Every film review, every article of cultural analysis and in fact every piece of writing ever written is informed by a system of expression we call language, which is used to describe aspects of a state of being we call reality. Nicolas Cage’s performance in the freakishly great 1989 cult classic Vampire’s Kiss transcends language and exposes the limitations of human vocabulary, entering a space sometimes rationalised with the defeatist turn of phrase: “there are no words”.
If that sounds a bit much, why not watch the film’s famous alphabet scene and have a crack at describing it yourself? You’ll probably gravitate towards words like “madness”, “batshit”, “bonkers”, “hilarious”, “unhinged” and “offbeat”, as others have. If you feel the need to use the words “over-the-top”, which have frequently been applied to this film and Cage’s style more broadly, you are missing the point and should go and sit in the naughty corner.
The great actor memorably responded to this demeaning description by emphasising his role as a creator of realities, rather than an artist beholden to just one, telling Variety in 2017: “You show me where the top is, and I’ll let you know whether I’m over it or not … I design where the top is.”
Cage plays Peter Loew, a literary agent who is bitten by a vampire and spirals into madness. The film opens with Peter speaking to his psychiatrist (Elizabeth Ashley), who, like us, is captivated and unnerved by him. Early on, Peter takes a woman home from a bar, but a bat flies into the room, killing the vibe and planting the first seeds of a monster movie. Things get more explicitly genrefied when another lover – a vampire, played by Jennifer Beals – sinks her fangs into Peter.
The person who cops the brunt of Peter’s intensity is his secretary Alva (María Conchita Alonso). In fact, Vampire’s Kiss becomes a portrait of workplace abuse in the form of a very, very black comedy; screenwriter Joseph Minion makes the point that monsters take many forms, including privileged men. Peter gives Alva monotonous tasks to do, makes her the target of long and demeaning monologues, screams her name repeatedly, chases her through the workplace, and even arrives at her house when she calls in sick to menace her some more, under the guise of calling a truce (although the nastiness is entirely one-sided).
Peter is Jack Torrence-esque in his pure psychotic energy and quintessentially Cage-like in his, well, Cageiness. The actor treats the camera as a funhouse mirror, reflecting insane distortions of himself and others, and the sets as laboratories in which to experiment with performative styles – some inspired by German expressionism, I think, and others impossible to categorise. Vampire’s Kiss is the greatest Nicolas Cage movie (which is not the same as saying the greatest movie with Nicolas Cage in it) and I have seen and written about every one of them.
The film invites the question of whether Peter really is a vampire or merely thinks he is. Towards the end he buys a set of fake vampire teeth, lugs around a plank of wood and begs strangers on the street to kill him with it and has a conversation with a marble pillar on the street, thinking it is his psychiatrist. At one point Cage eats a live cockroach, for real; the actor came up with his idea himself, stating in the DVD commentary: “I really [wanted] to do something that would shock the audience, something you would never forget.”
That proved an understatement: Cage did many things the audience would never forget in Vampire’s Kiss. His involvement both a blessing and a curse for director Robert Bierman – mostly a blessing, because Cage canonised the film and made it great, subverting a midnight movie into sheer performative spectacle. He’s a curse in the sense Bierman’s authorship has been overridden; there’s a reason I’m only mentioning the director now.
This speaks to the power of Cage who, at his peak, is so distinctive a performer that he becomes the main author or co-author of a work, challenging the hegemony of the auteur system. As the designer of where the top is, Cage reminds us that, just as realism is only one way to think about on-screen representation, categorising films by the auteur system is merely one prism through which to view authorship. Long may he challenge, provoke, perplex, astonish, astound.
