The National Love-Hate Relationship with Tom Cruise
5/16/2010 12:48:00 PM
kenmouse
, Posted in
The American public has such a conflicted relationship with Tom Cruise that sometimes it feels like we're all in marriage counseling together: Tom sitting on one side of the sofa and 307,006,550 of us on the other, trying to explain why we love him so much when sometimes we're not sure if we even like him.
All these colliding emotions about Tom came out last week when a video of him and his wife, Katie Holmes, mugging their way through a charity benefit performance of 'Whatever Lola Wants' went viral online. (Following copyright complaints, the clip has since mostly disappeared from the Internet.) People couldn't get enough of the couple, even though many still can't shake the feeling that something is not quite right about their relationship.
As we prepare for the marketing blitz around the June 25 release of his action-comedy 'Knight and Day' with Cameron Diaz, We thought it was time to take stock of our relationship with America's greatest movie star. He does seem a bit more subdued, as his appearance on The Oprah Winfrey show this week, minus the couch jumping, showed
Tom has had a rocky few years. The moment he began to slip from bona fide national treasure to sometime-figure-of-fun can be traced to March 2004, when he fired his longtime publicist, Pat Kingsley. At the time, Hollywood scuttlebutt was that Cruise was hoping 2003's 'The Last Samurai' would be his Oscar vehicle, and blamed his PR team for not securing him a nomination. (Cruise has been nominated for the Academy Award three times, but has never won.)
Whatever the reason they parted ways, the following years proved the wisdom of Kingsley's policy of having Cruise never discuss his Scientology faith. When Kingsley left, Cruise replaced her for almost two years with Lee Anne De Vette, his sister and a fellow Scientologist. De Vette (and Tom) felt that he should be more open about the faith that played such a big part in their lives.
This did not go down well with the public. But the snickering turned into a career-threatening backlash in May 2005, when Cruise criticized his friend Brooke Shields on both 'The Today Show' and 'Access Hollywood' for taking anti-depressants, which Scientologists do not approve of. (He later apologized.)
While that was a PR disaster of his own making, he also suffered ridicule in January 2008 when a Scientology-produced video the actor made about his faith leaked onto the Internet. And somewhere between those two events was a memorable 'South Park' episode that managed to skewer Cruise both for his religion and those pesky gay rumors.Ah, those rumors. Certainly, gossip about Cruise's sexuality has not hurt the actor's box office appeal -- at least not as of 2005, when he brought in almost a quarter-billion dollars for 'War of the Worlds.' But the more insidious damage it has done has been to create an aura of insincerity around him. When he infamously jumped on Oprah's couch to declare his love for Katie Holmes, people felt they were watching an actor acting rather than a genuine man in his 40s discussing his upcoming third marriage.
This generalized suspicion about the Cruise-Holmes union has spawned a thousand (essentially made-up) tabloid stories about their allegedly unhappy marriage. Unfortunately, they both exploit and promote an existing feeling that Tom, on some level, is not being honest with the American public.
All of those doubts are perfectly exemplified by that awkward, three-minute clip of Katie performing 'Whatever Lola Wants' at last week's private benefit, and the immediate, rushed attempts to have it removed from the Internet.
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