The Curious Case of Tom Cruise

It’s Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 opening week in the UK. The latest instalment in what, for my money, is the most consistently entertaining action franchises is, as usual, buttressed by a marking and PR machine with Tom Cruise front and centre. Much of the implicit and explicit media narrative of the press tour expands on the mythos created during the film’s troubled Covid-19 production: that in getting the film made the now 61-year-old actor/producer saved Hollywood (ergo saved the theatrical experience itself) by force of a star-auteurist power that only he possesses.

Anyone who listens to The Cinematologists Podcast regularly will know that Cruise is a subject of fascination for me. There is no one really quite like him in terms of a figure that has traversed several reformations of Hollywood infrastructure and culture. He somehow retains an iconicity, a kind of A-list+ status, that speaks to old-Hollywood, without having yet to succumb to a more “elder statesman” roles (a la Harrison Ford), and has also managed to navigate the age of social media celebrity without seeming, hmm, what’s the right word, naff?

The lengthy production and post-production of MI:DR/P1 has coincided with wider techno-cultural ructions. Discussions about the impact of AI have an apocalyptic urgency, pushing us to further question how grounding concepts such as reality and truth are subject to construction and manipulation. Without wishing to suggest the Mission Impossible franchise should be viewed as some kind of social critique, the layered (convoluted) narratives, use of impersonation (the famed masks and voice-adjusting “technology”), and general feeling that nothing and no one are what they seem, somehow capture an anxiety with the modern world.

Anticipating watching Cruise in another two age and death defying MI outings, a radical theory about his symbolism as Hollywood star in a future of total image manipulation began to percolate in my brain.

Bear with me on this.

Digital de-aging has, of course, already started to take place regularly in cinema. Synthespians, however, have been stuck in the uncanny valley, particularly when trying to recreate younger versions of real actors. Carrie Fisher’s Princess Lea had a weird animatronic aura in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). A sense of “realness” was somewhat improved upon with Sean Young’s likeness reprising Rachael in Blade Runner 2049 (2017). That the character was a synthetic human in the narrative, helped to imbue, albeit counterintuitively, a certain verisimilitude, fitting in with the central Blade Runner tension of human v replicant. These were avatars however, rather that the real aging actors, digitally regenerated.

In The Irishman (2019), the de-ageing of grandees of the New Hollywood furthered debates around aesthetics, ethics and economics of identity and recognition in film. The digital facial surgery worked effectively until the 76-year-old Robert De Niro had to get physical. A scene of a violent beating perpetrated by the supposedly young Frank Sheeran, betrayed the embodied stiffness behind the smoothed out digital mask. Digital deaging and various forms of character regeneration has been adoped seemingly as a matter of course by Disney and Marvel on both it’s film and TV properties. One could argue that the technique is vital to the ever metastasising number of Star Wars spin offs.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) has marked another stage of sophistication in the integration of de-aging into film narratives. Treating us to the young version of Harrison Ford being the rugged scourge of the Nazis, in his natural setting of late 30s Europe, director James Mangold was attuned to the candy of nostalgia which contemporary film audiences are addicted (or forced on us like it or not?) It’s 95% of the way there, with the young Indy as vibrant as he was in Raiders, with only a hint of pixelated uncanniness.

In his cinematic career, Cruise has yet have undergone the digital scalpel (as far as we know). Partly this is because he somehow holds a secret to eternal youth. One of the hot takes related to Top Gun: Maverick (2022) was the almost alien-like similarity between the aging Pete Mitchell, and his younger self in the 1986 original. You could also say the same for his co-star Jennifer Connelly. The two of them onscreen together was an eerie mix of unattainable aesthetic perfection and a kind of alienating anti-chemistry.

Cruise’s youthfulness means that any slip in the aura of Hollywood perfection, the mere suggestion that he might be, you know, normal, is sauce for the bitter, unforgiving analysis of social media. A photo taken of Cruise at a baseball game went viral with all manner of speculation and abuse. It seemed to me the tone of this wasn’t just sense of an aging star caught without the Hollywood façade that was mocked, but the affront of the “ordinariness” that was read into this image. Imagine if he had been caught eating a hot dog! 

 Furthermore, Cruise has been perhaps the most visible subject of celebrity deep-faking. A series AI assisted videos emerged on Tik Tok of what might be described as hyper-Cruise simulations created by effects artist Chris Umé with the help of a Cruise stand-in, actor Miles Fisher.  The reaction to the effectiveness of these short films, made without the economic-technological machinery of Hollywood, seemed to solidify for many, including myself, the feeling that we really are at the start of a profoundly new era.

It took me back to reading Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, a book that has been hugely influential in both academia and pop culture but was also derided as pretentious pseudo-intellectual nonsense. The Cruise videos epitomise what Baudrillard calls the fourth stage of simulacrum: “This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in the naïve sense, because the experience of consumers’ lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial ‘hyperreal” terms.” (Click here for a bit more background).

It was seeing the Dial of Destiny and then being bombarded with the marketing onslaught for MI:DR/P1, which echoed previous conversations on The Cinematologists Podcast about Cruise as star, the impact of deepfake technology and the general dystopian crisis around knowledge and truth, that has provoked what, on the face of it, is an outlandish theory.

Cruise is 61. How long can he go on being the action hero stuntman? Ethan Hunt as a character is directly linked to his highly cultivated, daredevil persona. Dead Reckoning Part 2 is slated to be realised in June 2024 and these two films have been trailed as a swan song for the character of Hunt. In interviews and PR events Cruise is starting, finally, to look at little rough around the edges, so it would seem logical that the franchise would have to come to an end with the retirement or death of Hunt (a la the end of Daniel Craig’s Bond in No Time To Die).  I doubt that audiences would accept another actor in the role (I could be completely wrong here), and I would forward that there is less possibility of spin-offs than with other franchises (although I’d watch a stand-alone movie with Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust).

But from a money-making standpoint, the Hollywood corporate machine is always reluctant to give up on a lucrative property. And from the point of view of Cruise, he doesn’t seem to want to go back to more serious dramatic roles, giving the impression of revelling in the dual position of ageless icon and Hollywood saviour.

So, what next then?

Maybe Tom Cruise has hit the perfect moment to begin a process of reverse-aging, akin to the eponymous character Benjamin Button. And I don’t just mean in one film. Digital technology will soon render synthetic human representations completely without a whiff of the uncanny. The use of de-aging will continue the drip-feeding audiences the nostalgia narcotic. At the same time, we potentially are headed for a era of total fourth order simulation, where all visual-audio material will become impossible to view as “real” in the sense we have traditionally understood. Add to this paranoid pot, the darker, murkier elements of Cruise’s Scientology. An organisation not adverse to secretive, clandestine manipulation. Indeed, the idea of keeping Cruise, alive might appeal to the science-fiction elements of this pseudo-religion.

Cruise’s return in further Mission Impossible outings is not beyond the realms of possibility, and why not take advantage of the technology to become younger and spritelier than ever? In Mission Impossible 9-10-11, perhaps the de-aging process could start to be applied incrementally, so we don’t even notice it taking place. Check out the poster below; is the image of Cruise already calling back to the star’s younger self? Maybe Cruise could make a sensational return to more dramatic roles in the future too, regenerating as an icon once again while still retaining the moniker of biggest movie star in the world, eternal suspended as a youthful 40-year-old?

But what about the public appearances? They could never be faked. Don’t be so sure. Maybe there is future in which the “real” Tom Cruise retires into the enclave of Scientology, with fabricated interviews and press tours not only keeping alive but retaining that famously vigorous positivity. Over the next 10-20 years the disassociation between the images we see and the reality they connect to could become so decoupled, that we forget to keep asking: how does Tom Cruise stay so young?

“Ridiculous!”, I hear you cry. “Dario, you’ve fallen into the worst excesses of conspiracy theory nonsense”. I hope you can detect that my tongue was lodged firmly in my cheek as I wrote this. And maybe I was overly influenced by a recent rewatch of Vanilla Sky(2001) - go revisit in the context of the above). We are on the precipice of the potential annihilation of any connecting tissue between reality and representation. If there is one star with the power to take advantage of this, to effectively become immortal, it’s Tom Cruise.

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