Dignity, Always Dignity: Longlegs (Oz Perkins, 2024)
Like they say, "you can't choose your projects." (They don't say that.)
Welcome back! Before you get to the newsletter, I will remind you, as always, of the impending books:
Be Not Afraid, my horror comic with Lisandro Estherren, is out in June and currently open for pre-order at your local comic shop. You can also pre-order the non-fiction book DILF: Did I Leave Feminism, due out in October. I hope you do.
Also, we're only two months and change out from DC Pride.
For a long time, Nicolas Cage was one of the cheapest special effects in Hollywood. In the early 2010s, Nicolas Cage was effectively penniless. He’d lost $150 million of his own money and owed another $6.3 million to the IRS. In order to get out of debt, Cage started taking every role he was offered. Big movie, small movie; bad movie, good movie; known director, unknown director; art film or action film or no-budget erotic-thriller-about-reincarnation, it just didn’t matter. If you made a movie, Oscar winner and blockbuster action star Nicolas Cage would star in it, practically for free.
If this were a story about another actor, it would be a sad one, about the long, slow death of fame and the squandering of artistic potential. Instead, it turned out to be the move that cemented Cage’s legacy. It turned out that, even if you were making an amateur movie for $15 in your basement — even if you were making a movie that was not good, that could never be good, that no-one aside from the filmmaker and his five best friends would ever see — Nicolas Cage refused to coast on his stardom. No matter how tiny or bad the project was, Cage would give a full-fledged Performance, and specifically, a Nicolas Cage Performance, which is to say: The weirdest shit you have ever seen in your life.
“When I was doing four movies a year, back to back to back, I still had to find something in them to be able to give it my all,” Cage said in 2022. “Some of them didn’t work. But I never phoned it in. So if there was a misconception, it was that. That I was just doing it and not caring. I was caring.”
Sure enough, it is impossible to watch these movies — or maybe any Nicolas Cage movie — without seeing that he cared. His caring mattered: Yes, lots of the movies are terrible, but some very good movies from unknown directors (say, Pig, which starts out as “John Wick with chefs” before becoming one of the most inexplicably moving things I’ve seen) got attention they wouldn’t otherwise have received, just because a real movie star was in them.
The Nicolas Cage debt run is a testament to the power of craftsmanship — of how much you can accomplish by just showing up and committing to your art, regardless of external circumstances. However, it also gave a lot of directors an excuse to be lazy with their own craft. They could put absolutely nothing into a movie, and it would still become a meme, on the strength of Nicolas Cage showing up and doing bizarre shit on camera. This, regrettably, brings us to Longlegs.