’s Kiss I had been gazing at a world that did not include Nicolas Cage. Once I’d watched that film it became clear to me that my desires in life would never exclude Nicolas Cage again.
After I watched Moonstruck, I was stricken with the desire for a world that included Ronny Camarreri, the sensitive, one-handed baker, with a love for the Opera and a great Manhattan apartment. I didn’t know that there was a hole in my heart shaped like his character until I saw the movie. Same goes for Sailor in Wild at Heart. Unfortunately I don’t yet have a boyfriend who karate kicks and sings Elvis directly to me while all the other women in the room shriek repetitively. But for the two hours that the tape plays, I can watch it and imagine that I do.
The stories in our lives are mostly filled with people far less exciting than those depicted in film, and the relationships and narratives we navigate can take years to culminate. Watching a story unfold in a movie is like enjoying a pile of Snickers bars that take 1.5 to 2 hours to eat. Experiencing our everyday lives can feel more akin to making overnight oats, refrigerating them, then eating them 5 days later. Which is why I’m addicted to cinema.
When I’m not watching a Nicolas Cage movie, I resort to thinking about Nicolas Cage in an effort to continue experiencing a life that has everything I desire in it. Remember, having learned of his existence, I can’t unlearn it.
My ability to daydream about Nicolas Cage is less satisfying than ingesting him, through film, via my optic nerve, right into my brain. So, I spend a lot of time watching his movies, like people watch dolphins in their glass enclosures at the zoo while imagining they’re mermaids. Does it help that we are in the middle of a pandemic and I can’t do other things like go and sit at a diner and eat some pancakes? No. I have made peace with the fact that my inability to participate in public life fuels the inner looping and re-looping of my experience further within the Nicolas Cage whirlpool of my own creation.
As a woman whose mother is Korean and whose father is English, I don’t really see myself reflected much in cinema. I like to think of Keanu Reeves as a distant reflection of a male version of myself. To see myself in women in film, I just pretend for a few moments that I can stand in for Sandra Bullock in Speed and fall in love with Jack Traven, or be Laura Dern in Wild at Heart, and do my nails, jump on beds, and drive around in a convertible with Sailor. This gives me a fleeting sense that I have the potential to be a functional part of society as a woman, and maybe have some fun as a part of it. Through their performances of love on screen, I am given the tools to imagine ideal romance.
We don’t know that prince charming exists, until we hear about him, read about him, or watch him on a screen. To me, that is Hollywood’s highest function; to show us a world we can aspire to experiencing for ourselves. One could argue that it is unfair to make movies like Sleepless in Seattle, or Pretty in Pink, because the average schlub is not as cute or charming as Tom Hanks or Andrew McCarthy, but again, film fills our gaze with hyper-reality. I choose to manifest this hyper-reality into my reality. You can fight me about the validity of my approach, or join me.
What makes Nicolas Cage different than my other mega celeb crushes, is that I think he is the outsider’s insider. Watch him in Kiss of Death as Little Junior Brown, or Castor Troy in Face/Off, and he does a really really good job of making antagonists likeable, and sexy. I think the villainy gives him an opportunity to thrive in a way that is less accessible to him when he plays straight roles, like in Honeymoon in Vegas or Firebirds. He’s cute, but he’s not channeling a higher power like he is able to when he plays a more devilish role. Since I think of myself as part alien, seeing Nicolas Cage on screen allows me to believe that I, being an outsider too, can belong in ‘ideal reality’.
I am grateful to David Lynch, Martha Coolidge, the Cohen Brothers, and John Woo for creating the canvas upon which Nicolas Cage was able to paint himself in their films. To quote Bazin again, he says “photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.” Film as a medium is unique because it captures a physical world that will never exist again except on screen.
The actors playing on the filmic stage are the ideals we offer to future generations as the highest representations of ourselves. I am grateful that Nicolas Cage decided to pursue acting, and offer himself up to us on Hollywood’s platter. A popular actor will succeed time and time again in being able to embody an archetype or be an avatar. Their ability to be a cipher for our fantasies ultimately determines their viability as a performer. What I’ve enjoyed as I’ve moved from film to film in Nicolas Cage’s filmography has been to take note of the idiosyncrasies he sprinkles into his performances. He seems to eat things both mundane and very strange in every movie, pistachios, bubblegum, steak, pears, a cockroach, Chiclets, a nectarine, are just a few examples. He does some head banging in Amos and Andrew, Face/Off, and Red Rock West. He also has the freakiest snake tongue in the business…
Only when I am able to generate the drama found in film into my day-to-day life will I step away from the screen. If I am willing to experience a film repeatedly, the performances of the actors are worth putting my actual life on hold to watch them experience theirs. That is until my secret wish to speed away in a fast car with Nicolas Cage comes true, then all my VHS tapes will be enveloped in a cloud of exhaust and we’ll drive off into a hazy sunset. -MB ~Also, watch Zandalee~
Theodore Rex
1995
Starring Whoopi Goldberg and an animatronic dinosaur
Theodore Rex is the most expensive direct-to-video film ever made.
In a 2015 interview, Goldberg stated that this is the only film she regrets ever having done: "Don't ask me why I did it, I didn't want to."