celebrity gossip, academic style

Cruise ‘Hustling’ on the Dance Floor — and Failing. Embarrassingly.

I borrow the title phrase from Lainey Gossip, who posted a short piece on how Tom Cruise has recently started playing the New Media game: he has a Twitter feed, a newly revamped website, and even a blog.

Lainey points out not only that the site is not managed by Cruise (he’s obviously too busy attending law classes at Harvard) but also that, in her words,

The fact that the GMD has to hustle it via new media…This is his reality now. He has a big name, a huge profile, he is a true movie star. But Tom Cruise still has to play catch up.

Indeed. Here’s what I wrote several months ago, in an earlier post on Cruise:

At the time of this writing, Cruise’s future in the industry is unclear. He boasts nearly half a dozen projects in development, including a possible Mission Impossible IV (following a reconciliatory lunch with Redstone) and several old school Cruise thrillers. But is there a market for a Cruise thriller that is neither pre-sold nor part of a larger franchise? In other words, is Cruise-as-brand still a strong enough ‘pre-sell’ to warrant the massive budgets that accompany such films? He might not have many other options: as Lions for Lambs demonstrated, audiences do not know how to respond to Cruise in non-blockbuster mode. He has effectively backed himself into a corner, forced to replay the sorts of roles that sustained his star through the ‘80s and ‘90s.

The Cruise model of stardom – distinguished by massive participation points, star-headed co-production, and reliance on star-as-selling-point – appears, by all accounts, to be on the decline. What’s more, the dramatic fall of Cruise’s star, taken in context with its gradual, albeit partial, recovery, speak to the continued necessity of excellent management, agenting, and publicity. Indeed, the fact that Cruise’s manic years are so closely aligned with the firing and rehiring of a trained publicist only further strengthens such a conclusion.

But Cruise’s career is by no means dead. He is still an international draw and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Small, artsy films featuring mid-level stars and “serious actors” may turn strong profits on small budgets domestically, but they will never supply the tremendous international and ancillary draw associated with Cruise and his middle-aged big-movie brethren: Tom Hanks, John Travolta, and Nicholas Cage. Unlike Roberts, forced to combat the stigma of the middle-aged woman and the difficulty of reprising her traditional rom-com roles, Cruise still has the market cornered in his particular brand of cocky action hero. It is remains a matter of finding the right films, the right studio arrangement, and the right publicity management to pull it off again. Whether that proves to be Mission Impossible 4 with Paramount, an official break with UA, or starring in the rumored thrillers with 20th Century Fox or Dreamworks, remains to be seen. Tom Cruise, as David Thomson has noted, is indeed very professional. Time will tell if he will be able to shift that consummate professionalism to the new parameters of conglomerate Hollywood.

What’s happening now, then, is not so much as rebranding as a Tom Cruise 2.0: the attempts of Cruise (and his very professional staff) to adapt his brand of stardom to new media formats. Cruise for the 21st century. New wife, new kid, newly botoxed face, same old smile and charisma.

Why, then, do his attempts come off as so incredibly clumsy and old media?

Take, for example, one of the recent posts on his blog, obviously authored by an eager staffer, screen capped below:

The post is coupled with a famous clip from Cocktail to the tune of “Hippy Hippy Shake.” Now, I want to emphasize the fact that I performed a tap dance to that song (from the Cocktail soundtrack) when I was 7 years old. What’s more, look to the way the post addresses the reader — first, as a somewhat dimwitted drinking novice (I’m imagining people who go on all-expenses paid cruises); second, as someone who would be attracted, or at very least appreciate, a blog post that simply posts a clip from a movie and tells you to appreciate it.

In other words, the blog post reads like bad magazine copy. In Reader’s Digest. For an un-hip, un-media savvy, old generation still living in Tom Cruise’s ’80s hey-day.

Take, for example, the TomCruise.com homepage:

The template looks snazzy enough, and the video that’s freezeframed above is high quality streaming. But it’s a montage of Cruise clips — most of them culled from classic Cruise, with a few iconic looks from the likes of Collateral thrown in for good measure — and, get this, set to…..the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The only thing better would’ve been to set it to “Danger Zone.”) Obviously, the designers are attempting to communicate the epic character of Cruise’s star — the iconic roles he’s played spanning the decades — but it plays rather like an amateur YouTube vid. Indeed, exploring the entire site, it offers very, very little that a star homepage from, say, 1998 would. It loads faster and uses streaming video — but couldn’t I have found that anywhere? What would draw me to this particular site? How is this refining or repopularizing Cruise’s image in any way? (Especially since it relies so heavily on old movies, effectively reminding its audience of what a great star Cruise was. Nearly thirty years ago.)

Finally, take a look at Cruise’s Twitter page:

Personally, I’m most entertained by the “Lookin forward to your tweets, guys!” As the other Tweets are signed “www.TomCruise.com team,” we’re to assume that those that go unsigned are authored by Cruise himself. Yet that voice — all geeky dad-style, akin to the hilarious one on this season’s Modern Family — reads as distinctly uncool. Dropping the ‘g’, calling his readers ‘guys’ — simply reifies the notion that Cruise is desperate to appear young and cool. That image of desperation is a relatively new one for Cruise, and dates to his courting of Holmes, when he not only dirty danced, but did the ‘motorcycle’ dance during an appearance on BET (one of Lainey’s favorite punching bags). Watch below if you dare.

Cruise isn’t rapidly Tweeting and Retweeting a la Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher; he’s not posting witty, acerbic comments like Rainn Wilson or Ben Stiller; he’s not endearing himself to his public by posting intimate details and photos of his private life, like Taylor Swift or even Elizabeth Taylor. Instead, he’s using Twitter as a banal extension of his preexisting publicity strategy. Why would I subscribe to his Twitter feed? So I can learn when Valkyrie comes out on Blu-Ray? He won’t win new fans with his Twitter feed - he’ll simply sustain the affection of those who already like him. In other words, he’s in stasis.

But a star in stasis is a star in decline. Cruise’s wisest move over the last few years has been to keep relatively quiet and mock himself in Tropic Thunder. But neither move sufficiently redefined his image — or made it dynamic enough — to thrive in our current gossip environment. He’s still a joke, as clearly evidenced by the uproarious laughter of my students when I suggested that he was a sex symbol.

And part of the joke, it seems, is his inability — or rather, the inability of those who manage his star — to appreciate and/or employ new media technologies. Old people struggling with new technology is inherently funny. My granddad on a computer is funny. And that’s the real humilation, especially now that he’s attempting to use the tech of the young-uns: he has fundamentally misunderstood how Twitter, websites, and blogs can be used to create a dynamic, resonating star image. His P.R. is firmly rooted in the 20th century: it’s as if he’s running Windows ’95 on an iPhone.

Ultimately, Cruise’s inability to adapt — or rather, his failure to understand and mimic how other stars have adapted — is what will keep him as the butt of innumerable jokes.