Tom Cruise has fallen off his perch, the Midas of Motion Pictures, the ace in a fly-boy suit, the original "Top Gun", the Hollywood Jet-Fighter: on-screen and off who always seemed to be able to hit his target especially if it was the box-office has come careening off his celluloid throne. Undone by none other than Tom Cruise, apparently. It would seem that Tom Cruise bought the line that unless your life is being recorded it's not worth living (hence the endless forays to Oprah's white couch, shot after shot of Tom in a crowd, Tom in Germany, Tom in Manhattan, Tom, Tom, Tom at Tom's premiere and yet another one of Tom at Tom's premiere with his zombiefied Katie doll supernaturally glued to his side, legs akimbo, eyes wide and blankly open, the ultimate Stepford wife).
What set off the anti-Tom rebellion? His bizarre promotional blitz of his love affair with a teenage acting Katie Holmes revealed a certain kind of creepiness that everyone suspected was there - the blind allegence to all things Scientology, no sensible person would honestly follow the dicates of L.Ron Hubbard, and the whispers of Tom's homosexuality which are too frequently debated to not believe, on some level, must be true. Once the cracks became visible on Tom's carefully contructed shinier-than-thou persona - there was no going back. Even the audience as it watched yet another preview for Mission Impossible Three, as Tom speedboats, gets blown up, recovers only to get blown up again, and Philip Seymour Hoffman's beady eyes glistened with hambone delight at being a good actor playing the ultimate bad guy, to shots of Tom as he heartily kissed his love interest, a brunette that didn't look entirely dissimiliar from Ms. Holmes, despite the onslaught of images edited around one overriding concept (to make Tom's character, Ethan Hunt, but really just Tom look like the ultimate multi-national hero) you could still sense that the movie-going public didn't buy it - instead the prevailing sentiment of viewers seemed to be "I think that guy's kind of a wierdo now."
Tom seemed all powerful not to long ago like America itself; it seemed as if the man and the nation could do no wrong, bouncing back from every conceivable set-back with a bigger movie (last summer it was a Spielberg flick for which he got paid $100 million dollars) and a better photo-op. The problem is the audience can no longer be convinced to just sit back, in the dark, and escape into his invincible grin, the kilo-watt smile has taken on a faustian quality and it is almost possible to believe Tom signed on the dotted line long ago.
Eventually, the devil comes to claim his debt and to think otherwise is just... a mission impossible.
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