Valkyrie doesn't open until the end of the week, but the movie has already been taking a pasting, much of it in the form of open mockery of its star, Tom Cruise, so scathing that the question of just what has gone wrong with the wonder boy's career, and how might it be righted, is likely to continue for quite some time. Some people may have problems remembering that, for a very long time--we're talking decades here--it was as hard to find someone in the mainstream entertainment press or the industry itself who was prepared to question Tom's magnificence as it's been, since around mid-2005, to find someone not eager to question both his appeal and his sanity. How did it come to this? Stephen Metcalf at Slate thinks he has it figured out. He has a theory that involves a close read of the movie that made Cruise a star, Risky Business (1983), and how it played its part in saddling the now 46-year-old Cruise with an image that leaves him no room to mature as an actor. Recognizing Cruise's movie-star image as "the '80s incarnate" (and accurately summing up his acting range in four words: "bark, glare, seethe, repeat"), Metcalf recalls how Risky Business's "distinctive pathos derives from its first half, from the nocturnal weirdscape emanating out of Joel's jumbled libido. As this Joel, Cruise allowed himself to be everything the publicity team has tried to convince us, for 25 years, he isn't: insecure, sexually confused, and as Brickman's camerawork takes no pains to hide, physically small. We are meant to dislike—or at least, feel queasy—in the presence of the strutting superabundant charmer of the second half of the film, as he bursts forth from, and destroys, the chrysalis of Joel Goodsen. When Joel's parents go on vacation, he teams up with Lana to bring his horny friends together with her scheming colleagues, and in Joel's transformation (into a pimp, but also into Tom Cruise), we see the emergence of the '80s as the '80s."
"The '80s," writes Metcalf, "did for money what the '60s did for sex. They told a miraculously tempting lie about the curative powers of disinhibition. It took AIDS, feminism, and sociobiology a while to catch up to our illusions about free love. It has taken cronyism, speculation, and manic overleveraging a while to catch up to our illusions about free money. Now that Ponzi capitalism is collapsing in on itself, the perverse disjunction, of saying 'what the fuck' and thereby securing your 'future,' is simply no longer tenable." What this has to do with the Tomcat and his present situation, is that "The Cruise persona, like a junk bond, was never meant to reach maturity." It is possible to agree with the broad outlines of this and still find a way to argue with many of the specifics.
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