You know you're close to stalking, when you're as passionate about (obsessed with) a Hollywood star as I am about Nicolas Cage. I like him. No, I mean, I really loveeee him. I have Nicolas Cage movie posters on the ceiling over my bed, so when I go to sleep at night I have someone beautiful to say goodnight to and when I awake, I have the same gun blue eyes greeting me.
I have a cutout of a magazine cover teaser for the article about Nicolas Cage inside that reads, "Nic Cage slept here". All my notebooks are those portfolio style binders presentation, so I can slip pictures of Nicolas Cage into both outer sleeves. (Have you seen some of those pictures? Swoon.)
Of course, I own almost every single Nicolas Cage movie though I could not tell you my favorite to save my life. (Different genres, different favorites.) I have the few books written on Nic and am sure to read every interview. I love how he was invested in visiting the house he grew up in but was shy about intruding. I am tickled that the current owners begged him to autograph his wall and though reluctant, he signed a wall in their home! I get mad at him when he marries someone of whom I do not approve (he is so intellectually superior over her!) and happy for my man when he is happy taking another, more suitable wife (she’s a fine actress and oh, how he courted her!).
I have a teeny, tiny novelty cup (the size of a hummingbird’s foot), which has the name Nic on it, and I have, given to me one year at a Nicolas Cage-themed birthday party friends threw for me, a toothbrush with his name on it - so when he spends the night, well, you know.
I have a Writer’s Pen Name that has something to do with Nicolas Cage; I repeatedly drive by the address a buddy gave me for his (at that time) San Francisco house and just stare and imagine; and have, at the prompting of friends and the supplying of his PR agent and personal assistant’s contact info, called the numbers and asked, like a 13-year-old David Cassidy lover who is sure he is her husband-to-be, “Hello, is Nic available? The assistants were very kind, responding with a puzzled, “Uh. Nooo. He is working on a film up north when they could have said he doesn’t typically hang around the water cooler of the executive suites, waiting for nutcases to call.
But, mind you, being of stalker mentality, while it does not require you in any way visit or threaten your objet d’amour, does require some justification beyond “Ooh, look at his muscles, or “My God, what a voice". It requires years of careful study and rational thought. Yes, when I read an interview with him, how he just finished Karen Armstrong’s work, A History of God.
I think how alike we are and how we would have such fine topics to discuss over dinner. I identify with his feelings for his mother, who was much like mine. I love cars, as he does, and want to take him for a spin in the Monte. I agree with his philosophies and am sure he and I are twin souls.
But more, I have a respect for his métier, which he is relentless about perfecting.
Here, then, is what is so great about Nicolas Cage, along with some great trivia (that I am not the only one privy to):
Nic is the nephew of the esteemed Francis Ford Coppola. But he refused to ride the coattails of fame, getting along by his uncle’s genius and subscribing to the expectations that came with the legendary, so he re-named himself. He took the name Cage from a comic book hero, Luke Cage, and famed composer, John Cage.
Some of Nic’s movies have a touch of Elvis, whom Nic has been assigned fanatic to (though this is a myth); he actually uses a technique called
"art synthesis", wherein he melds media as part of his distinctive style: In Wild at Heart (a film by the brilliant David Lynch, who uses Nic in other works, as well), Sailor Ripley speaks in an Elvis velvet and sings to his girl, Lula, in a stunning impersonation at the films end; in Honeymoon in Vegas, Nic’s Jack Singer gets caught up in a strategy to get back his fiancé, whom he has gambled away, by jumping out a plane with a group of Flying Elvises; and in Peggy Sue Got Married he is a bastardized Elvis sort, as a quirky, nasal singing star hopeful, Charlie Bodell.
Nic is such a dedicated actor that he embraces the character and the part: he lived in his car to be a convincing rebellious Randy in Valley Girl; he ate a live cockroach (a huge one!) to be a convincing executive-turned-vampire in Vampire’s Kiss; he bulked up for his role as the platitude-spouting thug, Little Junior Brown in Kiss of Death; and he befriended and followed the lifestyle of an alcoholic (an alcohol "coach" to play Ben Sanderson, a man whose only goal is to drink himself to death, in Leaving Las Vegas.
What makes Nicolas Cage an icon goes beyond his looks, his voice, his idiosyncrasies, style, and quirks. He has always been known to be intense, wild, even iconoclastic. And at his start in Hollywood, he was sometimes received poorly, seen as over the top. (Think about his histrionics in Honeymoon in Vegas, for example, or his maudlin malcontentment, which he shares in great self-pitying soliloquies, holding up his wooden hand and screaming how he cut off his hand for his bride and his brother.)
But forging on, in characteristic ignorance of the naysayers, Nicolas Cage, the sometimes surreal other times downright silly renderer of odd or ordinary men, relentlessly held to his practice of acting, and won the Academy Award. He did it in spite of and at risk to the odds. This alone is enough to make any fanatic swoon more than usual, worship at the Nic shrine, and even, if she’s nutty enough, to attempt to contact him - a real person with hyper-real appeal.
And you know what? Nicolas Cage wouldn’t shame those of us who are obsessed. For he has had his own (questionable) obsessions. He admits it. That’s also what I loooove about him about. Even if I can’t talk to him on the phone.
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