LA Weekly Tries to Convince Us that Tom Cruise was Railroaded

If there's someone in your life who can't understand how the media misleads, LA Weekly has offered the bunny slope of media skepticism: "How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star."

Writer Amy Nicholson should really have written this and then locked it in a vault for fifteen years. You see, she's writing revisionist history about events we just recently lived through and it's a ham-handed class in selective fact-picking and obsequiousness to the subject.

Her thesis is that Tom Cruise's public meltdown in 2005 was entirely fabricated, a combination of his inexperienced and less-powerful new publicist (his sister) and the rise of Internet celebrity gossip. The recurring motif is her contention that Cruise never jumped on a couch during his interview with Oprah Winfrey.

The comments on the article are excellent--immediately catching on to all the tricks Nicholson is pulling to make her meaningless point. Most importantly, he did jump on the couch, twice, but the writer would like us to believe that "jumping" means "jumping up and down." Since he only hopped onto the couch, and didn't act like a child on his parents' bed, she wants us to accept her contention that he didn't jump at all, as if he had stood on a couch in dignified, mature manner.

The story she constructs is that Cruise was placed before a thrilled audience and fed on the energy as a performer does, matching it with his own. A few of his for-the-crowd mannerisms were distilled into a video that made it look as though he were attacking her. This video, she says, is the source for the meme that he had gone crazy, which was amplified by the entirely new world of in-the-moment Internet gossip.

An example of her strain to spin the facts is in her off-hand mention of another appearance:

For two decades, Cruise had tried to keep the spotlight on his work. Now, it was fixated on him. Even the old guard — after years of chafing under his publicity restrictions, and finally freed from the need to appease the powerful [former publicist] Pat Kingsley — happily spun everything to fit the new narrative: Cruise was crazy. 

Guided by his sister's inexperienced hand, Cruise could only oblige, proposing to Katie Holmes and then debating the use of antidepressants (which Scientology opposes), specifically by a postpartum Brooke Shields, on The Today Show with Matt Lauer. 

Kingsley never would have let the Today footage air. But, of course, Kingsley wasn't there. "Afterward, I remember the PR people coming in and saying, 'Well, none of that stuff on Scientology and Brooke Shields, that's not going to be on the air,' " says Jim Bell, then executive producer of Today. "I started laughing and I said, 'That's probably going to be on a promo in about 30 minutes. It's going to be airing in a loop to get people to watch tomorrow morning.'"

Here's an alternative thesis, one that most people have already accepted:   Cruise has always been a nutball and Kingsley's tight control over his image prevented the public from seeing it. Let out of his cage, he showed the world that the intense characters he's played (and they're always intense) were a mirror of his own personality. But rather than being angered by lawerly misconduct or driven to succeed as a sports agent, his passion was for the tenets of Scientology.

Scientology was the third prong of his weird year. The Tom Cruise that appeared on the leaked internal Scientology video was exactly the same as his more public appearances, overly intense when serious, manic when happy and, as he called Matt Lauer, glib--he could speak paragraphs to any question he was asked.

What Cruise's "breakdown" indicated was not that the media was out to get him but that the real and unfiltered Tom Cruise is strange. Nicholson would have us believe that the previous lock-down on his private life was because he wanted the press to focus on his work. And while the media is ravenous when a weakness appears, the truth is that Cruise needed to be hidden away, lest his eccentricity sour the public.

Nice try, Nicholson, but you gave the whole game away.