Sarah: To me, there's kind of a bittersweet, lost worldliness to it. I feel like it's the way people maybe used to feel when they were like, “In my day, we got ice from the ice man, and they cut it out of lakes.”
Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we talk about great moments in daytime TV history. With me today is Willa Paskin from Decoder Ring.
Willa: Hi, I'm so happy to be here.
Sarah: Thank you so much for being here with us. I love your show so much and it's become a thing with my friends lately. I've been listening to just a bunch of episodes in celebration of your coming here. Because you're not going to quiz me on them, so it's become a joke where I'm like, “I listened to a Decoder Ring the other day about how muzak used to be made” or something.
Willa: That was a good one.
Sarah: And they're like, do you listen to any other shows? And it's like, not right now. I have to say, I'm sure that people tell you this joke a lot, but I have this fantasy that one day you'll be like today on Decoder Ring, North Dakota. What is it?
Willa: Should I do that? I would do that.
Sarah: I feel like that would be a good April fools. Because sometimes I like to think that you're also saying Dakota Ring.
Willa: I do say Dakota Ring. I have a problem with it actually. I noticed it, especially when I do ads. Cause it's when I say the name the most. And I think it's my New York accent. It's very hard to say decoder ring. I just say Dakota ring.
Sarah: It's like in the princess bride where he has to be like, you will not find her common now, decoder ring. You have to be a prince to do it.
Willa: I try to really annunciate.
Sarah: I feel like our podcasts, they want to be holding hands. And I feel like anyone who's a You're Wrong About listener, if you haven't listened to the Decoder Ring catalog, there's a whole new theme park for you to discover. I'm really mixing metaphors, either theme parks and holding hands. But are there episodes that you would recommend people start with?
Willa: My favorite episodes are like all the secretly, like, do you know that the podcast Heavyweight.
Sarah: I love Heavyweight.
Willa: So they're all sorts of like the secret, psychological therapy drama ones. It was like a major character. And I get to like, be like, what's up with your feelings. So I really like those. So I think like on this theme, the sad Jen episode, which is about the question of why are Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anistan still getting married on the cover of tabloids. Very apropos, and is one that I really like. We did this one about Chuck E Cheese, which I had never been to in my life, but it is pretty good. It's a pretty good story. Chuck E Cheese turns out to be pretty crazy.
Sarah: That was the first one I listened to. I love that one.
Willa: People really like that one. We did this one called the mystery of the mullet, which is about the word for the mullet and where it comes from. And that one's like start to finish, got a real arc. That was a proper mystery. We sort of pretend that they're all about mysteries, but they're not. My two favorite artists, the one called the sign painter, which is about I'm this artist that I've known my whole life and that one's just very emo, but I think it's really good. And then also we did one about the Jane Fonda workout that ended up also being really emo, because it's about Jane Fonda's relationships to the woman who actually made the workout, her name is Leni Kazdin. And so we did two about Jane Fonda, but the first Jane Fonda one is good stuff, I think.
Sarah: I would love to recommend the episode, is it called Getting Down on Friday? The episode?
Willa: Yes, that's a good one.
Sarah: Yeah, that's amazing. And that's such a maligned teen story and you do a bunch of different eras, but I love the way that you look at how our recent media landscape changed, how far in a way in history is even 10 years ago.
Willa: Yeah. Thank you. I do think of our shows as being like thematically connected all the time.
Sarah: Totally. What are you going to tell me about today? What kind of ride are we going to go on?
Willa: We're talking about the time that Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah Winfrey's couch.
Sarah: I'm so excited.
Willa: I'm excited, too.
Sarah: Can we start with me attempting to guess what year this happened?
Willa: Let's do that.
Sarah:Was it 2005?
Willa: Nailed it.
Sarah: Damn. If only I could keep track of the present like that. One of the really funny things about this, for me, is that I know it was huge. I saw people talking about it for weeks. I feel like I was fairly engaged with it, and I never saw a video of it at the time. I think because 2005 was the year YouTube started. Right? So that was kind of the last moment when you could hear about something endlessly without actually witnessing it.
Willa: That's exactly right. It happened in May of 2005. Tom Cruise is going on the Oprah Winfrey show extensively to promote this large movie he is making with Steven Spielberg, an adaptation of War of the Worlds. But he's a month into having this brand new, much younger girlfriend, Katie Holmes, who's known mostly for being on Dawson's Creek, but is also about to appear in Batman Begins.
It happens on Oprah, but unless you watched Oprah that day, you weren't going to find the whole episode. Some people had TiVo, but it's not like DVRs were everywhere. And Oprah Winfrey's putting the episode online and there have been some viral videos, but as you said, YouTube just started to the point that in February to the one that people don't even know they can use it to house their videos. So we have this really clear memory, I think of it. You don't even have to have seen it to have a memory of it. There’s a very clear and distinct cultural memory of this moment and what it signifies. And what it signifies is it's the moment Tom Cruise jumped up and down on a couch. Which he actually didn't do, and we'll get into that. But he jumped up and down on a couch, sort of ripped his mask off, like Mission Impossible style, and just revealed himself to be a stone cold freak is on. I think that's like what we sort of understand it as. And if you actually go watch the Oprah episode, it's not that it's not that it's not like a fully false memory, but it's definitely like an incomplete memory of what happened. And I think if you watch it now, you're like, it's not clear to me that would be the takeaway. It's about Tom Cruise, but it's also sort of just much more largely about this really changey time about celebrity and technology and media and culture. And he almost gets caught in the crossfire of all these changes and we laid him out for it. And we will talk about it, I hope, how no one has to feel bad for Tom Cruise. He's sort of like this vestigial celebrity, you don't have to feel bad for, but it is slightly more complicated than just like him being a total weirdo.
Sarah: Regardless of whatever Tom Cruise needs from the world, I feel like it's better for us if we can sort of examine why we thought we saw what we thought we saw. My interaction with it was that there were still images and probably a couple of iconic frames that were going around. And then it's like your brain fills it in, and you feel like you've seen the actual motion.
Willa: I definitely hadn't seen the episode. I'm not even dry solid the viral cutdown until I was researching this. But in my mind, I can see him. I can see him jumping up and down on a couch and it didn't happen. He jumps onto it and then he jumps off. He literally doesn't do the jumping motion.
Sarah: It’s a different vibe. It's like this kid that I'm babysitting is really wired as opposed to guy gets animated on daytime talk show.
Willa: This is like peak apex Oprah. It is the alchemy of Oprah-dom and the Oprah show. So just in September of 2004, so less than a year before, it was like, “you get a car, you get a car, you get a car”. It's that Oprah.
Sarah: I do remember this. The Oprah can do no wrong phase.
Willa: Totally. The audience is all women. I think there's literally one man. Tom Cruise sees him at some point. It's like, there's a man here. All women and they have been pre-selected because they're obsessed with Tom Cruise. The energy level at the show is concert-fainting level.
Sarah: Oh, wow. Oprah’s huge. I don't know if she's just matching the energy of the audience. And she’s like, “It’s Tom Cruise”.
Willa: And they’re so intimate and yeah. He comes on stage, and he's sort of overwhelmed by how loud the crowd is. Wow. And his hair got messed up and they embraced for like a long time. And then she fixes his hair. For the whole show there's just a lot of touching, collegial, you know, like warm, but like he definitely thinks he's in a safe space.
Sarah: Honestly, this is so cute. I'm like, Tom Cruise is so dreamy. Yeah, it's such an intense sound. It's like when you're right by the ocean and it's crashing and roaring.
Willa: Everyone couldn't be more amped to be there. And he's extensively there to promote War of the Worlds, but he's just sort of had this announcement of this new relationship. And so that's basically all they talk about at Oprah's insistence. You know, Oprah is so good at wearing both hats. She can relate to the famous person as a famous person, but then she's like, but I got to put on my regular person hat and I have to ask you what the people want to know. And she just does that where she's like, we're not getting off this subject. And she's like, we've never seen you like this. And she just sort of elicits a lot of ‘he's in love’ from him.
And to this enthusiasm, he adds a number of very large physical gestures. I think it was like four very grandiose physical gestures that he repeats throughout. So one is raising his hands in the air. The most cringy to me is he gets down on one knee and fist pumps wildly, almost like knots on the floor. And he does it every time he's like, he can't believe his luck about finding this amazing woman. He also regularly grabs Oprah's hands and shakes them together. Like some sort of really awkward high five that's gone up. You know when you’d give them a high five, but then you hold their hands, and you don't let go. He does that a lot. And then the bore thing, which he does twice, he sort of very acrobatic really from sitting on a couch, jumps to standing on the couch, just like in one move and then hops off. It actually would be hard for me to do that.
Sarah: Right. Now I feel sad for Tom Cruise. You know, not too sad.
Willa: You're going to feel sad the whole time.
Sarah: I, for a long time, didn't watch the Mission Impossible movies as they were coming out. And then I made friends with someone who's like a Mission Impossible super fan, and then we watched a bunch of them and I saw them through his eyes and I was like, oh my God, Tom Cruise is so delightful as a movie star. Partly because he's like, I will run full tilt through the streets of Paris trying to outrun a motorcycle or whatever. That he's just obsessed with physical stunts. And so I feel like what a bummer to do a great stunt and then have it passed off as he's out of control. And I imagine him being like, “I was totally in control. I'm like a gymnast.”
Willa: He knows he's performing, but he definitely feels safe to be ridiculous. Right. The expectation at the time would have been like you saw the show or you didn't. You were either watching Oprah at like three o'clock on whatever weekday that was.
Sarah: Or you had soccer practice that day.
Willa: And so it goes up, but the next day, someone does a cutdown of only the parts where he's doing like these excuse physical gestures, and it starts to go everywhere, and then it was really fast for the time, but basically like that cut down comes up that day. There are images of it I think on Defamer. And then a week later, someone does this viral video where it's called, Tom Cruise Kills Oprah, where he has like electric volts coming out of his hands over a long hand gesture, holding hands and holding her shoulders. And that's like a week later. And then it ends up on the news and then like the New York Times and the LA Times, like Frank Rich, they're writing serious articles about it in the middle of June. It just has these weird long legs and ends up totally destabilizing his career and transforming it and changing it. Do you have a first Tom Cruise movie?
Sarah: Oh boy, I think it probably was the first Mission Impossible. The one that came out in, I think ‘96. I feel like he is to me, Mr. Mission Impossible. And that kind of expresses whatever I happen to believe about his core being, which is that he’s a very smooth, very determined guy who just wants to do everything as hard as possible.
Willa: Yes. So film critic, and she has a podcast now, Amy Nicholson wrote this really great piece for LA Weekly, sort of about the couch jump, but it was about Tom Cruise’s career. And I think we have this sense of him as being like an action star who's like this sort of quintessential cocky cock shore clean cut American type.
Sarah: He's got the crooked grin, he's Maverick, and yeah.
Willa: Totally. That's true, but her read on his early group is really interesting because basically, he gets really famous at 21 for Risky Business where he’s in his skivvies and his button-down shirt and the sunnies, you know, dancing enough.
Sarah: It’s hard to remember he was basically a teenager at the time.
Willa: So he's this hot, young thing. And he's part of this group of young actors that include Sean Penn. And instead of doing a lot of press and trying to be in LA, he goes to London, films that Ridley Scott movie Legend, which is with Sloan, from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and it doesn't work out but he's not about it. But then in 1986, out comes Top Gun, and it's impossible for him to not be super famous anymore. But Paramount immediately asks him to do Top Gun 2. And he says, no. And he goes to work with Martin Scorsese and Paul Newman and makes The Color of Money. And he says I want to work with people who are really good. And he goes and is sort of second fiddle to Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. And Cocktail, he makes this point which doesn't fit in with the quality, although I love it. His romantic comedy with Elizabeth Shue. Turns out I only really love terrible Tom Cruise movies.
And he does Born on the 4th of July. You know, we think of him as an action hero guy, but none of those are really action movies. He's pretty quiet about his personal life. So in 1987, he married Mimi Rogers, who's like six years older than him. And she's the person who introduces him to Scientology. In 1990, he got divorced. And he also renounces Catholicism and is like, I'm going to be a Scientologist. And also sort of famously meets Nicole Kidman on Days of Thunder, another bad movie that I have a soft spot for. And they then make Far and Away, the bad movie that I love the most. Have you seen Far and Away?
Sarah: It lives in a part of my memory where the movies you saw when you were too young to really make sense of them live. And I remember specifically the part where she's rich, he's poor. They both leave Ireland for America or something like that. Is that it? Okay. And then she's trying to watch something and he's like, you're washing that too soft. You have to scrub it.
Willa: Like on a washboard? The nineties, apex functional Tom Cruise, right? He does this movie, these two movies don't work. And then he's like, oh, okay, I'm going to do A Few Good Men. He does The Firm. Right? Like he does Jerry Maguire. He starts doing Mission Impossible. He's just kinda cruising in between that. He does An Interview with a Vampire, which people are like really mean about whether or not he can do it and if he can play like a sexy, whatever.
Sarah: He was great in that movie.
Willa: He's up to stuff. He and Nicole Kidman are sort of very power-coupley. And then at the end of the night, it gets a little wobbly. He does Magnolia, which is when he grows his hair out. And that's also when I decided he was cute. I really remember him showing up in some premiere or like US Weekly, before it was a tabloid, as a teen and being like, who is that? That's Tom Cruise?
Sarah: You finally feel the tingle. I think he's amazing in Magnolia, and I want to see him do more stuff like that. That's not really relevant here, I just want it.
Willa: Well, it is actually, it's going to be relevant. We're going to call it back. So the other thing that's happening is that he Nicole come in and go to work with Stanley Kubrick, making Eyes Wide Shut. And Nicole Kidman was just on Fresh Air a couple of weeks ago and ended up talking to Terry Gross about Eyes Wide Shut. And basically, they're supposed to be there for six months. They're there for 18 months. They're just like living there. They're making Eyes Wide Shut, this erotic drama about this married couple playing sort of sex games. When they're in the UK for this incredible amount of time, the UK has totally different libel laws in America, where the person suing has the burden of proof, not the person who printed the thing that may or may not be true. So basically, you can just get away with saying a lot more stuff. But Tom Cruise goes ahead and sues a British tabloid successfully in 1998 and he wins. But what he's suing them for is this rumor that his marriage is a sham because he's gay and Nicole Kidman is a beard and they have to have sex coaches. They have to be taught how to have sex. When you think about who the male famous actors of the eighties and nineties who there have been rumors that they were gay, there's very few.
Sarah: That's such a good point. Especially Richard Gere and the gerbil rumor. I don't know how that got attached to him. Yeah. It was just a pastime. We just had to do that as a country.
Willa: There’s always been this verbal and this is at a high pitch, that Tom Cruise might be gay, but he's closeted, essentially. At the moment that he then sort of very abruptly gets divorced. This is all so speculative, but I remember very distinctly. At the time, California alimony laws change after 10 years, and the divorce happened right then. So there's all this theorizing that they had like a deal. She was a really young actress, obviously. Scientology, Tom Cruise credits with really helping him with dyslexia. Which is sort of also infamously rumored and thought - not even rumored - thought to de-gay people. That's a thing that they do.
They have two adopted children. There's just this whole massive, totally alleged suspicion and rumor about his sexual orientation. So he gets divorced. It's pretty abrupt and messy, and immediately starts dating his co-star from Vanilla Sky, Penelope Cruz, sort of quietly and they date for a couple years. And so then by 2004, like they’ve broken up and he doesn't have a girlfriend seemingly then seems from the public to go out and get another one.
He basically shows up in April of 2005 with Katie Holmes in Rome. And at the time, the tabloids people.com runs this online survey that ‘is his relationship a true romance or a publicity stunt?’ And like 62% of responses say it's a publicity stunt. And obviously this is totally bogus, but the point is just that this is how everyone's kind of thinking about it. Star Magazine tabloid runs a headline that's like, could this be true? Us Weekly is also doing surveys.
I used to intern at US Weekly and I would make those surveys up because it was so excruciating to go up to people in Times Square and ask them questions like this. So I'm not saying it's true, but it's just like…
Sarah: How many people were you supposed to talk to?
Willa: I was asked a hundred and I would totally do what you said. I would ask 10 and just extrapolate the numbers out.
Sarah: I know that because I just listened to you describe that on your Sad Jennifer Aniston episode, which I love, because that's such a mystery of our time.
Willa: This is really connected. We're going to get into what's happening in the tabloids at this moment. Basically everyone is just extremely skeptical that, whether they should be, or not, like, there's just a lot of cynicism that he needed to check a box and he did. Throughout this he's had this really powerful publicist named Pat Kingsley, who also represented Sandra Bullock and Al Pacino and Meg Ryan. They started working together in the nineties and she's making people sign non-disclosure agreements. If you do a print interview with him, she makes you sign something saying you're not going to sell it to the tabloids. She makes TV journalists delete or destroy the tape after they air. And also the media ecosystem is smaller and contained, right? There's less outlets. Also in the early 2000’s he fires her and hires his sister.
Sarah: Oh, Tom.
Willa: No, totally. As it does seem like Scientology is becoming increasingly important to him, Scientology has long been supposed to be a factor in his divorce with Nicole Kidman. And he insisted there's a Scientology tent on the War of the Worlds set and sort of after this Oprah thing, he will go on to do some also sort of infamous interviews with Matt Lauer, where he goes after the history of psychiatry and Brooke Shields. It just seems like Scientology is becoming more central to him.
Sarah: That’s right. He had a dustup with Brooke Shields. Yeah. That doesn't make you more sympathetic.
Willa: That's the worst part? The mood about celebrities in 2005 is really not the mood about celebrities right now. So the things that are happening that I think are germane to the mood. The first is reality television. We obviously had reality television for a long time, the Real World, yada, but basically in 2000 Survivor, the first season, starts. America falls in love with reality TV in a consistent way. And it'll take a couple of years for the machine of minting semi famous people from reality shows to really kick in, but everyone is really enamored with this new way of existing in public or in fiction. So just for example, after this Oprah incident, a columnist for the LA Times wrote this piece about now, celebrities are all existing in this reality TV zone where they can make their own reality TV show, without being on TV. Literally just what we all live in habit every single minute of the day with all social media. But it seems like an interesting insight into a new way of being famous, where you're sort of letting people in on the backseat behind the scenes, but you're also not. It's just a new way of thinking about how famous people can inhabit space and time, around us. They could be kind of performing, but also being real at the same time.
Sarah: I feel like it’s really hard to get back to a time when we didn't have direct access to celebrities and their thoughts through social media. In 2005, you would be like, “What's David Caruso doing today?” And you just wouldn't know.
Willa: David Caruso. I think one of the things that is happening with Tom Cruise, it seems like he's aware at this moment of the changes that are happening around him and that people want a different kind of access to celebrities, a more authentic, unfettered. And so he's like, I've been so uptight. I have not talked about my personal life. I've been so on the ball and hey, it's a new age. Maybe people want to see my real feelings.
There's some point in the Oprah interview, he's like, “I can't be cool”. When you feel like this, you just have to tell people he's sort of reaching for this new authenticity, but he's just very bad at it. Or just like, it just comes across as totally inauthentic. But I think that is the context. We have all these new ways of reaching audiences. Maybe I should do something with that? As we all know, being on a reality TV person is difficult.
Sarah: Yeah. And he's such an old-fashioned movie star, that to watch him try to transition to that, it's like having the champion penny farthing rider. Try and ride a bike with two wheels at the same size. It's just, it's like, oh, you're very good at the other thing. What if you did that?
Willa: No, I think that's exactly right, but he's like, there's this new bicycle, we should give that a shot. This Penny Barr thing is not going to go anywhere. And so then the other thing that's happening, the explosion of the tabloids. In 2001, Bonnie Fuller took over US Weekly and sort of inaugurated it as a more pugnacious, slightly dismissive relationship to celebrities, where her famous invention is, ‘Stars are just like us’ where you see people pumping their gas and wearing Uggs. And it doesn't mean that you're not super obsessed and interested in celebrities, but you’re not super obsessed and interested in like a hey geographic way anymore. Right? You don't want to read what the studio is putting out about Carey Grant. You want the dirt, you know, you want to see Carey Grant coming out of someone's house in the middle of the morning.
Sarah: In the morning leaving his LSD dealer's house.
Willa: Yeah, totally. So there's US Weekly, which metastasizes very quickly into a number of other tabloids, including Star and other staff. But then there's also this explosion in blogs. In 2005, the number of blogs went from 10 million to 25 million. One of those is Perez Hilton. He becomes a hugely successful celebrity blogger by literally drawing dicks on celebrity faces.
Sarah: It feels relevant that maybe we needed to, we still behave absolutely shamefully with regards to everyone in the media so it's not like we're living in this age of enlightenment. But I feel as though at that time, it felt so exciting and, in a way, necessary to be able to try and bring celebrities down to the level of normal people. I feel like we were gleeful at the fact that we could prod their humanity in a way that we really couldn't before.
Willa: I think also just like Tom Cruise is an A-Lister. There are some of those people left, but that's really not the celebrity ecology. The celebrity ecology is full of who's and people that we know, maybe really famous people, but people who it's not that they got famous on a movie screen being gorgeous and 20 feet tall or whatever. Especially with that kind of famous person. There's a lot of pleasure in making them a little more life-size.
This is also, I would say, really peak tabloid time. Because the other story that's happening in 2005 is Brangelina, there is no bigger story. And similarly Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston, they're so elevated that I think people feel a little more comfortable. You just are punching up.
Sarah: Oh yeah. Because I remember feeling like it was so amazing that they hadn't collided with each other before. They're like the two people who at the time you would use to signify the most desirable person imaginable. And then you were like, oh, I've never seen them next to each other before. How have they not been drawn together like magnets?
Willa: You’re just a famous person and you're like, yep. Now I will call that person's agent or call their manager because we're all in the famous club. You don't have to be introduced, you're like, hey, we already know each other.
Sarah: And I guess now they have an app or something, but I definitely had my share of judgmental-ness at the time. But I also remember being very enchanted by the fact that I think Katie Holmes had at least said that she had a poster of Tom Cruise on her wall as a teen or a tween.
Willa: She had told Seventeen Magazine she wanted to marry him.
Sarah: Right. And I was like, so you're telling me there is hope for me and whoever I had a crush on in 2005, it has to be too embarrassing to say.
Willa: I find it so creepy. Is there nothing so creepy about that, too?
Sarah: Yeah. Now that I'm an adult, it is also creepy.
Willa: There's movies, like win a date with Tad Hamilton or whatever. I think there's this premise of being with your high school…
Sarah: Misery.
Willa: In a different direction, but yeah, totally. But there's something weird about it, right? To have an experience of someone's fame and then to actually know them. Don't you think their experience with them being famous is still distorted? Especially when it's someone like Tom Cruise, I don't know.
Sarah: I'm sure the levels of power are really interesting there. Yeah. If you grow up watching someone and then are in a relationship with them, I feel like the version that existed in your head might sort of take precedence for a long time until you're able to look up and be like, wait, this guy, I don't know about this guy. When you move into a new place and you have all these ideas about how you're going to decorate it or what your life will be like. And then a year later, it's completely different. And hopefully you really like what you did.
Willa: As opposed to now. There's a lot of reveling in being mean to celebrities, being cynical about them. And Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are one half, but then we also have like the Paris, Britney, Lindsay Lohan stuff that's slow motion, disaster stuff. Burbling underneath. We’re not feeling that generous, I would say.
Sarah: There's like a bumper crop of cruelty, and yeah, I feel like we're kind of fending off. At the time, I feel like people were very stressed about the idea that you could be famous for being famous.
Willa: Yes. Oh my God.
Sarah: And maybe now we agree that's fine.
Willa: People were like, they didn't do anything. Paris Hilton! Right. There's real anxiety. What is it? What are they famous for? I think it's very clear, like for example, Kim Kardashians, very good at the thing that she's doing, right. It's very difficult to be a reality star. She's working all the time.
Sarah: It's very funny in retrospect that at the time we were like, obviously the correct model is that you act or sing or something and then have your life destroyed by celebrity. And I feel like from where we are now and in the ecosystem we have, I feel like it makes total sense to say, no, wouldn't it be nice if there were people who were just like, I want to be a celebrity, I don't care what kind. And then they got that. And then they were like, cool, I am going to focus all my energy on being a celebrity because that is my job. As opposed to like, I just want to act, and I have to sign babies now.
Willa: I do wonder if this is not also the time when fame really started to ruin people's lives. Obviously, fame is always complicated and it has drug and alcohol and mental health problems that seem totally exacerbated by fame. But this is when you can't turn it off. Did you watch Get Back, the Beatles documentary?
Sarah: I didn't.
Willa: One of the things that's interesting about it is they have this record label in the heart of London that they just show up to, or they walk up, or they take a taxi. And there's one or two people standing out as fans, but they just exist in the city and they come to work and there's just not a gajillion people around just trying to take pictures of them. And you're just like, oh, they're the Beatles. They're so famous, but it's not like fame wasn't crazy for them. But just like at a totally different temperature. It's just not all the time. And it's changing. This is when being famous means you're famous every minute of the day. So maybe you should have a different perspective on what fame is and just decide to be famous every minute of the day. Or if you want to be an actor, you are also signing up for being famous every minute of the day. You have to have both, you can't have one or the other. And I sorta think actually before it was a little more less intense. So then the other thing that also makes it more intense is just YouTube. So it's not that there've been no viral videos, I think a really analogous thing to this actually has nothing to do with celebrities at all, but is the Howard Dean Scream.
Sarah: Oh my God. That was a bummer. Can you tell that story?
Willa: So Howard Dean was the front runner for a Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. And he, in January of that year, does an event where he again is in a room full of really excited people who are on his side and he lets out a yowl, a scream, an intense, long scream, that basically gets plucked out of that interaction and spread all over the internet as just like a sign of him being totally crazy and uncool. And it does actually appear to totally tank him.
Sarah: And that makes, let me think of the thing where Muskie people thought that he had cried even when that was the fifties or the sixties, and that destroyed his campaign. I think the Dean scream was also made possible by what the media was in the moment that happened. But that maybe we're used to having that level of scrutiny for presidential candidates who are working in any kind of immediate age, or like Nixon got sweaty in 1960. But now that you are being so surveilled as a celebrity, I'm sure we've always had these desires, but maybe the technology is allowing us to surveil more people more closely.
Willa: Totally. And also, I think there's something about literally media literacy. So something like the Dean scream or the Tom cruise moment, you are seeing it, you're seeing the video of it, it's not written to you. But at that moment in time, I think like there weren't a hundred journalists that were then like, excuse me, what's the context? Who does this serve? You don't see people doing a close reading of the whole Oprah episode like two days later, And you would now, because we know not to trust our eyes, even though we also totally trust our eyes. We're just constantly living in this duality where we absolutely believe everything that we see and also know we can't believe everything we see, that's part of why we're all going crazy. But like, so you'd see the thing and have an opinion about it, but you might be like, oh, there's maybe more here. And I think sort of at the dawn of the viral video age, you're like, oh my God, I can see it. This is so unhinged. The Dean scream and Tom Cruise are really similar in the sense of telling us this man is too intense. This is undecorous. And if it's not quite effeminate, it is not masculine and calm. It's not what we're expecting from our action heroes or our presidents.
Sarah: So we went with John Kerry, who I don't remember feeling strongly about anything.
Willa: No, exactly. The thing is that YouTube has started, but the first cut down of this, which is just all the crazy parts, is not on YouTube. A future one, the sort of viral video of the electric is on YouTube and Tom Cruise and his team and Oprah and her team would never have known that this could possibly happen. Now, every famous person and their handlers consider everything they do might go viral. In fact, they're hoping that could happen, but this was definitely not in the realm of possibility.
Sarah: They’re like dodos.
Willa: The thing that can destroy you is the thing you never consider.
Sarah: The deal with Oprah that’s like, maybe it'll be really big that day, but then tomorrow she'll make another show, and then everyone will talk about that and we’ll all move on.
Willa: And moreover, we can have the reasonable expectation that everybody who saw it chose to watch Tom Cruise on Oprah, which probably indicates that they like him. Yes. Oprah is a safe space for famous people to come talk to Oprah and her adoring audience. Even as Perez Hilton is drawing literally jizz on celebrities faces at the same time. And the tabloids are like coining pet names. You know, they're going to be TomKat. You know, when you think about fan bases, like Tom Cruise doesn't have stans because his stans are the middle-aged women that were in the Oprah audience. All the things that a celebrity would have now, going into some situation like this, or just in Kuwait and forming. It's like with Twitter now, there's a bunch of people that are really skeptical of Tom Cruise and suspicious of him and there are also these people who will love him. Right. And they don't have much occasion to bump into each other, but they're about to.
So he goes on Oprah, as we've said, it's very cozy and she fixes his hair and they hold hands a lot. But I want to play you this thing, because this is how it starts. Basically, Oprah had recently just hosted the Legends Ball, which would air on TV a year later. It was this event where she sort of celebrated 25 black women, including Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou and Diahann Carroll and Rosa Parks and Tina Turner, who has a crush on Tom Cruise and tried to talk to him. And so that just happened. And Tom and Katie were at this event and he sent flowers, which is what they started talking about. And he's so sincerely saying it was magical. He's really complimenting her. And then she says this, hold on, let me find it for you.
“What Oprah did by acknowledging those women, it's a great inspiration.”
“You sent me the most beautiful flowers. Thank you, Tom.”
“You know what, I don’t feel like it was enough, Oprah. It wasn't. It was magic.”
“No Tom. I turned and looked at one point you were standing in the chair going, ‘Yes, Yes!’ It was a black tie ball, he was standing in his black tie. And it was, you were going, “Yes”. I go, I love that enthusiasm.”
Sarah: Oh, he did send some big flowers.
Willa: He really did.
Sarah: And it says flowers from Tom. I love it.
Willa: Right. So in this clip, you're hearing Oprah say she loved how enthusiastic he was. And in his enthusiasm, which he expressed by getting on a piece of furniture. The whole couch jumping thing is a callback to this.
Sarah: Oh, my God.
Willa: So on the one hand, he is unhinged. On the other, he's doing the thing Oprah's just told him she loved. Every time that she asked him about Katie Holmes and he jumps on the couches twice, he's saying, I'm so excited about this. It's manifest. It's not a subtext. That's what he's trying to say. And throughout there's all these funny bits of self-awareness. So she starts saying over and over again, like you're gone. And then he says, I'm standing on your couch. That's how gone I am.
Sarah: That really changes it. Because then it's an in-joke between them.
Willa: Totally.
Sarah: It never occurred to me how like pal-y they could be. But of course they are, they're both the same degree of famous, basically.
Willa: It ended up harming their relationship understandably. And also, she was not that nice about it with him later.
Sarah: God. It's hard to be Oprah.
Willa: That’s not quite my takeaway from this. It is hard being Oprah.
Sarah: Well, yeah, I guess it's Game of Thrones. It's like, if you're going to be Oprah, you have to destroy a lot of what you love to sit on the throne.
Willa: Yes. But I am really impressed with this sort of ease and confidence with which she toggles between so blatantly being like, I inhabit exactly the same exalted world as you, but I know what people want to hear and it is my obligation to get it for them. The whole thing is he's being much more open than he's ever been. She refers to this time that Katie Holmes had said she wanted to marry him when she was 17 years old. And then she goes, “I'm in the business of making dreams happen. Are you in the business and making dreams happen? Are you going to ask her to marry you?” You know, and Tom's like, I hate to disappoint her. And everyone's like, ahhh! And then Oprah's like, no, really, so are you gonna marry her? And then he's at some point he's like, aren't we here to promote War of the Worlds? And that's actually when he reaches over and grabs her by the shoulders and arms, the thing that is a scene of the viral video of him electrifying her, that is like Tom Cruise kills Oprah. But that's like literally at the moment where he's like, can we talk about the thing I'm here to talk about? And then, you know what Oprah’s like. She's like, we cannot talk about it. We're going to keep talking about Katie Holmes.
Later he says, you know, he just likes to make people happy. Like his mom and his sister, he's a performer. And he was like in this mode, and you can see it. They're loving it. I think people thought it was so weird and fake, but it doesn't really seem fake to me. I see that it's too much, but it doesn't read as fake. Does it really speak to you?
Sarah: No, and I'm a very credulous person, I think. But I feel like the read of it that I had at the time was like, this fake movie star is fakely jumping on a couch to sell his fake relationship with this fake lady. And I think that there's also an uncharitable read a lot of us have for somebody being truly in the grip of a strong emotion. Because it's a cynicism that maybe develops if you feel like who could ever actually be that happy, but regardless of what he is feeling that about, or what's creating this moment for him, he just reminds me that you got to start powering down.
Willa: Yes. He's like powering down is exactly right. He's just so high strung. But it does make sense to me as someone just being like, this is part of our strategy, you're going to stop playing everything so close to the chest, right? People want more access to famous people. They want to feel more intimately with the famous people they know. This is an opportunity. This is super on brand. It's romantic. It's big. Go big, just do you. And then he's Tom Cruise. He's like, I always do my own stunts. And so he's like, I am going to go big.
It was just a misunderstanding about how to appear sincere and authentic on camera, which he obviously sort of understands. It just reminds me, when people go from being in theater, to being in movies. In theater you've really have to play to the back row. And then in movies you have to do so much less. The camera will get it. There's some similar dissonance, right? He doesn't understand how to play to a viral video crowd.
Sarah: That's a new art form. It's also so sad where it's like, oh, Tom, just be yourself. People will love it. And then it just became this national shitstorm. And I imagine him being like never, again.
Willa: The intensity, right? The thing that we're seeing is, you are such an intense person and that's probably always been true and probably continues to be true and you’re being super-intense about that and intense is not effortless, right? Intense is not really cocksure and cocky. It can be, this is how you are famous in Hollywood for 40 years. You're just very controlling and intense.
Sarah: He's not the guy who you cast in Mission Impossible because he's going to jog at a safe pace around Prague or whatever. And then he's approaching love that way. The public doubting a story that they're being told about a celebrity romance makes total sense because we've been lied to so many times. It makes sense that we're all suspicious of the whole thing. But this came up in the Tammy Faye Bakker re-release, and I've kind of been kind of thinking about it since, real emotion makes us very suspicious as viewers. And I'm thinking of also the very famous meme before there was a meme moment in terms of - it would show up parodied on Seinfeld months later - Tonya Harding stopped her long program at the Olympics in 1984 because she had a broken skate lace and hoisted her skate up on the judges table and was just clearly distraught. And I think a lot of people saw that as her causing more trouble on purpose and engineering this disaster. And it's just like, why is it not more believable to us that she's just in the grip of a stronger emotion than she could handle. And this is just a real disaster.
Willa: What if Tom Cruise did go down a list to find an appropriate girlfriend? That's just called matchmaking. I'm not even saying his age, but this idea that he was like, I, in fact, am looking for a new partner and I will correlate all these appropriate... That's not so different from online dating. It just feels robotic and weird and especially did then. What if he just picked a list of 20 young and up and coming actresses and sent an email to them. That's really weird on the one hand. And then it was also very mercenary and logical on another. It's the same I have a job to do. I'll do it, kind of personality.
Sarah: I feel very sympathetic to that read, because I feel like I'm two years into a pandemic, wherever we are now, I feel like I'm now whenever I hear about anyone who I feel like I could possibly be interested in romantically, I'm like, are they single? Are they single?
Willa: Yeah. Maybe that's just Tom Cruise doing that version of it. You know? He's doing whatever he's doing, who knows, there's lots of stuff about Tom Cruise we never know, but I would just say that it was certainly out of this moment that came the most uncharitable read of it. I guess to me the most uncharitable thing about it is that like he wasn't reading the room when absolutely he was reading the room a hundred percent is that he wasn't reading all the other rooms, his viral video would play in. In the context, he's actually giving everybody there exactly what they wanted, and they're thrilled about it.
Sarah: It also occurs to me that this is kind of a uniquely bad moment to go viral because it's the moment when we have the technology for video to travel around the world the way that we're now used to, but also, it's a pain in the ass to wait for a two-minute-long video to load. I spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos that are two hours long that are like TanaCon: In Seven Chapters. And it is being exhaustively broken down by some college student in their bedroom. And you're like, yes. Tell me, you tell me the context. I feel like technologically we didn't have the capacity for context yet.
Willa: Totally. And not just technologically, like I said, more like almost mentally. And to be fair, some of those gestures are very broad and very weird. How many times do you need to kneel and first pump? You know, he's doing it over and over. It's not like there isn't anything cringy happening.
Sarah: Did he eat an entire bag of chocolate covered coffee beans in the green room?
Willa: And then Katie Holmes is in the green room the entire time, and they bring her out at the end and everyone's like, “Ahh!”
Sarah: Oh, my God.
Willa: I know. It's very, the whole thing. I would just say, the aftereffects of this are incredible given what it is. So, you know, I think people at the time were like, this ruined his career. And afterwards it'd be like, no, of course it didn't ruin his career. He still is a very famous and big movie star, but it absolutely did alter his career and change how we think about him. And Rich Chudziak, as I mentioned before, wrote this piece about it, and he sort of mentioned how one of the things it did do was totally squash the gay rumors. Because the decision to present yourself as not gay by instead presenting yourself as super-duper weird, just seemed so odd to people or just worked so well that everyone just went from being like, maybe you're gay to being like, oh, you're just a strange person. That just became the operating thing about Tom Cruise.
Sarah: Kind of a pyrrhic victory.
Willa: Yes, exactly. And sort of in the weeks after as he was promoting War of the Worlds, he did this Today Show interview with Matt Lauer, where he really snapped at him about not knowing the history of psychiatry and taking Brooke Shields to task. And in those, he seems just like an asshole, and it's all for Scientology. So it's just very gross and scary. And Paramount cuts the War of the Worlds press tour short. And then War of the Worlds cost a lot of money, does go on to make money, but perhaps not quite as much money as people thought it was going to make initially. Although it really did make quite a bit of money. And sort of in August, Paramount ends their relationship with Tom Cruise that has been going on for 15 years sort of saying like, you know, he's become a pop culture punchline.
Sarah: Wow, God, stick it out. Stand by your man, Paramount.
Willa: He actually totally doesn't really make romances anymore. He stopped doing the Jerry McGuire stuff, which just became not a part of his thing. And he really starts to do action movies almost exclusively. Amy Nicholson wrote this piece for the LA Weekly that I mentioned, and she's just like, we got a GIF and a viral video, and we lost a movie star who actually was really interested in doing interesting stuff for the first 20 years of his career and just stopped. And now only does exactly the things that are safe because people kind of think he's a weirdo and he's not going to risk doing Interview with a Vampire or Eyes Wide Shut.
Sarah: Or Magnolia. Oh, that's why we didn't get more Magnolias. Yeah. It's funny too, because I feel that we maybe conflated the Matt Lauer interview with the Oprah moment, and kind of were like, I got to hate the Oprah moment because the Matt Lauer moment was actually hateable. And it's like, yes, okay.
But I feel like Scientology is really weird and they seem pretty scary to me. And I think the idea of someone becoming really enmeshed in Scientology and then slamming there, I believe the former Endless Love co-star for writing a memoir about postpartum depression is really terrible. But I also don't think Paramount was like, “Tom Cruise, we're dropping you because you hindered the fight to de-stigmatize postpartum depression.”
Willa: Probably the next most viral thing he did was that very intense sort of speech he gave at Scientology. It was an inner Scientology viral video. He basically re-privatized his life after this. He does this sort of opening up and then he sort of shuts down and he's making a different kind of movie, but he sort of starts talking about he and Katie Holmes, do get married and they do have a baby.
Sarah: Oh, I remember that baby. Big, very big news.
Willa: An extremely germane topic running alongside of this is like the fixation on the baby bump of this moment, Octo mom, and this weird obsession with fertility also totally driven by the tabloids. But they do get married. They are together for a long time. They do get divorced. We don't really know about his dating life anymore at all. You can see how he got there. And then all we do know about is freaky Scientology stuff. And that's sort of one of the reasons where you're like, it feels like Tom Cruise’s whole personal life is all about Scientology now. And it's like alarm bells bad. No good, very bad. And when you look back at the Oprah thing, you're like, we did him a little dirty. But also, it's too complicated what he became to really want to apologize.
Sarah: He's a weird guy, but that was maybe the least weird thing he did that year.
Willa: Yes. The least harmful. It's harmless.
Sarah: Maybe that's important. You can do something weird and tabloid-y where you're calling into question the reality of postpartum depression. Or you can just be a very active physical guy who's being very exuberant and open and kind of feeling disarmed by the amount of love in the room for you. And those aren't the same thing. That, and then the Scientology thing where he sort of with his peers, the fact that he made the same mistake both times. I connect that to the fact that people growing up today - and myself, honestly, to some extent - the expectation you have to have now if you're putting yourself into the public sphere in any way is the entire world could feel the need to comment on this for some reason they probably won't, but they could.
Willa: Especially if you're Tom Cruise. It's almost like it couldn't have happened before. We just didn't have the technological capabilities to do it. And then I just don’t know that it would have happened after only because even though Tom Cruise is very famous, there is a par for the course-ness about the terms in which we understood what was happening would have been different, which is like, we would have understood it as a play for virality. Or we would have understood it as the Scientology stuff is him kind of trolling. He went to put himself out there in that way. And I think we would have responded to it with more jadedness a little bit. Maybe still been interested in it and made fun of it, but also just like, this is another celebrity, kind of pathetically trying to get attention. And it really didn't feel that way. It wasn't that right. He wasn't trying to get attention in that way. And it was just uncharted territory. And now it's very charted.
Sarah: To me there’s kind of a bittersweet lost worldliness to it. I feel like it’s the way people may be used to feel when they were like, in my day, we got ice from the ice man, and they cut it out of lakes.
Willa: Have you read celebrity profiles from the nineties? It was before everything could go around on the internet. So there's this famous premier interviewer where Jennifer Lopez is just slagging on everybody. There's a Meryl Streep profile in the nineties when she didn't get Evita or she just shit talks Madonna. Just stuff that no one would ever do now, because they would know it will just be all over the world and the internet for days, and they'll be asked about it forever. And so you read these old profiles and you're like, oh, glory days where it was only going to be here so they were willing to do it, just say something real. Which is a moment where people felt comfortable with a certain range of performative behaviors, honesty even, or maybe whatever. Now everyone knows better, unless they really want the attention. Yeah.
Sarah: There’s these layers of lesser levels of surveillance after the VCR, but before the internet. And then there's before the VCR, when you go on TV and do something weird and then people would say, I think I remember that happening, did it happen? And they couldn't play it for anybody. And it would become oral folklore, the way that you could remain in obscurity. That feels like a thing that we're now missing, the lack of expectation of privacy that anybody seems to have. But then the fact that we have the ability to offer context feels like some kind of countervailing weight to that. But I don't know. I don't think it evens out.
Willa: It's still so new. I know it's been like 20 years or 15 years since this happened or something like that. And so we’re like, it's not new and people who are thoughtful and cool don't want to be schoolmarmy about how bad technology is. Because the history of people being really worked up about how bad technology is… it's like, ah, the novel's going to ruin everything. But the things that we're doing are still really new and are uncharted and have like all these long-term consequences that are unfolding. I don't know. Maybe we should be worried about the novel, whatever the equivalent is now. And we'll obviously come to terms with it and learn how to deal with it, hopefully or not, you know, but it is happening. We are still living in a world where people are continuously assessing how to behave in public private spaces that they think are more private than they actually are.
Sarah: Also, in times of uncertainty it makes us feel, or it even just feels necessary. It doesn't even probably feel that great to be trying to suss out the actual motivations of everyone you see. Because God knows a lot of other people have lied to us recently, but maybe now it's just that we're all Tom Cruise.
Willa: We know now, there's been so much research about doubting the veracity of eyewitness accounts, right? We don't remember things correctly, we do not read things properly. And we just, we cannot believe that. We think that if we study the text close enough, the truth will be revealed and no, I don't know. Who knows what's going on with Tom Cruise? And there's no amount of studying the Tom Cruise footage that's going to really make us know. I would have thought that having access to all of this information, if we all think we can solve every puzzle every single time, literally Tom Cruise would have to tell you and that’s never going to happen. We’re never going to know.
Sarah: That's so emotional. I guess that's why I love Magnolia so much, because it's Tom Cruise playing a character who's living in a world of self-deceit about his life, and also his relationship with his father. And then at the end, we get to see him broken down enough to be honest. He's at his dad's death bed. I think he says, “Don't you die ,you fucking asshole.” It's so good. I love that movie. Honestly, is one of the things that we banish if we make the world this way. And maybe we can live without that from Tom Cruise, but we need to be able to be unguarded to some extent in our lives, I feel like, or we’re just going to all make a bunch of Mission Impossible movies.
Willa: This was really good. Thank you so much.
Sarah: I love this. I love getting to do this. This is great.
“Katie told Seventeen magazine that her dream was to marry Tom Cruise. So, you know, I've been in the dream making business this year, are you in the dream making business?”
“I don't want to disappoint her.”