Nicolas Cage as... My Dad

We'll start my quest into Cage-madness with his first two films, Valley Girl and Rumble Fish.

Valley Girl is a Romeo and Juliet story set in suburban LA in the late '80s, which is about the only way you can make the characters in Romeo and Juliet even more stupid and shallow. Cage plays Randy, a punk from the seedier part of LA (apparently Hollywood), who falls for a well-off rich girl from the San Fernando valley named Julie Richman(Clever name). As far as Romeo and Juliet adaptations go, this is one the better ones regarding parallels. One of our star-crossed lover is pining for another character (Julie, this time.) The couple meet at a party, Randy even jokes about how it should be a costume party. Randy attempts to meet with Julie, but instead of a balcony scene, we get a shower stall. However, because feuding families are OMG so dramatic, the main conflict in this story is that Randy is a "punk" and Julie is a "Valley Girl." What this means is that Julie's friends will never approve of their love! They're just too different. Randy leaves his collars unpopped! He listens to music where bands play their instruments! He's quite a rapscallion!

This is a controversial couple.

 This is how Valley Girl fails:  At no point does it really establish a difference between the two "warring" tribes. They have different haircuts and clothing styles, but that's about it. The music, which they think is a dividing line, is basically identical. It's all late-80s new wave, and damn, is it catchy. But that's really it. The only difference is that Randy likes to go to bars where bands play and Julie likes to go to parties at preppie boy's houses. That's it. Period.

This is really a primer for what's to come with Cage's performances. Most of his mannerisms are subdued, his trademark overselling reeled in, but on one or two occasions, he's allowed to overreact to a situation, and you can see the beginnings of his theatricality. His response to being dumped has the intent of coming off as realistic for an 18-year old's reaction, but he sells it so well, it has the unintentional hilarity of a preteen temper tantrum when her parents won't buy her a cell phone. But when his script gives him the beautiful line "Fuck off, for sure. Like, totally," it shows what we all know by now: Given terrible serious material, Nic Cage will pump out brilliant comedic work, and you will never know if it's intentional.

Rumble Fish, meanwhile, is boring and pretentious. Directed by Cage's uncle, Francis Ford Coppola (Apparently Nic Cage wasn't against nepotism at this point), it's a less entertaining spiritual successor to The Outsiders, with similar themes and based on a novel from the same author. Cage plays Smokey, the cynical friend  of protagonist Rusty James (Matt Dillon), who is involved for a gang fight, a rumble, even though it breaks a truce set by his older brother, the Urban Legend-esque Motorcycle Kid (Rourke), who has been AWOL for two months. He's only in about 20% of the movie, but when he is in the film, he's a brilliant calculating bastard. His one big scene, which is one of the film's better moments, basically boils down to him pulling a Lex Luthor and just telling our main character "I'm smarter than you. You suck." and he's just so damn smug and awesome in that moment.

Years before he would have to pretend to be John Travolta,

 

Nic pretended to be Arnold Horchach.

So, why do I bring these two films to your attention in the same post, despite the fact that they have basically nothing to do with each other? Because movies like Rumble Fish and The Outsiders, in their weird portrayal of life in the rough and tumble streets of dirty cities in times that look like the fifties, but are actually the seventies always manage to make me think of one man. My father, Ed Schneider.

Dad's the one on the right. Also, check out the sweet hair on the guy on the left.

See, growing up on the west coast, knowing my father was from New York, I had no idea what his life was like. Dad didn't like talking about growing up, because he had a rough childhood, and I didn't like to listen to "When I was your age" stories anyway. Somehow I always assumed that, because he was from New York, my dad lived a life filled with motorcycles, hair pomade, and rumbles with rival street gangs. It was a ridiculous assumption, I know, but can you blame a kid for wanting to think his father was cool like that? I liked the idea that my dad was in one of these romantic gangs, rebelling against nothing, then finally running away from that life, marrying my mom and having kids. (For some reason it never occurred to me that my father's occupation as apolice officer would actually be in complete conflict with these ideals.)

When my grandfather died, which was one of the only two times I've ever seen my dad cry, I went with my dad to visit our family back east. Even though my relatives lived on Staten Island (which has relatively cheap property values because it's about 40% landfill,) it turns out that my dad grew up in suburban Long Island, about 80 miles away from the city. Turns out my dad spent most of his time growing up eating pizza, getting high in shopping mall parking lots and listening to The Ramones. While that's pretty cool in it's own right, I remember feeling a little let down that my perception was completely wrong. I wanted to learn that my dad was Rumble Fish Nicolas Cage, the smart one who would take over as leader of the gang. Instead I learned that my dad was mopey drunken Valley Girl Nicolas Cage, and that was lame.

This is basically how dad spent his youth.

Now, I'm not saying I'm mad at my dad for being a boring teenager. If anything, I was mad at myself for having such ridiculous ideas in the first place. I realized in that moment that I didn't actually know anything about my father, though it would be many years before I would try to rectify that. Coincidentally, after losing his father that year, my dad would make an effort to be closer to me, so that I didn't just see him in pre-concieved notions from stereotypes I'd seen in movies. Sure, my dad's life hasn't been as exciting as a Nicolas Cage movie, (And Rumble Fish is a BORING movie) but it's real. And it's real to me. But because of those early years pent thinking my father was some sort of rebel without a cause, movies like The Outsiders and it's kind always make me play pretend, and imagine my dad, looking a lot like me, saving the gang in the rumble by crashing his motorcycle. It'd never happen, sure, but a kid can dream.