That F@%*ing Scene : Max California, smut peddler
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Nicolas Cage is one of these actors who overshadows everything by his mere presence. His career became so weird and off-putting at the turn of the millennium, every movie he’s involved with automatically become “a Nicolas Cage movie”. A weird and off-putting oddity one can only watch with detached amusement. For twenty something years now, it’s been increasingly difficult to take him seriously.
The reasons why Cage became so weird are more complex than they seem, but it’s safe to say he damaged the legacy of projects he was involved with.
For example, the movie 8MM is widely remembered for being the movie where Nicolas Cage chases a murderous gimp from Los Angeles to New York. It’s a low-key great 90s thriller that gets overshadowed by historical hindsight and today, I want to shed light on how it amounts to more than the sum of its parts. It’s a film that does a lot of little things well and that should stand on its own, out of Nicolas Cage’s weird expressionist shadow.
Let’s dig through a seemingly banal exposition scene that is anything but banal.
What is so cool about a square and a punk rocker talking shop together?
I’ve identified three reasons:
1) They’re two Americas bridging the gap between each other. Notice how Nicolas Cage’s character Tom Welles is wearing a leather jacket and Joaquin Phoenix’s character Max California is wearing leather pants? One is wearing it as an accessory to blend in. He can remove it at any time and become his boring self again. The other would be literally half-naked without it. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but leather is kind of important in this movie.
It is a visual indicator or moral decay.
There are two Americas in 8MM. The normal, righteous one that fosters nuclear family and the one righteous America is afraid of. This was very much a concern back then in the early internet that horny, gullible youth and shadowy rich perverts were corrupting society in a soul-sucking metropolis like Los Angeles or New York and this scene is kind of a compromise between this belief and the awkward reality. Tom Welles is awkwardly confronting urban legends.
2) Max California is low-key the best character in this film. Everyone seems to have forgotten that Joaquin Phoenix plays in 8MM and that he’s pretty darn great in it. If it would’ve been made in 2021, I have no fucking doubt Max California would be the main character and that Tom Welles either wouldn’t exist or would be relegated to a marginal role. He’s the interesting character who’s looking for purpose after his hopes & dreams got crushed by L.A.
In many ways, this scene introduces the real protagonist of this movie. The one who has more to lose than his moral virginity. Even from an existential point of view. Max feels like a loser illegally working a dead end job in a sex shop and brokering Tom in the (very fictional) L.A underground porno community is a way for him to use his talents for good. His pledge for relevance in an uncaring world is what makes 8MM more than a run-of-the-mill thriller.
That’s why you can’t take your eyes off Max.
3) It unwittingly shows another side of L.A. A lot of what 8MM claims is fiction. Internet porn showed us a couple years later that no extreme underground snuff porn existed. That it was all available mostly for free in the comfort of your own home. But one thing it unwittingly got right in this scene is showing the worn down, ratty side of Los Angeles. The sex shop parking lot is so barren that even graffiti artists seem to have abandoned it.
This scene sets the mood not for something that doesn’t exist, but for something that COULD exist and that is why it works so goddamn well. What separates alright movies from memorable ones is how they use the time that isn’t crucial to the story they are telling and one of 8MM’s memorable characteristics is it treats every scene with the respect for the audience and the attention to detail that it deserves. Even when there’s nothing going on, there’s everything.
