Vampire's Kiss: Renfield Un-(Nicolas)-Caged

I never thought I would preface a blog post for an English class with this, but man, Nicolas Cage doesn't get enough credit. It doesn't occur to many that some of his roles are actually pretty convincing (he won an Oscar, you guys...) but if you want a role that is simultaneously his best and worst, here it is. If you've ever seen the viral video "Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit" and were wondering where the ridiculous "I'M A VAMPIIIIIIRE!" soliloquy and the infamous scene where he recites the alphabet to his confused psychiatrist came from, this is it. The 1989 film Vampire's Kiss can best be described as an over the top psychological thriller with blackly comic overtones. I appreciate it that much more having read Dracula, especially with the parallel to that novel's depiction of male vampirism through Renfield.

He bought plastic fangs because they were cheaper.

An undercurrent of sexual repression runs through Cage's protagonist Peter Loew, who gets tired of his day job as a top publishing agent, berates his poor secretary Alva to no end, has fruitless sessions with psychiatrist Dr. Glaser, and, in one of his many one night stands, ends up bedding Rachel, a girl whom he thinks is a vampire just because she bites his throat a little. But apparently, in his words, "she's a goddamn vampire!" It seems as if screenwriter Joseph Minion, who also wrote Scorsese's crazy neo-noir After Hours, wanted to take the obvious metaphor of throats in Dracula and drag it in a little bit further. But with that said and done, one question is in the back of my head whenever I look at this film is the question: is Loew really a vampire?

A real twist on the Renfield/Dracula relationship, I'm sure.

Any sane person would say the obvious answer is no, because vampires aren't real. But Loew's sanity reaches a tipping point when he finally gets some excitement in his life, when Rachel bites his neck. Again, throats embody phallic symbols in Dracula, and it doesn't take much searching to find out that Loew, by all means a bitter guy who makes his secretary do a bunch of work and talks VERY openly with his psychiatrist about his job failures and sexual encounters, needs just one last bit of action to regress into a role he can't get out of. It makes me wonder what could have happened if the vampiresses actually bit Jonathan Harker at the beginning of Dracula.

Loew, dancing like he doesn't care.

Even then, I'm certain even Jonathan wouldn't go full Renfield and eat a cockroach on camera, turn his studio apartment into a makeshift vampire pad, get dark glasses and plastic vampire teeth (he couldn't afford the fiberglass fangs), or bite people. When he finds Rachel, she doesn't care at all...and neither does he, as he proceeds to curse her out very profusely. Indeed, Rachel is shown mainly as a figment of Loew's wild imagination up to that point, feeding on him and making him lose it that much more.

I'm not kidding about the cockroach, either. That's real.

And then there's poor Alva. Before Loew has another soulless one-night stand that turns out to be a feeding frenzy, he bites her on the throat, sexually assaults her, and almost kills her. Alva gets her brother to avenge Loew for his mistreatment, and in the final scene, where Alva's brother enacts his revenge by stabbing Loew in the chest with a crude stake from the leg of a chair in Loew's studio apartment/makeshift lair, Loew finally frees himself from his vampirism, repression, madness, and above all, ennui.

In other words, he's Uncaged! And that's a really big stake...perhaps some repressed masculinity on his part?

I may be reading a bit too much into Vampire's Kiss, even as I draw parallels to the major characters in Dracula - but especially Renfield. Loew and Renfield differ in many ways, though. Stoker does not place much of his major focus on Renfield, while Loew is this film's protagonist. Accordingly, the other characters take a backseat to him. Dr. Glaser is most definitely not the Seward type, and the motive of Alva's brother can be categorized as straight up revenge. Finally, Renfield is confined, while Loew is a publishing agent, and thus, the latter is most definitely in the 1%. Thus, it says a lot that a guy spending $$$ on therapist visits, club outings, rent for a studio apartment in NYC, and plastic vampire teeth can be compared to a man who spends his days confined in the squalid conditions of a Victorian asylum.

"R" is for "Renfield would NEVER recite the alphabet like this to Seward!"

In the end, I actually consider Vampire's Kiss to be a forerunner of psychological thriller films such as American Psycho, Nightcrawler, and Gone Girl, which all go deep into the psyches of unlikable characters and get their black comedy from the crazy stuff they do. Yet, what separates Vampire's Kiss from those would, no doubt, have to do with Cage's miraculous overacting. Nothing can hold a candle to his cockroach-eating, pigeon-catching, plastic fang-bearing work here. Nothing, I tell you.

And this film has been immortalized in another way, too: anyone with Internet meme cred knows this as his "YOU DON'T SAY" face.