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Tom Cruise vs. the engrams

Colby Cosh
National Post

June 28, 2005

In the past few months, Tom Cruise has done more for the reputation of professional publicists than any other human being in history.

Until March, 2004, Cruise's media affairs were handled by Pat Kingsley, the famously aggressive head of the PMK/HBH agency. By wielding the agency's market corner on the stars against terrified editors and producers, Kingsley was always able to circumscribe reporters' questions, and particularly to ward off inquiries about her client Cruise's involvement in the religion of Scientology.

She was also apparently able to convince Cruise that it was in his interests not to defend, or proselytize for, his faith. In fact, by last year entertainment-watchers were wondering whether Cruise was still a genuine practising Scientologist.

This could not have sat too well with Scientology, which specifically tries to cultivate and promote celebrity adherents. (The church even operates special "Celebrity Centres," including a palatial one in the old Chateau Elysee hotel in Hollywood.) What good is having Tom Cruise in your pew if he's not allowed to spread the good news? For whatever reason, Cruise became uncomfortable with the situation and left PMK behind, replacing Kingsley with his sister. Which doesn't exactly seem like a recipe for getting unbiased, no-nonsense media advice.

A year or so later, after a long sequence of embarrassments for Cruise, no one on the planet doubts the value of a good publicist. It's no longer difficult to get the actor talking about Scientology; the problem is getting him to stop.

On May 23 he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to talk about his faith and his new relationship with Dawson's Creek starlet Katie Holmes. As Cruise, 42, ranted about the charms of Holmes, 26, he alternately stood on the couch to bellow his love and knelt on the floor to display his awe, interrupting the bizarre interpretive dance to savage actress Brooke Shields for admitting that she had used psychiatric medication to treat post-partum depression. Footage of the appearance immediately became a much-downloaded Internet curio. (In a telling sign of mainstream Hollywood reaction, it was soon being openly mocked by Lindsay Lohan on the Tonight Show. When Lindsay Lohan's making fun of you for acting crazy and excessive, you've definitely got a problem.)

Not long after the Oprah fiasco, Cruise staged a flashy marriage proposal to Holmes at the Eiffel Tower, which only served to revive old mutterings about his sexual orientation. Holmes had been single, apparently, as late as the first week of April; she disappeared from public view for a few weeks, emerged as Cruise's girlfriend late in the month, and got engaged on June 17. Love, we know, always proceeds at its own headlong pace. But then we read in Radar magazine that Scarlett Johansson had seemingly been auditioned for the role of Cruise's girlfriend not long before; Cruise reportedly wheedled Johansson into a long religious discussion at the Hollywood Celebrity Centre and then tried (unsuccessfully) to drag her upstairs for a meal with church leaders. Again, this is not the sort of thing that made the papers during the Kingsley Era.

Cruise defiantly refuses to apologize for his attack on Shields, as he demonstrated on Friday in an on-air squabble with the Today Show's Matt Lauer. (Another Internet hit!) Cruise badgered the helpless Lauer about the evils of psychiatry: "Here we are today, where I talk out against drugs and psychiatric abuses of electric-shocking people, OK, against their will, of drugging children with them not knowing the effects of these drugs. Do you know what Adderall is? Do you know Ritalin? Do you know now that Ritalin is a street drug? Do you understand that?" Oddly enough, Cruise's implacable, frantic manner might have come straight out of an Adderall bottle.

It qualifies as a class-A PR disaster to get shirty with Lauer, a handsome galoot whose role on Today is basically to be America's genial older brother. Cruise's woes are mounting as his $135-million War of the Worlds, directed by Steven Spielberg, awaits release this weekend. Every nutball talk show appearance pours a little more of Paramount's money down the toilet, and Spielberg, trying to bounce back from the terminally unpopular Terminal, scarcely needs the hassle. Indeed, Hollywood as a whole was looking to War of the Worlds to help rescue a lousy year. More and more, the meltdown of the world's biggest male movie star looks like a symbol of the industry's overall problems.

But while Cruise is turning off the general public, his antics are introducing the Church of Scientology to millions who otherwise wouldn't have heard of it. And the Church -- a complex, secretive web of entities originally founded in the 1950s by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard -- is presumably happy to accept some contempt as long as new recruits are filing through the front door. If a thousand people laugh at Cruise's antics, but just one is curious enough to embark on Scientology's expensive series of courses in better living, that's a quiet victory for the Church.

Which brings us back to Brooke Shields. The public may not understand why Cruise is so intense about his hatred of psychiatry; certainly his wrestling matches with TV talking heads aren't designed to shed any light on the subject. Scientology began as Dianetics, a psychotherapeutic method written up by Hubbard for a 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Hubbard's idea was that delusion and unhappiness were founded in "engrams," or subconscious mental records of unhappy incidents in the past. He invented and marketed a device called an "e-meter," a simple galvanometer that purported to detect reactions to engrams during interviews.

Scientology didn't consistently present itself as a full-fledged religion until American trade officials started cracking down on the e-meter business, whereupon Hubbard acquired an additional layer of constitutional protection. (Observers have noted that when Scientology enters countries that have fewer protections for religious minorities, it downplays the "church" label and calls itself as a "philosophical system.") In the meantime, mainstream psychiatry continued to deride the claims of Dianetics. It's easy to see why Scientology believers are taught that psychiatry is a satanic conspiracy, and that all psychoactive drugs are evil.

In Scientology metaphysics, the engrams accrued during your life aren't the only problem; our souls also react to bad experiences from previous lives. And according to former members and Church documents, we are also said to be saddled with clingy, impish "body thetans" released, 75 million years ago, from aliens killed in a thermonuclear attack on Earth by the galactic overlord Xenu. Over the years, ex-Scientologists have disclosed much about the Church's unusual doctrines, disquieting indoctrination methods, and nasty methods of attacking hostile observers. Since the death of the reclusive Hubbard, the Church -- still called a cult by many -- seems to have cleaned up its act in a quest for mainstream credibility. But there are still live controversies about its financial and psychological treatment of adherents.

Oddly enough, his hostility to psychiatry may be one of the sanest things about Tom Cruise. His spluttering at Lauer was abhorrent, but Scientologists are not the only ones who worry about pumping quasi-amphetamines into large numbers of children-- especially boys -- who suffer from attention deficit disorder. Other critics of psychiatry share Cruise's concern about coercive mental-health treatments. Many of them -- like Cruise -- would use the word "torture." Hubbard invented the e-meter when the popularity of surgical lobotomy was near its height among his critics, and when electroconvulsive or "shock" therapy was still being widely abused. His acolytes are taught this history, and why shouldn't they be? The old sci-fi writer may have less cruelty to answer for than several Nobel laureates.

For all I know, I really might be addicted to nicotine and pizza because some bad-ass alien dictator punted the nuclear football during the Paleocene epoch. And for all I know Tom Cruise may be a repressed gay man, or a coprophagous gibbon-fancier, with a fake fiancee. What I do know is that I'm enjoying the spectacle of an actor shedding the shackles of celebrity, and behaving just as weirdly in public as we know the rest of them do in private. Of the two cults to which Cruise belongs, Hollywood is easily the more powerful, and quite possibly the more menacing and ruinous.

National Post 2005

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