Pig reminds us why Nicolas Cage endures - Vox.com

Pig invites fans of Nic Cage, the meme, to rediscover Nic Cage, the movie star.

The idea of Nicolas Cage starring in a film about a truffle hunter who goes on the hunt for his stolen pig was too much.

The expectation was clear: This movie would be bonkers, so bonkers that only an actor like Cage would take the job.

We’d say it’s a career-best performance from Cage, except that, well, it is Nicolas Cage we’re talking about here.

“Other actors on the set of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Rumble Fish would tease him because he was Nicolas Coppola,” says Keith Phipps, author of the forthcoming book Age of Cage, about Cage’s career.

Even when the movie around him fell short, critics seemed to agree, Cage was pretty interesting to watch.

A few years later, in 1986, a longer LA Times profile of 22-year-old Cage opened with the actor showing off his pet baby octopus to the journalist before speaking thoughtfully about the movie business.

“That’s the Nicolas Cage performance style,” Phipps says.

Cage’s ex-business manager shot back soon with a counter-complaint, alleging that Cage’s money problems stemmed from the actor spending prolifically and ignoring warnings for years, amassing “15 personal residences,” a “Gulfstream jet,” a “flotilla of yachts,” a “squadron of Rolls Royces,” and “millions of dollars in jewelry and art” — as well as a rare, stolen dinosaur skull (which Cage returned).

How those financial struggles wormed their way into Cage’s career is at times easy to see.

That drive to never stop working and stretching, to be someone new in every film, is what marks a Nicolas Cage performance.

I feel and I imagine and I channel.” In an era when actors are often hired because they give a dependable performance, Cage is a live wire, making choices that will always astound, no matter what the movie around him is like.

Much like his fellow ’90s action movie icon Keanu Reeves, Cage’s popularity on the internet has given him a distinct identity online — yet another facet of his slippery persona.

Cage has been popular since the internet’s infancy in the ’90s, with early fan pages springing up in his honor across ancient websites and “web rings.” In the early aughts, influential meme sites like You’re the Man Now Dawg began to fill with homages to Cage’s over-the-top acting.

Cage’s memeability has both cemented his status as a cultural icon and rendered questions of whether he’s a “good” or a “bad” actor largely irrelevant: Nic Cage is simply himself.

Nic Cage being Nic Cage also seems to have carved out a lasting space in the internet’s ever-shifting topography; rather than Nic Cage starring in a number of well-known memes, Nic Cage is the meme.

(He even has his own entry on Know Your Meme.) Somewhat like early “Chuck Norris” memes where the punchline was always Chuck Norris showing up to kick some ass, Cage has become a go-to punchline if ever a situation calls for a mental non sequitur, an injection of absurdity, or a wholly wacky plot twist.

Starring a plethora of the era’s icons like Cage, John Cusack, Ving Rhames, and John Malkovich, and packed with gratuitous Jerry Bruckheimer explosions, Con Air fueled jokes across countless early internet forums.

Specifically, Cage’s antihero prison escapee became known for his laconic drawl and deadpan delivery of Dadaist one-liners like “put the bunny back in the box” — an early glimpse into future Cage extravagance:.

That’s because The Wicker Man, an appallingly awful remake of a brilliant 1973 cult classic horror movie, was destined to become the stuff of internet meme legend the moment Cage stepped on set.

The film became instantly notorious for its terrible script, garishly over-the-top scenes — moments where Cage’s character is tortured with a face cage full of bees, or punches multiple women in the face, including while wearing a giant bear costume — and Cage’s over-the-top acting throughout.

The Wicker Man sealed Cage’s reputation for injecting movies of every genre with unexpected doses of “unintentional comedy,” as WatchMojo wrote in a list of Top 10 Nicolas Cage Freakouts.

This is arguably the result of 2018’s acid-trip horror film Mandy, a riveting revenge thriller that reframes Cage’s over-the-top performativity as a spectacular exploration of grief-fueled rage?

Pig’s marketing seemed to deliberately build on audience expectations of what a Nic Cage film is — bonkers, as previously stated, with an unusual plot that trades in action movie tropes and out-of-left-field twists

It’s hard to say whether that strategy was meant to highlight Pig’s unique story or whether this kind of marketing is simply an inevitable byproduct of having Nic Cage, walking meme, attached to the film

Like Mandy, Pig might just be the rare film that can accommodate Cage the actor and Cage the meme — without trivializing either of those ideas