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Tom Cruise An Unauthorized Biography ( PDFDrive )
Entertainment Tonight in 2005, that psychiatry was a “Nazi science” and that
methadone, a drug used to fight heroin addiction, was originally called Adolophine after Adolf Hitler? Although neither statement is accurate, Tom’s popularity as an actor inevitably give his pronouncements weight and authenticity. In an era when Tom is much more powerful than the average senator, with a worldwide reach and influence, he and Scientology are given a free pass, one that they have used to great effect. For example, according to the Mental Health Matters Political Action Committee, some twenty-eight Scientology bills have been introduced by members of the Arizona state legislature aimed at limiting access to treatment and medication for children with mental health disorders. On its Web site, the lobbying group asks voters if they want Tom Cruise to make future decisions about mental health care in their state. It is therefore ironic that, unbeknownst to the actor, Dr. Gary Lebendiger, Tom’s stepbrother from his father’s second marriage, is a child psychiatrist. Of course, Tom is merely a smiling conduit for the philosophy of the man he calls his mentor, L. Ron Hubbard. By definition, everything LRH wrote about psychiatry—and, for that matter birth, marriage, and life—is deemed sacred and inviolable. His word is Scientology lore. Neither Tom nor any other Scientologist can deviate from his teachings or his policies. This is one of the fatal flaws in Tom’s prognosis for the planet. Take Hubbard’s obsession with psychiatry. Apart from the personal slight he felt when mental health experts dismissed his book Dianetics, the bedrock of Scientology, Hubbard was learning and writing about psychiatry in the 1940s and ’50s, when inquiry into what makes the brain tick was still in its relative infancy. Psychiatry, like computing, is an evolving science. For Hubbard to make universal rules and edicts about the science of mental health is akin to laying out iron laws about computing based on the cumbersome machines of the postwar period, when it took rooms full of equipment to perform fewer functions than today’s microscopic silicon chips. Philosophically, Hubbard’s worldview was defined by the state of the planet just after World War II. It is intellectually static, unable to accept or absorb any progress in civilization since then. It is no exaggeration to state that Scientology is the intellectual equivalent to the Flat Earth Society, a group locked in a time warp, inexorably bound by the rules defined by its founder. Even today, for example, high-ranking Scientologists communicate by encrypted telex—rather than more modern methods such as e- mail—because Hubbard decreed it. If, like the Flat Earth Society, Scientology were content to be a parochial, inward-looking club, there would be little enough harm in it. But it is not. The relentless expansion of the organization and its front groups has been made possible by the charm and persuasiveness of its poster boy, whose modernity, familiarity, and friendliness mask the totalitarian zeal of his faith. Perhaps the media, politicians, and public should examine Tom’s claims with greater rigor and skepticism. When comedians ridicule Tom Cruise, the joke may be on him —but it is also on ourselves. More than any star today, Tom is a movie messiah who reflects and refracts the fears and doubts of our times, trading on the unfettered power of modern celebrity, our embrace of religious extremism, and the unnerving scale of globalization. While advances in science, medicine, and technology give the illusion of modernity, the world is seemingly gripped by a harking back to apocalyptic fundamentalism. Current discourse all too often resembles that of the period before the Age of Reason and Enlightenment when messianical theories held sway. In the marketplace of ideas, rational debate and scientific method are frequently shouted down by the most extreme—and unproven— dogmas. And Tom has been one of those shouting the loudest, selling the dubious, unproven wares of his faith. In an age of material plenty and spiritual famine, Tom Cruise is compelling— and dangerous—because he stands for something, extolling the virtues of a faith that is parodied and feared in equal measure. This faith, like his own personality, exists and thrives by disguise. Truly theirs is a match made in heaven—if they believed in it. While he is clearly “one of the premier American actors of his generation,” taking his rightful place alongside such luminaries as Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Julia Roberts when he received this honor from New York’s Museum of the Moving Image in November 2007, there is another dimension to Tom’s appeal. What you see is not what you get. With his boy-next-door good looks, energy, and winning smile, he should join the likes of Tom Hanks and Jimmy Stewart as one of the ordinary guys with universal audience appeal, an actor who makes us feel safe and secure in an uncertain world. Yet his history suggests that the man behind the smile is altogether more edgy, threatening, and even sinister. Steven Spielberg recognized this quality when he directed him in Minority Report. Spielberg instructed Tom not to smile for the role because he understood the iconography of the Cruise grin. On one occasion he burst into a characteristic smile and Spielberg found himself thinking, “I get it. He has that deliciously indescribable magic that cannot be analyzed or replicated. He is in every sense a movie star.” He is a man, too, of contradictions: an uncertain child waiting for an undeserved blow from his father, an adult searching for certainty and control. An alpha male who does his own stunts, lest there be a challenge he could not meet, seeking approval from the ghost of his bullying father. Now a father himself, he clearly loves family life and yet crusades for a faith that routinely sets loved ones against one another. A romantic who falls in love in a heartbeat and yet walks away without a backward glance. A certain, purposeful presence but a man who hates to be alone. During a career spanning a quarter of a century, he has played pilot, doctor, secret agent, warrior, assassin, vampire, and war hero. Perhaps the most complex character he has ever played is Tom Cruise himself. UPDATE It was the Tom Cruise blockbuster of the year, watched by an audience of millions around the world. Yet even though the sensational film was the talk of the water cooler for weeks, the nine-minute solo performance, entitled “Tom Cruise on Tom Cruise,” did not have its premiere in a movie theater. From this humble debut on the Internet, the film of Tom, unshaven and dressed in a black turtleneck as he talked about his passion for Scientology, rapidly exploded into a global phenomenon. Viewers gawped and giggled as the movie star, in a performance both rambling and inarticulate, tried to explain his religious credo. The only people not smiling were Tom Cruise and his church. As the actor later told Oprah Winfrey about the video, “I was receiving an award that evening for global literacy. It was a very private moment. I’m actually talking to my congregation.” Actually he was being awarded Scientology’s first-ever Freedom of Valor medal at a 2004 gala for thousands of fellow believers at Scientology’s English headquarters, Saint Hill Manor. Although I mentioned salient features of his pre- taped interview in the original edition of this book, the video proved that a picture, especially a moving picture of the biggest Hollywood star in the world, was worth 10,000 words. Its release ignited a firestorm of controversy. This was Tom Cruise as never seen before, unguarded, unvarnished and, to many, unhinged. He spoke as though in a dazed reverie, almost as if he were communing with himself. From time to time, he would laugh maniacally for little or no reason. His speech was peppered with Scientology jargon, confirming his credentials as an ardent follower of his faith. As the Mission: Impossible theme played in background, he explained how Scientologists were the “authorities on getting people off drugs, the authorities on the mind,” and the only people who can bring peace and unite cultures. As an ambassador for his faith, he insisted that the world’s politicians were waiting for Scientologists to provide solutions to global problems. “Traveling the world and meeting the people that I’ve met, talking with these leaders . . . they want help, and they are depending on people who know and can be effective and do it and that’s us. That is our responsibility to do it.” Such was his dedication to “clearing the planet” that he had little time to enjoy his private jets, custom-made motorbikes, race cars, $35-million home in Hollywood, or skiing and snowmobiling at his mountain retreat in Colorado. “I wish the world was a different place. I’d like to go on vacation and go and romp and play . . . but I can’t.” Despite his absolute certainty that only he and his fellow believers could solve the problems of the planet, he warned his congregation that the journey would be “rough and tumble . . . wild and woolly.” Finally, a portentous voiceover announced that “Tom Cruise has introduced LRH [L. Ron Hubbard] technology to over one billion people of earth. And that’s only the first wave he’s unleashed. Which is why the story of Tom Cruise, Scientologist, has only just begun.” As comedians around the world ransacked their wardrobes for black turtlenecks and practiced the Cruise guffaw and chopping hand gestures, it became an iconic moment in his career. Just as the famous shots of Tom in Risky Download 1.37 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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