Tom Cruise was in Rome today to promote Edge Of Tomorrow. He’s doing some kind of whirlwind press tour later this week. London, Paris, New York all in one day.
Suzanne sent me an article this morning this morning in support of Cruise, his career, his film choices, and his impact on the industry. According to the piece, the internet ruined him. YouTube ruined him. Bloggers ruined him.
If the Oprah couch moment for example wasn’t turned into a meme and if we didn’t have YouTube, repeating those 15 seconds over and over again, if we took that entire interview as a one hour experience, instead of reducing it down to a crazed trampoline act, Tom Cruise wouldn’t have been turned into a joke. The writer argues that he was encouraged to behave that way by Oprah, by the audience. That if it hadn’t gone viral, and spliced, and condensed into a GIF, we wouldn’t think he was a crazy motherf-cker. As for the interview with Matt Lauer during which he behaved like a “glib”, smug asshole? That too was less about whether or not he’s an asshole but more about how he was totally unprepared for new media and the meanness of digital reporting.
Read it here.
If I were the Dean of the Faculty of Celebrity Studies at a liberal arts college somewhere in New England, this is exactly the kind of thing we’d be debating. Because… the internet didn’t seem to hurt Brad Pitt. And not Johnny Depp either, who thrived in the years that Tom Cruise declined. Johnny Depp is only losing ground now because he wears really bad jeans and has turned into a cliché. I’m not sure you can blame that on the internet.
There is merit however to the point that Cruise wasn’t ready for the internet. Kinda like how your parents or grandparents weren’t ready for the internet. Kinda like how there’s an entire generation being left behind by the internet. I always feel sad when I think about that. For feeling like the world is passing right over you. Should I feel sad for Tom Cruise, the millionaire movie star?
