The most commercially successful works of art are rarely the most thought-provoking, the most intelligent or influential. Just take T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, for instance. Commercially, it was a complete flop, and only sold 450 copies on its first run. And yet now we recognise it as one of the most important poems of the twentieth century.
What ‘The Waste Land’ was for twentieth-century poetry, Vampire’s Kiss was for twentieth-century film. What is Vampire’s Kiss? Well, as with any work of art so multi-layered and complex, the only answer is ‘many things’.
It is the tragic tale of a man who becomes convinced that he is a vampire; it is the film which proved the incomparable ability of Nicolas Cage to convey a character’s mental turmoil in a style truly his own. More than that, it is the seminal masterpiece of Urban Psychogothic cinema.
Whether you like the film will depend on your ability to recognise Cage’s genius as a tragedian, something critics have failed to do throughout his career. Their accusations are always the same: that he can’t convey serious emotion realistically, that all he is actually doing on screen is clowning around. The only riposte which needs to be made to these criticisms is: go watch the final scenes of The Wicker Man. Nobody can question that the Cagean style is essentially a realistic one, once they have seen him running around in a bear costume punching people.
Like The Wicker Man, Vampire’s Kiss is a work of high seriousness, and Cage’s performance reflects this. The film is essentially a reimagining of classical tragedy. Like Oedipus Rex, it tracks the descent of a rich and respectable man down to the depths of depravity and despair. Many a tragedy is begun by a chance occurrence; Romeo and Juliet would never have died in one another’s arms had Romeo never gatecrashed the Capulets, and Cage would not have had to run round New York shouting “I’m a vampire!” at passers-by, had a vampire bat not, at the start of the film, interrupted his one night stand.
If Vampire’s Kiss is to be compared to any tragedy (and of course, it should be) then the closest comparison is actually to Othello, because we the audience realise that its descent into tragedy is based on a mere misunderstanding; this bat has not in fact turned Cage’s character into a vampire. He just thinks it has. So we, the audience, are painfully aware that he has no more reason to spend his days sleeping under his upturned couch (a makeshift coffin) than Othello has to strangle Desdemona.
The pathos of Cage’s descent into madness is often heart-wrenching. I challenge anyone not to shed a tear at the scene in which Cage, having convinced himself that it would be best for humanity if he did not exist to threaten it, walks the streets of New York carrying a makeshift stake made out of plywood, imploring people, “I’m a vampire! Kill me!” and then walks into a wall.
Even more pathetic (in the sense of pathos, of course) is that he then convinces himself this wall is called ‘Sharon’, and is not a wall at all but the love of his life.
