The “insulting” childhood experience Nicolas Cage relived on-screen
There’s something brilliantly unique about Nicolas Cage. Though he’s certainly capable of tapping into the more emotional nuances of the acting profession, he’s carved out a reputation for himself as a performer known for one thing in particular: losing his shit in the most hilarious yet sometimes terrifying of manners.
After coming through the ranks of acting with appearances in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Rumble Fish, Cage broke through with his efforts in Moonstruck and Raising Arizona. It was in these movies that we first saw Cage go off the rails, but that facet of his talent was mastered when he played a raging alcoholic in Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas, winning the ‘Best Actor’ Academy Award in the process.
Throughout The Wicker Man, Adaptation, Mandy, Pig, and Longlegs, we’ve seen Cage go to the limits of his inner emotions, the likes of which make us wonder from which source he draws his most vitriolic and intense feelings. When speaking with Marilyn Manson in a feature with Interview, Cage once spoke of how he taps into his past to bring out his best performances.
“It has to do with life experience,” Cage admitted. “Do I have the emotional record or memories to inform the performance in a way that feels authentic?” When it came to such a moment of accessing his past, a few times in Cage’s early life were as influential as the one he used in the 2017 black comedy horror film Mom and Dad, directed by Brian Taylor.
The film focuses on a teenage girl and her little brother who must try to survive a bout of mass hysteria in their parents who try to savagely kill them. One moment in the film sees Cage’s character dementedly sing the ‘Hokey Pokey’ song: “You put your right foot in, you take your right foot out,” and he used his early memories of the song to impact his performance of it.
“I relished the opportunity to recall my frustration with the damned ‘Hokey Pokey’ song in the scene when I’m smashing the pool table with a sledgehammer while singing it,” Cage pointed out. That was the song in kindergarten where the teachers would figure out who was coordinated and who wasn’t.”
The actor said that he found the way that his kindergarten teachers used the song to separate the more coordinated kids from the less coordinated kids “very insulting,” so he decided to go “all the way back to kindergarten to find that anger,” and the proof of Cage’s anger is very much found within the scene.
One might have thought that Cage was one of the uncoordinated kids, but the truth was that he was normally able to perform the ‘Hokey Pokey’ with ease. “I knew even then, at five years old, that the Bureau of Education had created that song to separate un-coordinated kids from the coordinated,” he had also told Newsweek. “I wasn’t un-coordinated, but I was very protective of friends who were. I found the whole thing incredibly condescending, and it made me angry, so I thought of that as the most despicable scene while preparing.”
Thinking about Cage’s most intensely angry on-screen moments (there have been many), it’s always interesting to imagine just where he gets his energy from, and in the instance of his ‘Hokey Pokey’ scene in Mom and Dad, he accessed one of his early experiences of discrimination and injustice to deliver one of the film’s most terrifying (and real) moments.
