A post about Tom Cruise

  • This entry is all about the recent stuff about Tom Cruise, so if that kind of gos­sipy non­sense annoys you, ta-ta for now and I promise not to do it again. I really under­stand, because I usu­ally don’t even think about giv­ing a thought to what is mak­ing Hol­ly­wood head­lines. But I find myself a lit­tle fas­ci­nated with this one, because I can’t decide whether Cruise is being the most bizarre, or the stu­dio is, or we (the pub­lic) are. And also, there might be a hid­den reli­gious angle to all this, so maybe I’m not being totally off-topic.

    The recent story, (one write-up here) is that Para­mount has dropped him “because of his off­screen behav­ior.” Really? As opposed to Susan Sarandon’s polit­i­cal screeds, Robert Downey Jr.’s con­stant drug arrests and the offen­sive remarks and behav­ior of numer­ous other celebri­ties whose star, if no longer on the rise, isn’t being shut­tered by the stu­dio guys? Just what is it that Cruise is sup­posed to have done? The expla­na­tion always runs about the same:

    “Cruise raised eye­brows with sev­eral pub­lic­ity gaffes in the past year, includ­ing his couch-hopping appear­ance on “The Oprah Win­frey Show,” his out­spo­ken espousal of Sci­en­tol­ogy and denun­ci­a­tions of psychiatry.”

    Couch-hopping appear­ance? I have now heard about this so much that I had to go hunt it down on the inter­net. I knew it would be there, and it was. Here it is, thank­fully edited down to just get to the high­lights. Well, yeah. It’s for sure that that boy’s just not right. But then, that audi­ence just ain’t right either. Where in the world did they round up a pas­sel of women who would go into a bob­bysoxer squealfest over weird ol’ Tom Cruise? And why is Oprah act­ing like she’s see­ing a guy whose just crazy in love? Peo­ple in love don’t fid­get, gig­gle, pound the floor, jump on fur­ni­ture and act like they want to kill you. (This video doesn’t really seem that much of a stretch.) Are show peo­ple really that totally out of touch with nor­mal behav­ior? She should’ve slapped the snot out of him and told him to behave him­self. Or maybe she should have told him that for a guy who has been accused of being a homo­sex­ual for years to come onto national tele­vi­sion and leap around going “I’m in love with a woman! Yep! I’m straight and I’m high on het­ero­sex­u­al­ity, baby!” might not have been the smartest thing to do.

    Still, I can’t under­stand why Para­mount would give a rip about this. So he acted stu­pid on Oprah — big whoop. What about the “denun­ci­a­tions of psy­chi­a­try” charge? I won’t even try to hunt this down on the inter­net, because I’m afraid I’d have to watch too much of an inter­view show, and then I’d have to go directly to sleep to replen­ish the lost brain cells. But I gather that he chewed out a cou­ple peo­ple about tak­ing anti-depressants or giv­ing their kids Ritalin. Well, again, I’m not sure I see the unfor­give­able offense here, at least if the stu­dio is claim­ing to be watch­ing out for what the pub­lic thinks. Those drugs prob­a­bly are at least a lit­tle bit con­tro­ver­sial to peo­ple, and unless he did the furniture-hopping baboon num­ber on those shows too, I’d con­sider that a per­son is enti­tled to their opin­ion and even occa­sion­ally enti­tled to feel strongly enough about it to con­front someone.

    The unspo­ken truth is that Cruise prob­a­bly isn’t seem­ing like a big mon­ey­maker to the big corpo guys any­more. I get the impres­sion that oth­ers share my response to Tom Cruise: he just seems curi­ously unap­peal­ing at all times. The only movies where I’ve been able to stand him are the ones where he plays a total jerk — “Rain­man,” “Jerry Maguire” and “Mag­no­lia” for exam­ples. (Come to think of it, Cruise’s behav­ior on Oprah reminds me a lot of his “Mag­no­lia” character’s response to an inter­viewer try­ing to get him to be hon­est.) Com­ing off self-righteous by lay­ing him off isn’t likely to be a bad move with the movie­go­ers, and it may shake up a lot of big stars who think they’re untouchable.

    And then there’s the bit about him being too out­spo­ken for Sci­en­tol­ogy. I guess that’s so, but since when has a movie stu­dio been watch­ing out for my reli­gious sen­si­bil­i­ties? But as “Get Reli­gion” notes, both the stu­dio and the reporters cov­er­ing the news aren’t really spelling out what they mean by that:

    I would argue that, for mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, all of this seem­ingly bizarre behav­ior is con­nected. Many Amer­i­cans now believe that Cruise is bizarre because they con­sider his per­sonal beliefs bizarre. In short, the con­nect­ing thread is the public’s view of Scientology.

    This is hard for the media to deal with because (a) it’s hard to write about Sci­en­tol­ogy, period, in Hol­ly­wood and else­where; (b) quite a few peo­ple in the MSM con­sider all strong, doc­tri­naire reli­gious beliefs some­what bizarre; and © because all of this is linked to years of rumors about Cruise that, frankly, may never escape the world of innuendo.

    That’s just it. The great unsaid is that a lot of peo­ple in this coun­try are Chris­tians of some stripe, and a lot of Chris­tians have a prob­lem with Sci­en­tol­ogy. And a lot of sec­u­lar reporters have a prob­lem with Chris­tians AND Sci­en­tol­ogy, and so they don’t tend to shed any real light on the prob­lem because it annoys them to dis­cuss any orga­nized reli­gion with­out say­ing that it sucks.

    I still don’t think that’s enough to have got­ten Cruise fired, but maybe some com­bi­na­tion of all those fac­tors more than explains it. And it’s unlikely to make a real crimp in my day to know that he’ll only have the other forty-bajillion dol­lars he’s made to scrape by with. But he may have to set­tle for just jump­ing around on his own fur­ni­ture for a while.


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    3. Oprah’s new exer­cise: backpedaling
    4. Blog round-up
    5. So are we doing “Merry Christ­mas” or “Happy hol­i­days” or what?

    August 24th, 2006 | Grace | 7 Comments |

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