The Travolta/Cage Project #20: Vampire's Kiss (1989)
“Intense emotion”, incidentally, is the subtitle of the Travola/Cage Project book.
1989’s Vampire’s Kiss was certainly not the first great movie Nicolas Cage made. When he made the evisceratingly dark satirical horror-comedy he was riding a hot streak that included Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising Arizona and the Oscar-winning blockbuster Moonstruck.
Vampire’s Kiss wasn’t even the first time the intense young future Academy Award winner went to masochistic, method extremes for a role. He lost fifteen pounds and had two teeth pulled in order to experience the pain and torment of his Birdy character. Nor was Vampire’s Kiss the first time Cage played a character whose defining characteristic is an operatic, theatrical, damn near historic level of insanity.
In Moonstruck, when a co-worker observes reverently of Cage’s brooding bread baker, “This is the most tormented man I have ever known” it feels exquisitely redundant because, over the course of just a few minutes, it has already been indelibly established that he is the most tormented man who has ever lived.
Similarly, when another character observes of the demented yuppie monster Cage plays here, “He is so eccentric” it’s an adorable under-statement because the literary agent and professional misogynist isn’t just eccentric; to borrow a colloquialism, he’s crazier than a shit house rat.
Vampire’s Kiss wasn’t Cage’s first great movie, or the first high-profile showcase for his method actor intensity, or the first movie where he played someone mesmerizingly out of their goddamned mind but it represents a creative breakthrough all the same.
In many ways the legend of Nicolas Cage begins with Vampire’s Kiss and the notorious sequence where, for the sake of verisimilitude, the actor chose to eat an actual cockroach onscreen. Now bear in mind that this was not a scene that existed in the script. Cage did not receive a screenplay that called upon his character to actually eat a disgusting insect, not a candy shaped like a cockroach or a plastic bug from a plastic bug shop. No, the cockroach-eating scene was Cage’s idea. Cage decided not only that his character would eat a cockroach as he very dramatically begins to lose what’s left of his mind, but the cockroach in question would be genuine, a crunchy, wriggling little monster.
That, friends, is commitment. And conviction. And insanity. When you’re willing to eat a fucking live cockroach for your art, you’re willing to do anything. In Vampire’s Kiss Cage goes to extremes in ways that have formed the core of the actor’s enduring cult. In the Church of Cage, Vampire’s Kiss occupies a place of distinction disproportionate to its meager box-office.
“The Alphabet with Nicolas Cage” proved a shockingly popular children’s app
In his most extreme performance to date, Cage plays Peter Loew, a wealthy New York literary agent whose nights are a never-ending hunt for beautiful women to seduce, emotionally abuse and abandon and whose days are devoted to terrorizing Alva Restrepo (María Conchita Alonso) , a secretary unlucky to work at the same literary agency as Peter.
As a form of torture, Peter gives the terrified woman the impossible, impossibly pointless task of finding a decades-old contract from one of Peter’s clients in a massive, disorganized file. Peter insists it’s a task of supreme importance and that the author might leave the agency unless the contract is found and framed.
It’s a Kafkaesque task as cruel as it is arbitrary and meaningless, particularly since, in sharp contrast to Peter’s assertion, the ostensibly apoplectic author does not care at all about the contract. Peter plays Alva a message of the author in question good-naturedly telling him to forget about the contract if retrieving it proves at all a hassle yet Peter insists, in spite of the clear evidence of Alva’s eyes and ears, that the author cares so deeply about the contract that he’s willing to switch agencies over it.
It’s one of an endless series of pointless power moves; it’s not enough for this monster to make the secretary’s life’s hell for no discernible reason with an errand specifically designed to drive her crazy and make her feel worthless. No, he also has to show her that he knows damn well that what he’s asking for is meaningless and cruel. If anything, the sheer pointlessness of the task makes him even more insistent about angrily, repeatedly demanding it in increasingly psychotic ways.
“Bullying” doesn’t sufficiently capture the viciousness and brutality of the way Peter treats the poor woman forced to interact with him on a daily basis for the sake of economic survival. It’s something closer to one-sided psychological warfare but Peter isn’t just cruel in theatrical, performative ways.
Like many abusers, Peter keeps the victims of his cruelty off-balance by alternating continually between visceral contempt and teary protestations of regret. He is forever apologizing for his actions and vowing to be better and then, when Alva lets down her guard, he doubles down on the viciousness. It’s a game to him, nothing more, a way to pass the time and feed his insatiable sadism.
Cage does a lot of wonderful acting with his arms here. When he points menacingly and threateningly at Alva, it feels like a punch. Cage’s body coiled body language vibrates with barely repressed violence and rage. It’s as if he is a conductor forever leading a mad symphony or humiliation and degradation.
Peter’s threatening body language when manipulating Alva reminded me, weirdly enough, of the way Donald Trump stalked Hillary Clinton at one of the presidential debates in a manner that suggested a slasher stalking his prey more than a politician interacting with a rival.
Vampire’s Kiss is a movie about how misogyny destroys all it touches, how it poisons and warps and corrupts the lives of men as well the women they abuse and mistreat. Re-watching Vampire’s Kiss I was reminded of the original English title of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: Men Who Hate Women.
Men Who Hate Women describes the violently misogynistic world of Vampire’s Kiss. We don’t meet many other men over the course of the film but we do learn enough about Peter’s boss and co-workers to know that not only do they not see anything wrong with a man chasing a terrified secretary into a woman’s bathroom and angrily making demands, but they think it’s an absolute hoot. Nothing unites these horrible men quite like delighting in the humiliation and degradation of women.
Then one debauched evening Peter goes home with Rachel (Jennifer Beals), a gorgeous vamp who sinks her teeth into Peter and drinks lustily. Peter becomes convinced that he was bitten by a genuine vampire and contracted vampirism in the process. He buys a pair of cheap plastic fangs and begins behaving how he imagines an immortal blood-sucker might.
Even before he is bitten by a woman he is convinced is a bona fide supernatural blood sucker, Peter is already a vampire of the metaphorical variety, a sociopathic parasite who takes and takes and takes from the vulnerable women in his life without giving anything back in return.
Vampire’s Kiss is a horror movie as much as it is a satirical comedy about the ugliness and excesses of yuppie life at its most hedonistic and unhinged but the horrors at its core are sexism and capitalism and materialism as much, if not more, than vampirism.
Vampire’s Kiss begins as elegant yuppie lifestyle porn. It takes place in a New York as sleek and sexy as it is lonely and unforgiving, a dark playground for naughty adults filled with sex and drugs and money and other temptations. Before he opens his mouth, Peter cuts an impressive figure, a strikingly handsome man in elegantly tailored suits with an apartment that is a yuppie dream, elegant in its tasteful simplicity.
Then Peter’s descent begins and his orderly, obscene life devolves into shambling madness. His look goes from GQ to Nosferatu. His snazzy bachelor’s pad becomes a shambling makeshift crypt, with an overturned leather sofa for a coffin. Peter begins the film the image of blow-dried, spit-polished upscale perfection but it isn’t long until his life is as ugly on the outside as it does internally.
Re-watching Vampire’s Kiss I was struck by its similarities to both the book and movie version of American Psycho, which would not be published until 1991. Ellis’ emptily transgressive novel and Vampire’s Kiss are both satirical allegories about how capitalism and misogyny can transform callow young men into literal monsters of depravity, blood-thirsty ghouls with killer pads, expensive wardrobes and an endless string of hot conquests but nothing in the way of a conscience or a soul.
American Psycho and Vampire’s Kiss are both intensely subjective in their storytelling. Patrick Bateman is the most unreliable of narrators. Everything in Bret Easton Ellis’ zeitgeist-capturing novel is filtered through the prism of its narrator/protagonist’s madness. We are never quite sure what’s real and what’s a violent delusion because Patrick Bateman never knows where reality ends and his bloody fantasies begin. We similarly are never entirely sure what portion of Vampire’s Kiss action happens only in Peter’s fevered imagination but it’s clearly a lot.
The crucial difference is that Vampire’s Kiss is genuinely funny and incisive in its eviscerating, uncompromising exploration of the ugliness of machismo and narcissism whereas Ellis’ garbage novel is a dreadful, heavy-handed rip-off of Vampire’s Kiss. So it seems appropriate that Christian Bale’s iconic turn as the title character in American Psycho was reportedly influenced by Cage’s turn here.
Vampire’s Kiss is a quintessential 1980s New York movie but it’s timeless and universal in its blistering take on the savagery and brutality of capitalism, a subject that will forever be relevant as long as there are monsters at the top of the socioeconomic ladder making cruel sport of abusing those with less.
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