Sunday, July 10, 2005

Tom Cruise's contribution to reality

The mega-star, by being so publicly out there in another world, is helping us discern fact from image =A0 Peter McKnightVancouver Sun
Saturday, July 09, 2005

CREDIT: Associated Press, Vancouver Sun

FilesImage is all: Tom Cruise zips up for a War of the Worlds screening on Hollywood Boulevard with fiance Katie Holmes on a motorcycle.

It's easy to laugh at Tom Cruise, now that he's lost his mind. But Cruise's recent otherworldly behaviour -- and I'm not referring here to his Scientology-inspired, semi-coherent, anti-psychiatry musings -- might actually help us to shore up our own tenuous grip on reality.

Cruise made his break with reality in front of world, which is the stage on which he is now playing out his entire life. While on a worldwide junket to promote his latest movie, Stephen Spielberg's blockbuster remake of H.G. Wells's classic War of the Worlds, Cruise proved, with an increasingly bizarre repertoire of performances, that the world is indeed his stage.

First, the mega-movie star fired his longtime publicist-extraordinaire, Pat Kinglsey, and replaced her with the little known Lee Anne Devette, who happens to be Cruise's blood sister and soul sister (fellow Scientologist).

Then, Cruise, having tired long ago of Stepford Wives' wife Nicole Kidman, announced his engagement to Stepford fiance and newly brainwashed Scientologist Katie Holmes. Actually "announced" is a rather inapposite term for someone who lives his life creating images: Cruise reportedly popped the question on the Eiffel Tower, the pinnacle of the City of Light and City of Love.

As if that weren't enough symbolism, Cruise proceeded to drag Holmes to a series of press conferences where they acted out their undying love for each other. Cruise then topped it off with visits to Oprah and Jay Leno, so he could jump up and down on their couches because that's what love does to you, or something.

Of course, no one I know believes any of it -- no one thinks that the images Cruise created are in any way grounded in reality. But that's really not problematic since in Hollywood, and, increasingly, in the rest of the world, a good image is even better than reality.

This all sounds terribly postmodern and reminds us of French theorist Jean Baudrillard, who has become adored and reviled in equal measure for suggesting, in Simulacra and Simulations among other works, that postmodern culture has broken with reality.

(I once dismissed Baudrillard as a poor man's Plato, and thought his work, like that of most postmodernists, was a load of nonsense. But I've come to believe that, despite his hyperbole and exaggeration, he does present an important warning that we ought to heed.) For Baudrillard, the postmodern world is marked by media, computers, and technologies that don't merely simulate real things, but create a reality (hyperreality) all their own. While images once represented things -- that is, they were copies that represented or referred to originals -- we're now beset by simulacra, which are copies without originals, copies that don't represent or refer to anything.

Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon comes, curiously enough, from War of the Worlds. New York Times columnist Frank Rich notes that even though Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds repeatedly told listeners it was fiction, the melding of news and entertainment techniques convinced many that the Earth really was being attacked by Martians.......MORE

Vancouver Sun http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/news/editorial/story.html?id=3D= 9f574074-23a6-416b-b58f-ecc5683b31f7

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