See Cruise

This weblog is barely 24 hours old, and I'll admit to some regrets about coming late to the game. There have been so many memes to mock over the last few years, and while I was out, oh, I don't know, earning a living or something, everybody else got to have all the fun. I've particularly been regretting the opportunity I missed to comment on Tom Cruise's creepy, hysterical, arm-pumping, sofa-leaping freak-out on the Oprah Winfrey show. A QuickTime video making the rounds today gives me a pretext to weigh in, however belatedly. And if the title -- "Tom Cruise Kills Oprah" -- is joke-killingly direct, the clip is still worth viewing for the rich, yeasty top note of wish fulfillment it delivers. Seriously, now: Who hasn't wanted to deliver an incapacitating jolt of electricity to Oprah, especially when she does that irritating carnival barker thing with her voice ("...it's John Tra-VOLLL-taaa!")?

That said, Oprah isn't the center ring of the 10-in-1 show that is Cruise's extended publicity tour. It's Cruise himself who has that honor, accompanied only by the increasingly steely-looking Katie Holmes. (Holmes entered the maw of the publicity machine a dewy ingenue, and shows every sign of emerging at the other end as hard-eyed as Demi Moore. A girl does what a girl's gotta do, I guess.) Cruise's behavior has been so singularly bizarre that it's stunned his representatives at CAA, given aid and comfort to his ex-publicist, the terrifying Pat Kingsley, and put Kingsley's replacement, Cruise's sister Lee Anne DeVette, on the hot seat. (Memo to Tom: If you absolutely insist on working with family, try to make sure they don't use their porn star names while they're on the clock.)  How do I know all this? Not because I want to, believe me, but because all the media in the universe have giddily colluded in the manufacture of a publicity juggernaut that's jack-hammeringly unsubtle and seemingly endless, like an episode of "ER."

It's become too much, almost, and seemed at times to threaten a backlash. The thing about stars, though, is that they have a gut-puncher's instinct for survival. That's what Cruise has shown, by sheer good fortune, this week. Just as it began to seem possible that the world might actually be preparing to write the diminutive mega-star off as a soulless, hyper-controlling android with fewer human instincts than the average copying machine, he happened on the one personality type in the world that's more gratingly obnoxious than his own: A practical joker. "You're a jerk," Cruise sputtered at the Briton who squirted him with water while posing as a TV interviewer.  Oh, there he goes again, the world thought reflexively, that Cruise, I swear, and then it stopped. Oh. Wait. He's right.

This was, needless to say, a confusing moment. But it was also an illuminating one, because in it Cruise demonstrated an instinctive grasp of a survival technique I like to call “Fitting The Black Hat." Its basic outline is simple: When in trouble, look around for the person who is just slightly less sympathetic and appealing than you are, and make that person the bad guy. The trick is to avoid the people who are markedly less sympathetic than you are; this will create an imbalance of empathy, and send all good feelings rushing away from you. With that caveat, this is a technique that can be practiced anywhere, anytime, by anyone. In fact, its beauty is its broad scalability -- it works in settings as small as an informal dinner party, and as large as a paparazzi-clogged movie premiere.  By standing and confronting his dweeby tormentor, Cruise wrestled what might be called the momentum of sympathy back his way. And as a cheery little fillip, he had the guy and three of his co-conspirators arrested. This shows not only a gift for self-preservation but a dash of wit as well. A little more of this sort of thing and I might even go see "War of the Worlds." But I doubt it.