Raising Arizona

In the interest of time, let's skip a few years in Cage's career to the first film that really put him on the map: The Coen Brothers' 1988 film, Raising Arizona:


In Raising Arizona, Cage plays H.I. McDonnaugh, a petty crook married to an ex-cop named Ed (Holly Hunter) who longs for a child of their own. Since the couple is unable to concieve, Ed hatches a brilliant plan to steal a child from the wife of Nathan Arizona, a local furniture dealer whose wife has just given birth to quintuplets. Around the same time, Hi's old friends sneak out of prison and expect him to join them in some robberies, so Hi is forced to turn them down, for the reason that he is now a family man.

What I like the most about Raising Arizona is that it tells a simple story about being a man and growing up, it just also does it in the most insane way possible. It's about a man learning to accept the responsibilities of being a parent, and knowing that he can't go out and have fun with his friends anymore. The feelings expressed by Hi to his boss are common in new fathers, but in this case his baby is stolen, and his friends want to rob banks.

Leonard Smalls, the Lone Biker Of The Apocalypse hired to hunt down Hi and retrieve the baby represented Hi's immaturity and selfishness, basically his shortcomings that he must eventually defeat. He only defeats them accidentally, however, after realizing that they are a part of him. This is evidenced by the part where Hi discovers he and Leonard Smalls have the same tattoo, they are part of the same person. It's at that point that Hi realizes what he can and can't handle, and it's then and only then that he is ready to be the father he sees in his dreams.

In many ways, Hi's situation is quite like my own at the moment. There's an inbetween stage of growing up, right before one really becomes a man, and it's one Hi has delayed his stay in for many years. On the other hand, I think I passed through that stage entirely. For as long as I can remember, I've had to take care of someone. My mother was basically useless and bipolar to the point of psychosis through my teen years, and my father and I didn't get along for one stupid reason or another. For my teen years, I was always in charge, and I've gotten used to being a grown-up. Now? I'm at the end of a relationship because, quite frankly, I'm bored with being an adult. Like Hi, I don't want my responsibilities and commitments. I realize what an immature child this makes me sound like. I haven't faced my Leonard Smalls yet, I don't know my own limitations, because I've never gotten the chance to. I'm at the point Hi is in the movie, in his mid-30s, and I shouldn't be. I shouldn't be having a midlife crisis at 22. And yet here I am. Drinking away the pain with Nicolas Cage and the yodeling chase scenes.

Cage purchase

Who bought three Nicolas Cage movies for eight bucks today? Marty bought three Cage movies for eight bucks today!

I got:
Raising Arizona
Trapped in Paradise
Kiss of Death

So, three Cage comedies, two intentional.

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.

Everywhere You Look

I have always been a glutton for punishment.

During the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, my younger sister developed a love for reruns of late '80s sitcom Full House. During that summer, Full House reruns ran for a two-hour block every weekday, two episodes from 11:00-Noon on TBS, followed by two episodes on ABC Family.  I sat with her and watched every single episode that aired that summer, which was easy since I didn't usually get out of bed until about 10:00, and nobody wanted to do anything until about 2:00. There were probably millions of better uses for my summer, but I was a man with a mission. I had to understand how a show aired for eight full seasons on a major network, billed as a comedy, and not have one funny moment in its history. I was convinced that at some point in time, someone would tell a joke, (Probably Uncle Joey, played by Dave Coulier) and it would make everything right. There would be one incredible line, and eight seasons worth of laughter would come pouring out of my mouth. There I was, two hours a day, waiting for a show starring Bob Saget to release the line that would launch me into hysterics. That line never came. Similarly, the release from the grip of that horrible summer stuck in the house with my sister and my increasingly-psychopathic mother that I had been searching for never came. A girlfriend, a video game, a ride into town, something. I'm sure those things happened (except the girlfriend), but if they did, they weren't enough, and I certainly don't remember them. Maybe they didn't come because I was on the couch watching Full House every morning. Maybe it wouldn't have come regardless. But the fact remained, I spent that summer on the couch with my sister waiting for something that would never come, to distract myself from the fact that I was waiting for something that would never come.

Save me, Uncle Jesse. Save me with your beautiful mullet.

Fast-Forward to Summer of 2010. My sister is now the one waiting for release, and I am playing the role of the successful college student. Having just discovered my love for cinema, I spend my spare time floating around the internet discussing metaphor and symbolism, quoting Foucault when I've only just read him, and generally sounding like a pretentious douche. And when someone on a forum discusses the ridiculous filmography of madman and auteur Nicolas Cage, I step up to plate with something to prove. I take a challenge: To watch every single Nicolas Cage movie in the course of a year. My thoughts are documented on this forum, and this blog. At first, it's going okay, and then comes Zandalee.

Zandalee is a little-known direct-to-video which Nic Cage supposedly likes kept off its resume. It is one of the worst films I have ever seen, and there's no reason for it to exist, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The point is, Zandalee broke me. It made me unable to watch films for about two weeks. It made me fail the Great Cage Challenge, but that led to me writing film commentary in a semi-professional fashion, so that all worked out.

Also, in Zandalee, Nicolas Cage looks like this.

Here's the status quo between myself and Nicolas Cage: At the moment, Nic Cage's career is considered "a bad joke" according to this month's GQ Magazine. This is a man once described as "daring and fearless in his choice of roles, and unafraid to crawl out on a limb, saw it off and remain suspended in air" by legendary critic Roger Ebert. Today, Nicolas Cage is better known for outrageous, over the top performances than he is the fun and creative characters he used to play, like when he won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1995 for Leaving Las Vegas. Due to insane overspending and bad accountants, Nicolas Cage is forced to take any role he's offered due to the staggering amount of money who owes to the IRS.

Meanwhile, this is where I stand: I'm at the crushing end of a five-year long relationship which has dominated the majority of my formative dating years, meaning I have no idea how to be single, having not been for so long. I'm staring down the barrel of a job in the electronics department of the local Walmart that I told myself was only temporary three years ago. I don't speak to my mother, and my father and I are incredibly awkward around each other. I'm at least a full term behind in my classes, and I have all the job opportunities that are afforded to an English Lit major during a recession to look forward to. To top it all off, I recently had to admit to myself that I am in fact, a size 36 waist, instead of the 33 I've been telling myself I am since high school. I still have my writing, but at the end of the day I have to remind myself that no matter how many readers I have, I still have to wear a nametag and be treated sub-human in order to pay my rent.

As a result I find myself drawn back to Mr. Cage. In a way, we're kindred spirits, in that we both have to look at ourselves in the mirror some mornings, think of the potential everyone said we have, and wonder "What the hell happened?" And so I come back to the challenge. Just like that summer and Full House, I go back to my couch, where I will try to figure out what went wrong for Nicolas Cage, and what happened to me along the way.

Shoo-ba-do-ba-ba-DOW!