Tom Carson, one of my favorite working all-purpose, culturally omnivorous, pound-for-pound critics, wrote a wonderfulicious essay on Tom Cruise a few years that you just have to read (okay, you don’t have to read it, but if you don’t, you’ll forever be less-than-ideally equipped to understand the peculiar nature of Tom Cruise’s celebrity, and who would want that?). Carson writes:
He could so easily have been Emilio Estevez. After emerging from the fringes of the Brat Pack, Cruise ruled the dumb but rousing eighties genre that one critic pegged as the "go for it" picture, culminating with the Reaganite recruiting poster Top Gun. Then, in a masterstroke of savvy, he smuggled his way into maturity via a series of movies in which he played the junior foil to old pros: Paul Newman in The Color of Money, Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, Bryan Brown in Cocktail. (It’s almost too much of a giveaway when his junior mixologist in Cocktail calls Brown "Obi-Wan.") The cycle climaxed with A Few Good Men, in which the older hand was finally identified as Cruise’s antagonist, not his mentor. He went head-to-head with Jack Nicholson, acquitted himself decently, and never worked with an actor more imposing than he was again.
This whole master-and-disciple game underlines how much Cruise is the kind of post-Madonna presence whose movie roles are most evocative as metaphors for his career moves. The reason he’s been able to hold our attention without engaging our imagination is that his celebrity’s only topic is movie stardom itself–as an odyssey, as a chess game, as a master plan. Fundamentally, Cruise is an entrepreneur; he’d have less to talk about with Brando than Bill Gates. And more to talk about with Barney than either, since he’s his own product.
Nothing of consequence is riding on this–not the way something was felt to be riding on Robert De Niro’s fame, or even Eddie Murphy’s. (Or Madonna’s.) So Cruise’s career ought to seem vapid. Instead, because he’s so ambitious, gung-ho without ever asking himself why, and constantly strategizing–I mean, you bet he shows us the money–his pent but eerily content-free trek across the culture comes on as just as tense, and maybe as bleak, as the tale of a tycoon’s rise in Dreiser. If we identify with him, it isn’t because he plays people we’d like to be; that’s obsolete. It’s because he conducts himself like the movie star we hope we’d be–making a fortune, looking great, and getting worshiped, all with no apparent downside. To talk about Cruise’s performances as if they’re the point of his fame is to introduce an annoying middleman to our relationship with him.
