I realize that the "Tom Cruise hearts Scientology" video has been just about everywhere over the past couple of days. Still, it's one of those rare cultural curiosities that, for whatever reason, I can't seem to get enough of.
It's just mesmerizing in its unbridled surreality -- like being bukkaked with crazy.
There's really very little that I can add in reference to the unhinged lunacy of Cruise these days; most of it's already been contemplated at length by sources far more notable than myself.
I guess all that I can muster -- besides a somewhat horrified "What the fuck?" -- is that if Cruise weren't a movie star, Congress would already have passed a law bearing his name aimed at keeping him 100 yards away from the innocent.
He doesn't simply look insane in the leaked promotional video, he looks dangerously insane. Demonically possessed. As in, he really should've been a shoe-in to play the new Joker.
On the one hand, it's a trainwreck that bests even Britney or maybe the 1996 remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau for sheer hypnotic power. When you think about where Tom Cruise once was -- his place in the Hollywood hierarchy and in America's hearts -- compared to what he's become in the collective consciousness, it's almost unfathomable. Even Janeane Garofalo's decision to forgo a promising film career in favor of becoming a humorless lesbian doesn't come close.
It's truly rare that you see a person who's spent a majority of his life carefully under the control and, it would seem, sedation of highly-trained publicists go completely off the fucking rails.
In some ways, it's almost admirable to watch him commit career suicide with such bombastic finality.
Behold the power of Scientology, I suppose.
Which does, I admit, bring up an interesting question: Do ridiculous little men like Scientology's current chief David Miscavige really think that Cruise is doing their silly "religion" a favor? There's just no way that anyone with the kind of mind Scientology purports to be able to create can honestly buy Cruise's antics as good for the religion -- that a guy who's pissed away a huge career and turned himself into a laughing stock is somehow going to be the most effective advocate for the product that led to his exile from the grown-ups' table.
"I'm Tom Cruise, and just look at what Scientology did for me!"
I don't know -- that doesn't seem very, well, smart.
Hmm...
You know something, now that I watch this video again -- I feel like I've seen it somewhere before...
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