As Wing Chun pointed out on Fametracker last week, Tom Cruise is the biggest movie star in the world right now. Everyone in the English-speaking world recognizes his face; everyone in the English-speaking world can name at least five of the films he’s appeared in, if not all of them. He commands at least $20 million per picture. Rosie O’Donnell would lie down in front of a freight train for him. But Tom Cruise’s fame is a mystery to me.

Okay, that’s not entirely accurate. I understand why he’s famous. But that famous — the most famous individual in Hollywood? It doesn’t add up. It’s my understanding, as an admittedly non-famous person, that fame proceeds according to a handful of well-defined, easily parsed trajectories, and that a famous person (well, a famous person who stays that way — these assertions obviously don’t apply to people like Vanilla Ice or Richard Hatch) generally possesses at least one of these useful qualities, or various combinations of said qualities, to wit: talent; good looks; connections of some sort; the faint but functional scent of scandal, whether substantiated or not. The fact that Tom Cruise is so very famous — to the point where the word “famous” almost doesn’t do the subject justice — would seem to suggest that he has all of these qualities, that he’s indisputably talented, good-looking, well connected, and gossip-worthy. If that’s not the case, we must assume that one of those qualities exists in or with him to the extent that he defines that quality — that, say, he’s not the best actor working, but he’s so beautiful that his attractiveness serves as the gold standard (Brad Pitt), or that he’s had unfortunate plastic surgery and reads his lines no more skillfully than a drama-club V.P. selected at random from America’s high schools, but he’s more plugged in to the Hollywood power structure than anyone else (Tori Spelling). Can we say that about Tom Cruise — that he’s got the whole range of qualities, or that he’s got one quality that puts all the others (and everyone else’s) to shame? I don’t think we can.

Let’s address the talent issue first. Tom Cruise is not a good actor. Tom Cruise is not an abysmal actor, either, but his range consists of three expressions…wait, no, two and a half: The Intense Scowl (one); The Intense Scowl With Twitching Jaw Muscle To Denote Grief Or, Depending On The Scene, Contemplation, And Sometimes Also Physical Attraction, Or Maybe He Smelled A Fart, Or Has A Toothache (one half); and of course The Grin. To his credit, he doesn’t choose roles that he can’t handle, and at this point in his career, it’s not possible for Tom Cruise to disappear into a role because, well, he’s Tom Cruise. But disappearing into a role isn’t a skill he’s ever had, really. The names of the characters change, and his hair changes, but the performance is always the same — lots of grinning, scowling, and whisper-shouting. It’s not that he’s bad, or even notably wooden, but I’d hardly call him a formidable acting talent.

And although Cruise picks his roles relatively wisely, talent-wise — nothing too challenging, nothing that could conceivably make him look bad or inept — the films in which those roles appear seldom receive critical lauds. In fact, of the twenty-odd movies he’s credited in (did you know he showed up in Young Guns? No, neither did I), several of them suck outright. Mr. Stupidhead and I used to watch Legend over and over again, and ohhhhh, how we used to laugh. Tom Cruise becoming one with his inner forest sprite never ceased to amaze and delight. I can forgive pre-Top Gun career choices like Legend and Losin’ It, though; a young actor does what he has to do. But…Far and Away? With the Irish accent? Awful. Days of Thunder? Also really really bad. Plus, he’s got a perm in that one. A man should not have a perm. And then, you know…Cocktail. No excuse for Cocktail. None.

Cruise’s other films certainly evince a savvy at allying himself with talented big-name directors like Kubrick, Scorsese, and Spielberg, but the films themselves stick pretty resolutely to the middle of the road. Others associated with those films win Oscars now and then, and Cruise has received several nominations, but he’s never bagged one himself. Of course, we can argue that the Oscars don’t always reward talent, and Cruise has picked up a handful of Golden Globes and other awards. He gives the impression of working extremely hard, and that’s something — but it’s not talent. Long story short, he’s competent, but he’s not a particularly good actor, and certainly not a great one.

And now, to the attractiveness. I will confess to a mild crush on Tom Cruise that dates from the All The Right Moves era…but I also had a crush on Jack Wagner at that time, so let’s not use me as an example. Apparently, many women find Tom Cruise attractive. I do not. He’s too short. He’s too…bandy. I don’t know how to explain what I mean by that, but I know bandy when I see it, and I don’t like it, and Tom Cruise is bandy. And then there’s The Grin. What Rosie calls magnetic, I call creepy — the sheer willfulness of The Grin, the effort he so obviously throws behind it every time, is really off-putting to me. It’s not genuine. It’s not a real smile. It’s a rictus, a calculated baring of fangs. Worse, the fangs don’t line up right. I mean, the current teeth definitely constitute an improvement over the scraggly stumps he showcased so annoyingly in The Outsiders, but instead of falling on either side of a center line, his teeth radiate out from that one icky cap that’s directly under the septum of his nose. That one icky cap, known to those who flee from it in terror merely as THE TOOTH, is so deeply disturbing to me when projected onto a movie screen that as a matter of policy I avoid Tom Cruise’s movies in the theater. But even if we disregard my personal phobia here, the fact remains that he’s not conventionally good-looking. More importantly, there’s no consensus that he’s a hottie. Some folks dig him, some don’t, but he’s not even close to Brad Pitt on the Universal Lickability Scale. Even women who don’t want to sleep with Pitt can see empirically that he’s scrumpy, but Cruise’s looks don’t work that way. In other words, whatever you think about his looks, Tom Cruise’s giant fame doesn’t come from them.

It doesn’t come from connections, either. If anything, it’s the opposite — other people’s fame comes from their connections to him. I won’t belabor the Kidman/Cruz point, except to say that Mimi Rogers obviously jumped ship too early, but it’s not an accepted fact that he’s “wired.” Well, now he’s wired, but it’s not something said about him early in his career. He didn’t Gwyneth his way into Taps or anything.

And so we arrive at the “scent of scandal” element of Cruise’s fame. Wing Chun put it quite succinctly, I think: “Tom Cruise is as famous as he is in large part because he is widely believed to be a weirdo.” Well…yes. I don’t have much to add to that statement, really, although I might fine-tune it juuuuust a bit in order to reflect my belief that anyone who sincerely and publicly believes in the principles of Scientology is a dim-witted jackass. But the assertion itself is perfect. Wing doesn’t say that he’s a weirdo, because in the end, we can’t really prove that he’s a weirdo. There’s the Scientology business, sure, and we’ve all heard things (and drawn conclusions) about the sudden and decidedly non-amiable dissolution of his marriage to Nicole Kidman, not to mention the sick-making Cruise/Cruz pairing (of which, judging from the resounding “meh” Vanilla Sky received from critics, I suspect we’ll soon see the last, and not a moment too soon, either). He didn’t kill anyone. He didn’t sleep around on Nicole. He doesn’t abuse drugs or alcohol, or get pulled over for speeding. He’s not known for berating his staff or treating fans rudely. The point isn’t that he doesn’t do these things, but that, if he does, we don’t know about it. Nothing is confirmed. Nothing is verified. Rumors have flown about the timing of the divorce and Nicole’s miscarriage and when exactly he got involved with Penelope and blah blah blah, but most of it is exactly that — rumor. “Widely believed.” The only thing we know for sure? He hates it when people say that he’s gay. HATES it. Will sue over it, for millions. Doesn’t seem to understand that pitching a hissy orders of magnitude larger than the “accusation” warrants not only makes him seem like a homophobe, but lends credibility to the idea in the second place. But even that doesn’t stick to him, really. Again, we can think what we want — and I do, believe me — but there’s no proof, unless we count the fact that Cruise keeps winning those lawsuits, which I don’t. Still, the scandals and gossip themselves aren’t the point. The point is that none of these things is enough to keep him in the public eye, either singly or taken together. And they don’t define him; the gold standard of Famous Becoming Notorious is O.J. Simpson, and Cruise is nowhere close with this stuff.

So, we can establish that Tom Cruise is not the most talented actor in Hollywood; he’s probably not even in the top twenty most talented actors. He’s not the best-looking actor in Hollywood, either; it’s a matter of taste, but even if we all agree that he’s cute, he’s got four or five cuter guys ahead of him. He doesn’t owe his career to connections. And he’s not still in the public eye because of a porn video or a drug bust or anything. No one ingredient of the fame cocktail I mentioned above distinguishes him from anyone else in Hollywood. And yet, while he possesses all of the ingredients in average degree — not terrible, not ugly, not an island, not squeaky-clean — it doesn’t seem like enough to have catapulted him to the superstardom he enjoys. Okay, he’s famous — fine. But that famous? Based on what — that Nicholson used him as dental floss in A Few Good Men? That he’s continued not to be C. Thomas Howell? What the hell?

There’s really no other conclusion I can reach, no other explanation. It’s THE TOOTH. THE TOOTH, an enigmatic entity of immense power, has hypnotized us all. THE TOOTH is the master of all which it surveys. THE TOOTH wants to star in big-budget movies; THE TOOTH would like you to know that it is not a homosexual. People in high places, powerful people with access to information unavailable to mortals like you and me, have learned through painful experience that to deny THE TOOTH is to seal their doom.

Fear THE TOOTH, my friends. FEAR THE TOOTH!

December 17, 2001

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