Is Matthew McConaughey the Next Nic Cage?
In the Aftermath of the McConaissance
Over the last decade Matthew McConaughey’s career has taken an unexpected arc from two-dimensional rom-com hunk upward into the coveted realm of the Serious Actor and downward again as the meme-generating star of those unfortunate Lincoln commercials. The McConaissance was short lived, and the Lincoln commercials look a lot like the lone bullet that killed McConaughey’s bid for credibility as a Serious Actor. But could one ad deal really be the single devastating nail in the frail coffin of the McConaissance? Indulge me as I deconstruct the premise of my own question: this question assumes that it is only McConaughey’s mistake(s) that could have contributed to his present decline, when in fact some of the brightest moments of his last five years (Dallas Buyers Club, True Detective, Interstellar) are as much the cause of his increasingly mockable career as his showdown with a bull in Middle of Nowhere, Western State.
But is it possible for McConaughey to bounce back? No, it is not, and here’s why: first, McConaughey is playing himself in every role, a realization that struck me when I saw this clip last week:
When Matthew McConaughey came out of the womb he brushed cigarette ashes off his mustache and said, “I got a bad taste in my mouth out here: aluminum, ash.” By day two he was coughing up sentences like, “Death created Time to grow the things that it would kill. And you are reborn, but into the same life that you’ve always been born into.”
The man is already a caricature of himself. That isn’t changing any time soon. But there is this also: Matthew McConaughey is the next Nicolas Cage.
If that doesn’t send seismic ripples through your forecasted cultural landscape of the next decade, then I don’t know what will. Allow me to explain.
First, who is Nicolas Cage? A washed up actor with a never-ending midlife crisis who has put the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to shame by taking every movie offer available to him, yes, but more importantly, he is the scape goat of a cultural economy that necessitates the existence of a firm and reliable punching bag. This is to say that actors like Nic Cage add coal to the cultural steam engine as much as Leonardo DiCaprio or Matt Damon. We need the people at the bottom, just like we need the people at the top. And it’s not just actors — every cultural subdivision has its own personal punching bag.
There are a few major stipulations defining any member of the Nic Cage Club: (1) a constituent must, at some earlier point in their career, have been popular and/or respected, (2) a constituent must have made a mistake at some point in their career that lost them critical and popular respect, (3) for the remainder of a constituent’s career the aforementioned mistake must duplicate itself to the point of meme-generating absurdity, and finally (this is a big one) (4) the latter day state of the constituent’s career must eclipse prior success such that the world in which the constituent was taken seriously is now practically unimaginable.
In pop music, it’s Pitbull, in hip hop it’s (probably) (and sadly) Lil Wayne, in recent politics it’s Chris Christie, in sports it’s Derrick Rose, and in rock music it’s Nickelback. They exist in every cultural quadrant, though Nic Cage and Nickelback happen to be the two that have transcended their industries to achieve internet meme ubiquity. In the case of Nic Cage, he found early career success in Raising Arizona and Moonstruck but his seeming incapacity to turn down a role or discern an ill-conceived movie eventually relegated him from Serious Actor to industry joke. Nickelback, similarly, achieved ‘90s post-grunge megastardom before their excessively grizzled sound and playboy rockstar lyrics began to hit such a redundantly stereotypical chord that the band became an ugly caricature of its declining genre. A world in which Nic Cage and Nickelback are recognized as serious artists now sounds like the next episode of Black Mirror. The ‘90s, man.
And so it will go for Matthew McConaughey. Each of McConaughey’s big break Serious Actor roles, in retrospect, emphasizes the very qualities that construct present and future punch lines. Just as historians mark The Last Supper as the start of the High Renaissance in Italy, so they will designate the 2011 film Bernie as the beginning of the McConaissance. Here McConaughey’s supporting role as a slow-talking Texas attorney sets the tone for his Serious Actor run over the next five years. In 2012's Mud McConaughey stars as a wayward Southern antihero whose enigmatic language emphasizes his lone wolf ethos. In Magic Mike McConaughey lampoons his own cowboy persona in his brief appearance as a Texan stripper outfitted in a leather vest (quickly removed of course), tight leather pants (deconstructed), bejeweled lone star belt buckle (tossed away), and ten gallon hat (somehow the last to go). The role was a brilliant move of self-deprecation for McConaughey that might have come a few years too soon since 2013's Oscar-winning Dallas Buyers Club performance, though critically hailed, entrenched him further into his smooth-talking modern cowboy pigeonhole.
In the moment, however, that Oscar win ushered in the full-blown pinnacle of the McConaissance where McConaughey stole headlines as a chest-thumping, coke-fueled investment banker in The Wolf of Wall Street, in a spooky performance as a rogue bayou detective in HBO’s hit first season of True Detective, and as a farmer turned intergalactic explorer in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. The five-minute Wolf of Wall Street cameo withstanding, peak McConaissance played further into the mumbling and excessively enigmatic stereotype that McConaughey was then building, and Interstellar only proved that he could take his macho man charisma and deep-voiced abstractions to outer space.
And then the Lincoln commercials hit. They were funny and absurd because they took McConaughey’s deceptively dumb cinematic monologues and stuck them in objectively dumb situations, stripping away the veil that had previously made his slurred truisms sound (at best) appropriate, and (at worst) redeemable. They were far more the straw that broke the McConaissance camel’s back than the single lethal bullet for the epoch.
Since those commercials debuted McConaughey has starred in The Sea of Trees (you probably missed this one — it grossed just over $825,000 on a $25 million budget and currently holds a steady 10% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and Free State of Jones, another archetypically Southern rebel role for McConaughey, another abysmal box office performance. Forthcoming for McConaughey there’s Gold, an action-drama about modern American treasure hunters (sound familiar?), and Dark Tower, the Stephen King-Western adaption that, no matter how it performs, will immortalize McConaughey like this.
The world needs Nic Cage, but the Nic Cage watering hole may not giveth for eternity. Jokes get old, and the internet looks for new punching bags. Don’t be surprised when it’s Matthew McConaughey, no longer Cage, taking the battering of the internet’s wild fists.
