I found this post about Tom Cruise on City Rag and it is making some point about Tom Cruise giving Oprah the stink eye, whatever the hell that is. I actually have no idea what this post is about but it gives me an opportunity to segue away and talk about the Oprah interview with Cruise last Friday at his mountain top home in Colorado.
Talk about completely contrived and fabricated. Oprah was fine, she asked the questions, she wasn’t completely sycophantic; it was ok on her end.
He, on the other hand, is a completely insincere machine. This is clearly the point at which Cruise Corp. begins the mending of Tom Cruise’s public image. From the time he walked out to meet Oprah with Katie Holmes standing next to him fulfilling her contractual obligations as a professional beard, the entire thing seemed like one of the most calculated moves ever.
After he took Oprah on a strictly controlled tour of the house where whole sections of it weren’t shown, he kept insistently pointing out the family spaces, the dining room, he related stories about how they crowd 25 people around the table at Christmas, showed pictures of the children and also relentlessly pointed out of things to do with Suri (her shoe box, her little play room, the story about her responding to Cruise when he allegedly dressed up as Santa Claus).
His responses to the questions about what he was thinking when he patronizingly dressed down Matt Lauer with his freakish position on psychiatry and how he completely dissed Brooke Shields were utterly inadequate as well. Here he is flipping out on her show in 2005. Above is Cruise talking about what happened. Apparently, the phrase “It was a moment”, explains it all.
So, fundamentally, while I completely and utterly refuse to believe that, after watching that interview with Oprah Winfrey, I suddenly know so much more about the REAL Tom Cruise and the reality of life within his family unit, what became completely clear to me is that Tom Cruise is very similar to Clay Aiken in the sense that he is followed almost entirely by a demographic of middle aged women and that reality is something he can't escape. This is why he appears on Oprah and not really anything else besides morning television. He’s never on MTV or at younger focused award shows, he doesn’t really court any other demographic and that’s probably why he had to insist on portraying himself as a man who is completely focused on family on as many levels as possible.
Of course, he has to enlist the services of someone like Oprah Winfrey because the reality of Tom Cruise’s life is probably extraordinarily bleak, lonely and empty and so it takes that much media influence and planning to paint a picture so completely different to what reality actually is.
Tom Cruise held in the freakish crazy so hard throughout that interview that there’s no doubt in my mind that when Oprah and her people left for the day, he went out and gnawed on a tree trunk and howled at the moon just to balance out the repression.
What amazes me even more than the exhaustive efforts Tom Cruise goes to to be this “thing” is the way middle aged women who watch Oprah seem to have a capacity for fantasy and denial. Well, I suppose not. Not when you consider that most of them really only have stucco houses and strip malls at the center of their lives.
I just realized that the word “Oprah” is IN Microsoft’s dictionary. My computer totally recognizes the word. Oprah is everything. [source]
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