Cruise Control: The Hollywood star in stasis

At the end of Paul Brickman’s Risky Business, Tom Cruise’s Joel Goodsen turns the tables on Rebecca De Mornay’s Lana, the sex worker he’s fallen in love with despite – or because of – the fact that she’s just conned him into turning his affluent parents’ home into a brothel. Where once Lana had asked Joel to pay her, he now insists she pay him. They joke about pricing as Joel’s voiceover plays us out. “My name is Joel Goodsen,” he reminds, stressing the ‘good son’ pun. “I deal in human fulfilment. I grossed over eight thousand dollars in one night. Time of your life, huh, kid?” Bolstered by Cruise’s wry delivery, the message here is clear: this is a kid who has learned, above all, how to sell himself.

If the movie – at base a screwy satire of Reaganomics – ultimately needles this lesson, its lead pricks with a boyish exuberance irreducible to the bleak machinations of social reproduction. (Joel’s sales pitch is the Hollywood ending; Brickman’s more downbeat original sees the two teens parting forever, Lana back to her pimp, Joel to Princeton.) That kinetic zeal, along with photography by The Beguiled’s Bruce Surtees and original synth score by Tangerine Dream, limns the picture. You can hardly fault Cruise, then 20 and still fresh-faced from a brief stint in seminary school, for being enthusiastic about a role that takes an ambitious virgin and makes him over into a professional crowd-pleaser. After all, how else do you become a movie star?

After Risky Business, which enters the Criterion collection this month (the first of Cruise’s films to do so), Cruise was the movie star. By “movie star” I mean “not an actor” – or rather, an actor only when it suits, as a particular constellation he might form at will. But generally, the celebrity of Cruise eclipses any technical skill; the brand and commodity of him overwhelms. In part, this means there’s a remarkable consistency across his entire body of work. Much of what audiences would come to expect from a “Tom Cruise performance” is there already in his breakout role: the gusto that can verge on derangement, the live-wire physicality, the fixated commitment to some form of workaholism or hyper-competence. All these aspects have made Cruise tremendously fun to watch over the past four decades. But what makes him interesting – Criterion release, academic monograph, talking about Edge of Tomorrow after a couple of beers interesting – is his long-standing commitment to performances that interrogate, and sometimes outright undermine, the very same things that make him a star.

This begins as early as Risky Business. Both Cruise and Joel, ultimately, deal in human fulfilment. (Joel made eight thousand in one night? Cruise’s best box office weekend netted him nearly $100 million.) The film they’re in wonders whether that’s ever a good thing. Scenes as famously star-making as the “Old Time Rock and Roll” pantomime are nonetheless troubled by the exploitable space between an ingenue’s public performance and private child’s play. Cruise’s nascent affinity for couches renders Joel’s pantsless dance party more adorable than titillating, but a shot through the windows of his parents’ house still casts our attention as some shameless voyeurism. Even as it made him a mega-star, Risky Business raised an eyebrow at the appeal of the MTV-era matinee idols Cruise would come to define.

For the rest of the 1980s, Hollywood’s biggest earner fleshed out his golden boy persona in Americana mainstays like All The Right Moves and Top Gun. For Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, Cruise translated Joel Goodsen’s naivety into a callow self-assurance that, when set against the shimmering speed of the F-14 Tomcat, became a glamorous symbol of insouciant American warmongering. Or so said Oliver Stone, with whom Cruise made his last movie of the decade, the anti-war drama Born on the Fourth of July.

Cruise was an unlikely choice for the role of Ron Kovic, a Vietnam vet who became an outspoken decrier of U.S. interventionism after being paralyzed overseas. Critics saw the actor’s physical transformation from clean-cut cadet into shaggy resistor as a major, though welcome, departure. But the performance’s wallop is in the familiarity of Maverick’s insolent face on a furious, frangible body. When, briefly cleaned up in Kovic’s crisp Marine blues, Cruise flinches at an Independence Day parade’s every firecracker, the wince registers not as a retreat from his earlier work, but a reflection on it.

There are shades of this reflexivity in 1996’s Jerry Maguire, the fairytale of a slick sell-out cured by Cameron Crowe’s hippie speedball style blend of manic sincerity. But Cruise’s penchant for roles troubled by “Tom Cruise” truly peaked in 1999, when he gave himself over to Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson for back-to-back vivisections. Both Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Anderson’s magnificent Magnolia cut through the layers of Cruise’s star persona to expose the nervier things that lie beneath it. As chauvinist pick-up artist Frank TJ Mackey and the solipsistic Dr. Bill Hartford, Cruise’s trademark cockiness becomes a hollow front for desperate insecurity. His masculinity hinges on a sequence of lies. His authority evaporates in rooms full of strangers who look to him for explanations only to get backflips, or bad orgy etiquette, in reply.

Then, in the mid-2000s, Cruise began running, literally, in the opposite direction. Abruptly an action star, and only a bit less abruptly a zealous PR nightmare, he seemed more interested in armoring his mythos than further exploring it. Still, for all their navel-gazing glory, a deep vein of anxiety runs through Top Gun: Maverick and the latest entries in the Mission: Impossible franchise. The extreme stunts for which Cruise has now become notorious trade on the dual idea that he is both the only one who can execute them and that, someday sooner than we’d like, he won’t be able to. It’s a vulnerability reaching back to his Risky Business days that is made most visible when Tom Cruise hurls his body off a cliff in IMAX 3-D. If there’s only one star like him, the long arc of his uniquely self-aware career seems to ask, does it mean he’s infallible or always already falling?

Published 23 Jul 2024

Tags: Criterion Collection Risky Business Tom Cruise