The Masculine Power of the Handshake
Nicholas Cage, Pig, Fatherhood, Masculinity, and Handshakes. Need I say more?
In this article, I will be discussing the movie Pig starring Nicholas Cage. I hope you have already seen it, but if you haven’t please watch it as soon as possible and then come back.
I first saw the film Pig when it came out in 2021, and did a second viewing of it last night while nestled on a comfy couch with my girlfriend in a fruit-fly infested AirBnB. While I was already in love with the movie when it first premiered, watching it again with someone I care about unlocked in me a joy so profound that I find myself scarcely able to give the plot a proper outline.
It’s not because the movie is difficult to describe (in fact it’s quite simple), it’s just that the excitement over discussing my experience of the film is frothing so violently over the brim of my mind mug that I don’t even feel like doing the usual “cinema recap” that’s usually tagged onto the front end of a properly formulated critique. No time. I just want to get into it, man. I want you to get into it, too, and so you’ll have to forgive the fact that the momentum of this essay might not leave space for you to ease into it.
In other words, proceed at your own hazard as any recap of the movie will be sporadic and embedded in a larger context of the analysis I wish to provide. Namely, I will be talking about the film through the lens of masculinity, and how the film is a masterful explication between so-called “toxic masculinity” and what my bro Jay Rollins refers to as “Tonic Masculinity.”
So if you haven’t gotten the point by now, I’ll spell it out as clearly as possible: if you scroll past this picture of Nicholas Cage going gleefully insane, then you are entering SPOILERS territory. Go watch Pig.
Nicholas Cage is my favorite actor. I know, I know - loving Nicholas Cage as an actor is always some sort of “statement.” But I want to be clear that he is my favorite actor, which does not mean I think he is the best actor (that accolade obviously goes to Tom Cruise, especially when he is playing the role of “Tom Cruise,” such as in the movie called “A Movie with Tom Cruise.”)
That’s not to say I love Cage “ironically;” I do sincerely love his bravely wackadoo acting choices, but what I love the most about him is the commitment he has to every role. Win, lose, or draw, Cage knows no other speed than super ultra turbo plaid. It’s as if he reads a script, lights a cig, sits for no more than five minutes, decides who his character is, stubs the butt, and never turns back. There’s no room for doubt when it’s MOVIE TIME mother-effers.
Sometimes the result is a marvel, sometimes a gas, and sometimes an intensely bizarre experience, bordering on upsetting. His method acting (a form he hilariously refers to as “nouveau-shamanic” lol) has been at times so severe, that it disturbs the other actors and crew while on set, such as when he got two teeth removed without anesthesia for his role as a traumatized Vietnam soldier in Birdy. Sit your ass down Jared Leto, your method acting is as inferior to Cage’s as the analgesia of Tylenol is to Fentanyl.
(I would be remiss to not also mention that, following the agonizing extraction of his teeth for Birdy, Cage then wore a bandage around his head for several weeks, leading to a severe skin infection on his face. Whether or not this outcome was intended is unknown, as part of his stated motivation for doing so was not only to understand the pain of his character, but also to disfigure his face to the level he felt was required to satisfy the verisimilitude of his role. Dude absolutely rules).
So needless to say, I was more than excited when I saw the first trailer for Pig, in which a bedraggled, blood-splattered Cage stalks around the forest looking to exact revenge on some dope-sick dickhead tweakers for fucking with - you guessed it - his pig. Hell yes. Did I think this plot was ridiculous? You bet. Did I wonder how you could fill an hour and 31 minutes with a pig-based narrative? You’re damn right I did. Did I care? Absolutely fucking not. I am a lifelong Cage-head, and that means you’re either all in or you’re a punk, and I refuse to be a punk. Not to mention, I had just finished my third viewing of Mandy a week prior, and so I was under no illusion that Cage needed something as trivial as a “coherent plot” to spin straw into movie gold.
(Sorry, but I have to do another aside to give the strongest recommendation possible for Mandy. Even my best friend - who absolutely hates horror movies - agreed that Mandy: A.) was totally fucking metal and B.) rules so fucking hard. So yeah…make sure you catch that one at some point when you’re in the mood for watching Nick Cage snort a boatload of cocaine after throwing an axe into the spiked helmet of a member of a satanic motorcycle cult. Future essay? Probably. Subscribe now!)
I know that we’ve all had our fill of revenge films. It’s been a long time since we first reveled in Denzel Washington blowing up a cartel shithead by placing a bomb in his rectal cavity in Tony Scott’s ass-blasting 2004 masterpiece Man on Fire. And while most of us loved Taken, and maybe Taken 2, I don’t think there’s many people who could give me the elevator-pitch explanation for the plot of Taken 3, and I’m not fully certain whether or not there even is a Taken 4. I’m not sure anyone really knows, but if there is a part 4, you have to wonder how Liam Neeson felt talking about his “special set of skills” for the fourth time. Are they really that special anymore?
Who knows. The point is that we all need a cooling off period before we’re ready to see another aging actor rescue their daughter from vaguely-Baltic terrorists. Suffice to say there are peaks and troughs in any genre, and revenge films are in a bit of a trough. But watching the trailer for Pig, I didn’t care about any trough other than the one the titular character would be munching from while standing loyally to the side of our unhinged anti-hero as he gleefully tore his extremely unlikable foes apart with psychotic gusto.
Cage’s acting can bring life to the most overplayed of genres. Case in point: I think I’ll actually puke if I watch another single minute of a zombie film or tv show - unless it was starring Cage. Why? Because when you put Nicholas Cage in a zombie movie, it’s no longer a “zombie movie.” It’s a Nicholas Cage movie. I don’t really know what that would mean, but I do imagine there would be at least one scene in which a horde of zombies gradually slow to a halt and then start running the other way as the camera pans over and we see Cage chasing after them, eyes ablaze, garden hoe in hand, hairline receding into the horizon, forehead stabbing skyward, yelling out something along the lines of “come here you decrepit zombie FUCKERS!!!” My God it would be beautiful to see. One day, inshallah. One day.
When I finally made my way to the theater to see Pig - in the usual Nicholas Cage viewing format (by myself, mad at all of my friends for “taking a pass” on yet another modern masterpiece) - I was ready to be blown away. I was ready to be enthralled. I was ready to laugh my ass off, cheer, maybe even clap. Who cares - I’d probably be the only one in the theater. To be a lifelong Cage-head is to be ready for anything.
Anything other than for what I got.
I was absolutely blown away.
Okay, I need to stop once again and insist that you really consider watching this movie before you proceed. I know from personal experience that many of you who haven’t yet seen it are probably rationalizing your choice to bypass my spoiler warning, thinking that my summary of it will at least partially capture the sensuous experience of watching Pig for yourself, but it won’t. This is doubly so because this movie is now two years old, and so the imaginary window that most of us have in our heads for when we will see a movie has already passed, and so now you’re going to just skate by on a second-hand description. Please don’t. Please watch Pig.
Alright…we good? Good. Here we go.
I want to be very clear about how I feel about this movie, and to do so I’m going to carefully choose some adjectives. I want you to know that I kind of hate adjectives in writing, and often loathe in private my over-usage of them. But such is the importance of this description that I will fully lean into the adjective game, and I promise that none of these modifiers will go to waste:
Pig is one of the most beautiful, heart-breaking, inspiring, powerful, and humane movies I have ever seen.
This movie was nothing like I expected it to be. It is also nothing like you expected it to be. It is nothing like anyone expected it to be, and that is not only good fortune for us viewers, but also an absolutely intentional choice. While the trailer hinted at a bloody tale of satisfying revenge, it was the presence of Cage himself - and his proven track record of on-screen derangement - that is perhaps the greatest dupe of all. Michael Sarnoski, in his first ever (!!!) directorial role, knew exactly what he was doing. He knew what he was doing not only with the script, but with the raw resource of Cage’s presence itself. Our brains do something when we see Nicholas Cage attached to a project, and Sarnoski knew this. There are only a few actors whose talent burns so brightly that it can either illuminate a film or burn it to the ground, and Cage is most certainly one of those few.
Enjoying Nicholas Cage is a lot like enjoying The Room and Room in equal measure. As often as Cage leaves me in stitches, he just as often leaves me spell-bound, weeping, and intensely moved. My favorite movie to this day remains 2002’s Adaptation, and despite the many moments of extreme silliness in that movie…
…it also has just as many moments that are tender, romantic, harrowing, transcendent, and morally profound. If you haven’t seen it, I want to give you a challenge: watch Adaptation and then tell me which scene brought you closest to tears. I guarantee that, without a single prod or cue from me, you will name the exact scene I am currently thinking of. Bet you two quid.
But then, if I am suggesting that Pig defied my expectations of the typical Nicky Cage experience that I know and love, then why oh why am I so enamored with it? Well, besides the fact that it gave our boy an opportunity to advance into new terrains of his acting range, he also seems to have deeply enjoyed making Pig. One stupid YouTube “google auto-complete” interview even has Cage admitting that this was his favorite movie he’s ever been a part of it, and that it was his proudest role. After a decade of absurd folly and highly publicized misfortune for the eccentric actor, it’s just nice to see him enjoying himself and happy with his work.
Yet it’s what the film has to say about masculinity that pushes this film beyond my normal level of appreciation, and further into the territory of something spiritual. Not every movie can do this, and among those that can, it doesn’t mean it will do so for everyone. But for some vaporous reasons that I can’t quite swing a lasso around in a single sentence, I feel that the readers of this substack have higher odds of feeling the same way. For it is my faith in my subscribers that allows me to trust that you all - like me - are willing to enter the mind space necessary to speak of masculinity in terms that reach beyond the unimaginative limitations so oft-prescribed by our present dullard culture.
Pig, like so many other films, is one about fathers. There are actual fathers in the movie, such as the father of Amir (a supporting role excellently rendered by one of my rising faves, actor Alex Wolff) who treats his douchebag son with UChicago-MBA-psychopath levels of surgical paternal coldness and distance. There is also Cage’s sullen reclusive character himself, a smelly forest-hermit who Amir initially refers to simply as “Rob,” but who is later revealed to be someone named “Robin Feld,” a name that was glimmering in the light of Michelin stars just ten years prior. While we don’t know the full story, it becomes clear that Robin is a shell of his former self, which was once upon a time a chef whose name was worthy of mythological levels of reverence in the Portland restaurant scene.
That was a long time ago, and now Robin spends his life wasting away in the muffled silence of a rickety wooden cabin under the cover of the towering Redwoods of the Pacific Northwest. His wife is dead. Probably. And he’s sad. It’s all a little unclear, and there are few answers in sight. But by the end of this movie the viewer is somehow okay with all of the vagueness, nourished with the deeper truths of the story instead of nitpicking details.
So anyway, for the simple price of weekly deliveries of groceries and supplies, Rob provides Amir with a luxury supply of foraged truffles that he spends the week digging up with the help of the nose of his trusty pet pig. The unnamed pig not only seems to be the only thing that Cage cares about, but she also serves as the only source of Rob’s income, companionship, and purpose. Surprise, surprise…the sweet little pig is kidnapped by a pair of meth-heads who knock Rob unconscious as they shove the pig’s scream-oinking porcine body into a bag and cart her away. Robin wakes up later, bloody and disoriented. The pig is gone.
Rub your hands together people - here comes vengeance.
Well…not quite. While just about every single beat of this movie compels you into a frenzy of anticipation as you salivate over the prospect of some wicked badassery around every corner, it never quite arrives. Rob finds the perpetrators, two sunken-eyed addicts who didn’t even know what they were doing or why they had to kidnap a pig. With the help of the members of the nefarious underground truffle business (intentionally and kinda winkingly absurd in its portrayal of the trade as a quasi-cartel operation), Rob and Amir are lead directly to the track-marked mobile home of the pig-thieving couple. They are CORNERED. They are DONE FOR. They are…
…questioned about the pig and overall are just not much help.
No beat down. No snapping of femurs. No bodacious one-liners. No righteous torture. Nothing. Nada. In fact, we don’t even see the end of the conversation.
Fudge.
Okay. Okay…I mean…no matter, right? I mean…this is a REAL MAN and REAL MEN don’t have time for junkies. They need to move straight to the head of the operation. And that means we get back into the car and press into the city itself. The epicenter of corruption, with scumbags around every corner. It’s been a decade since Rob was the Robin Feld, but his mere reappearance leaves the most hard-boiled denizens of the Portland foodie-industry with their jaws wagging in disbelief. Everyone thought he was dead…but he’s not.
He’s back bitch. And it’s clobbering time.
This ain’t no street fight, either. It’s an underground fight; one that must be accessed through a hidden doorway, down through the basement of a hotel that used to shine bright in the Portland skyline, but nowadays you can’t even find it on a map. Rob doesn’t need a map, though. He remembers the path, and he brings Amir right along with him.
Deeper. Deeper. Deeper into the bowels. Our Orpheus descends into the bowels of hell to reclaim his curly-tailed pink-snouted Eurydice.
Servers and line chefs swig on bottles of cheap swill as they watch their peers bareknuckle box each other into bloody pulps. Rob approaches the fighters’ registration table, and all eyes in the room are glued to the massive frame of this living legend as he takes off his coat.
He was supposed to be gone.
He was supposed to be dead.
He was supposed to back down.
But he didn’t back down. He marches right up to the dust streaked chalkboard and writes his name in stabbing, definitive white lines. Doesn’t matter who his opponent will be. He needs his pig, and nothing else matters. Rob rolls up his sleeves, his head rises and he meets the scowling visage of his opponent. It’s time. Rob straightens his body, cracks his knuckles and…
…and gets the shit kicked out of him for about 70 seconds.
The bell rings. It’s over. Rob is flat on his back, head hanging limply to the side. His face is bloodied and mutilated by the flurry of blows laid upon him by a 5’6” busboy in a red vest. A busboy. In a red vest. Ten seconds of silence and then…a cough. He’s not dead yet. But the fight is…over? I guess he just had to like…survive? To get paid? He survives, but not to get paid. Instead he gets a single sheet of paper with a name. He folds the paper and leaves.
WTF?
I could carry on with this little “thing” I’m doing here, but you get the picture. The epic showdown never arrives. The plot inflates and deflates over and over again. Amir and Rob move from place to place, getting only small tips, little clues, another lead. In between each locale, we learn a little more about Amir. While we were damn near certain this character was a vain little shit for the first 20 minutes of the movie, we are starting to kind of…feel for him? Especially when we learn that his father is the absolute king of all bastards, and also the BMOP (“Big Man of Portland”). He’s the big bad, and his cruelty and indifference left Amir with little choice in life but to fight the borders of his father’s shadow casting over him by sharpening his own knife with narcissism and meaningless pursuit of wealth and status.
Amir knows the basic contours of the industry, even if only in form rather than function, but his superficial quest for the prizes he thinks he needs to win in order to impress his father certainly do not impress Robin. Cage’s character demolishes Amir’s pathetic attempts at being a big shot not with direct derision, but instead by reacting in a completely non-plussed way. It’s as if Amir’s entire life philosophy is so trite that it’s barely worth the notice of Rob, like a soft breeze passing his face, the kind of breeze so slight you don’t even squint.
Color us unsurprised when we learn that it was Amir’s father himself that was behind the whole pig-napping. Amir, partly from his naivety but also from his lingering unresolved desire to earn the love of his emotionally inaccessible father, told his father all about Robin and his pig the minute he started buying truffles from him for pennies on the dollar. His father, being the total piece of shit that he is, decided to forcefully co-opt the enterprise so as to put it in “more capable hands” as he explains to Rob in a fittingly non-explosive confrontation.
As for Amir’s mother, we soon learn that she “killed herself” after many years of a loveless marriage with his dad. Amir attempts to seem casual about this, as if it’s some ancient remnant that he has already processed, packaged, and filed away as a distant relic. But Wolff’s excellent acting provides a summarizing soliloquy on the tragedy that we immediately recognize as a canned speech, and one that is the betrayal of any actual truth.
We have known from the beginning that Amir is a boy playing in a man’s world. But it’s not until the final act of the movie that we begin to fully understand how this all-too-common failure to launch into manhood is far more worthy of care, pity, and nurturing than it is of laughter and derision. Shame on us for placing Amir so neatly in that stereotyped toxic-masculine package that we spend our days on Substack bristling against. If even I did that to Amir’s character, then the hollering rabble of twitter would surely do him thrice as dirty.
Amir is a human, uniquely wounded, imperfectly coping, desperate for a dad.
Like anyone who is afraid and hurt and broken, Amir wishes for nurturing. He thinks he needs that to fix him. And he does, just not in the way he imagines. All people, be they men or women, have the same reference points for safety: the womb first, and the arms of the mother in second place. There is a piece inside the tip of the center of the middle of the brain that always longs for this. For certain, being held by the mother, staring into the perfect beauty of her eyes, seeing ourselves reflected back to us, knowing nothing but love and warmth and belonging is something we strive for every time we curl our bodies into a fetal position in our beds, each time we lose ourselves in the gaze of a lover.
But being a man means putting that bullshit away. Right? Being a man means taking a deep breath and settling at last for the consolation prize: if we cannot have the love of the mother, and if we do not think the father is capable of anything close to that love, then - at the very least - we hope for the only atavistic prize that remains: the father’s approval.
Amir, even though in open rebellion, longs for this approval. In finding that a straight path to this approval was unlikely from a cold man like his father, he opted for the backup scheme so many of us with hard fathers undertake. If approval is not given, it must be taken. Right? Amir attempts to earn approval through resistance, competition, and force. If the father will not give the approval straight away, then perhaps he would surrender it while kneeling in defeat before his son’s feet.
On the other hand, we have Rob. Rob was seemingly no different than Amir’s dad. He was just as distant and unkind as his father, and a “has been” and a “nobody” at that. To Amir, Rob was just like his father, saved only from his capability to provide Amir with revenue and, perhaps, the means to mount his uprising.
But there was one key difference, and it is a subtle one. While both Rob and Amir’s father were hard men, greedy with their affections and unyielding in their drive, their reasons for such a stoic and frightening orientation was different. Amir’s father shut off his son completely, probably because his son reminded him too much of his dead wife (who we find was never really dead, but instead kept on life-support in perpetuity due to his dad’s inability to fully let her go), that he was afraid that if he opened the door to his son even an inch, the tidal wave of hurt would be so overwhelming it would consume him whole.
Like so many people in movies who say “I’m a business man,” Amir’s dad (again, wonderfully acted by a granite-faced Adam Arkin) sets up a Rube Goldberg machine of rationalizations for keeping himself closed off and compartmentalized. The purpose for existence for men like this is always to simply get “more value,” even if their means of extracting value come at the expense of those things which we all know are the actual, honest-to-god, real sources of any value on this cursed planet. There was no way his father would ever approve of Amir, because approving of him would not only be a surrender of his last bastion of “purpose,” but also an acknowledgement that the woman who made Amir was gone.
Rob is similarly stunted and unable to let go. As the movie winds down, we begin to wonder if the titular “pig” was no different than a beloved partner kept on life-support; both fleshy entombments of memory that form the type of knotted emotional limbos that so many humans waste entire lifetimes trying to unravel (and often fail). The difference was that Rob’s masculinity was based on love, while Amir’s father’s supposed masculinity was formed from the clay of fear and regret. Masculinity that comes from fear seems the same “stuff” as masculinity that emerges from love, but that which comes from fear is always far more brittle. Always.
Rob still had a shred of tonic masculine energy to share with Amir. Because of this, he gives Amir something that only a father can give - a handshake. Sure, anyone can shake a hand, but it is the handshake of a father that can empower boys to grow ten feet taller, for boys to become men who run toward danger, to turn their back and shield their children from a volley of bullets, to rip a kidney out of their back and give it to someone who has more life left to live than them. A hug is the embodied love of a mother; it reassures and tranquilizes. It loves you no matter what. It is the invaluable generosity and selflessness of a mother’s love. It is the tree who gives until barren.
But a handshake is different.
A handshake doesn’t make a boy feel warm and fuzzy. Doesn’t make them feel safe or cared for.
A handshake makes a boy feel like a man.
A handshake looks the same in both directions. It is equal, symmetrical. It is done with both parties reserved and respectful, looking each other in the eyes. A handshake between a father and a son is a form of love that says: “you don’t need to get a hug anymore. It’s time for you to be the one that gives hugs to someone else.”
To protect those who need protection. To lift others who have fallen. To stand up to those who take without earning, to those who use fire to destroy instead of giving warmth, to those who consume love and give nothing in return. To those who try to control with fear.
This is the power of the handshake. It is a transfer of masculine energy. The handshake means you stand up. It means that you don’t solve problems with money, that you don’t tell people things that aren’t true, that you prove your worth not with seeming good, but by actually being and doing good. The handshake holds no turbulence like the hug. No ears are smashed into tear-soaked shirts in the handshake. Just eyes looking at eyes, mutual leverage, vulnerability and power, need and generosity, honesty.
I have never seen a movie like Pig. I don’t think I’ll ever see one like it again. But I think it’s just one of those pieces of art that are too big to limit to a Blu-Ray or On-Demand click. It is a movie that asks you to write its lessons upon the Earth, one that beckons you to stand the fuck up and be a man; a man who proves his worth not by fucking and fighting and fleeing, but by taking a million punches to save even a single pig.