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Nothing Personal
What the devil has gotten into Ms. Jones?
Paula's going back to court; Dan Quayle and Alice Cooper on reality's inequities; King of Pop flops into Munich orchestra pit; and FBI says Tim Leary sang.
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Column
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Nothing Personal
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Brilliant Careers
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Still going strong after 50 years of dancing, the founder of the Dance Theater of Harlem did for ballet what Jackie Robinson did for baseball.
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Nothing Personal
China's new weapon: Smart sperm
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[06/28/99]

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By Christopher Kelly

June 30, 1999 | One of the earliest and most trenchant intimations I had of my own homosexuality came while watching Tom Cruise in the 1983 comedy "Risky Business." I say this with a certain amount of embarrassment -- because who, after all, wants to admit to being aroused, as a 10-year-old boy, at the sight of a barely-post-pubescent-himself movie star dancing in his snug white cotton underwear? Indeed, I'm not sure I should be mentioning this at all, for fear that I'll undermine what I really want to say about Cruise, about how original and daring an actor I think he's become.

But the problem is that I can't seem to say the one thing without saying the other. My admiration for him as a performer is entirely bound up in my desire for him as a sexual persona. In fact, I don't think Cruise can separate these elements either; whether he realizes it or not, he's grown as an actor by exploiting the very things -- a classic face, a perfect body, a predilection toward sexually ambiguous parts -- that have also made him a gay icon. Is it any wonder, then, that in our impaired film culture, in which male sexuality is rarely addressed on-screen, and even more rarely addressed in film criticism, Cruise has had such a hard time gaining widespread respect? Or, to put it another way: Whether you're gay or straight, until you allow yourself to be turned on by Tom Cruise, you can't begin to see how very far he's come. (I hope, and expect, this progression will continue with his much-speculated-upon performance in the soon-to-be-released "Eyes Wide Shut," co-starring Cruise's wife, Nicole Kidman, and directed by Stanley Kubrick.)

I can already hear the objections: from the one group of moviegoers cemented in their belief that Cruise will never be anything more than a transparent pretty boy, and from the other that will disapprovingly sneer, "When are you people going to give up? He's not gay." The former objections I will address in due time, but to those who would argue the latter, let me state this right away: I don't care whether any of the rumors that have dogged Cruise from virtually the start of his career are true or not. It doesn't matter to me. What does interest me are the rumors themselves, because in many ways they are a necessary starting point for a critical analysis of the actor's work. Cruise has repeatedly -- and vehemently -- denied these rumors, including taking successful legal action against a London newspaper that called his marriage to Nicole Kidman a put-on. But still they persist -- to the point where one wonders if the actor's work isn't feeding them. Has Cruise (consciously or unconsciously) been telegraphing gay signals that audiences (consciously or unconsciously) have been picking up on?

A scene in "Losin' It" (1983), a crass teen comedy in which Cruise plays one of three California high school students who head to Tijuana to get laid, certainly suggests that there's something more sexually complicated about him than anyone has ever acknowledged. Taken "upstairs" at a strip club, Cruise is led into a room of prostitutes where his buddies give him first choice. His gait hesitant, his hands lodged in the pockets of his pants, his face sweetly telegraphing the panic of a confident young man gradually losing his cool, he selects a much older woman. But the desire soon caves in on itself. Alone with the prostitute, he realizes that he won't be able to perform -- and he captures a quiet, lingering moment of sexual dejection.

Tom Cruise has played the role of confident, cocksure stud so many times -- and so effectively -- that most viewers tend to forget how many moments there are just like this one in the Cruise canon. In "Risky Business," for instance, Cruise imagines himself home alone with his high school dream girl -- the music swells, their shirts come off, they begin making out. And then sirens, flashing lights and a curious mob of neighbors outside interrupt them. The next shot is of Cruise lying in bed, with a sheet covering his lower body and his hand beneath that sheet. The joke is that this is a masturbatory fantasy gone awry -- and yet Cruise doesn't play it for laughs. When he bounds out of the bed and begins looking through an alternative newspaper for a prostitute -- first enraged, and then sad and awkwardly tensed up -- he limns a genuinely moving portrait of a young boy frustrated by how long it's taking for him to become a man.

Yet, I'm not trying to suggest anything so banal as Cruise's heterosexual failings in "Losin' It" or "Risky Business" being symbolic of a latent homosexuality, in either the characters or the actor. (He does, after all, successfully lose his virginity in both of these films.) Instead, I think these moments convey something far more difficult -- a state of almost constant sexual vulnerability. Few of Cruise's talented contemporaries right now -- not Denzel Washington, Tim Robbins, or even the swaggering Vince Vaughn or the sublimely vapid Keanu Reeves -- are uninhibited enough to convey real sexual impulses on screen. The one or two who can, say Nicolas Cage or Sean Penn, do so through macho ferality -- Penn violently finishing himself off in the woods after a tryst with Jennifer Lopez in "U-Turn," or Cage lecherously placing his hand between Laura Dern's legs as he follows her up the steps in "Wild at Heart."

But when it comes to deeply lived-in portraits of human sexuality, Cruise is the most original talent we have -- particularly in the way he so readily establishes his characters through heterosexual posturing and then strips away the layers of control. Watch the scene in Oliver Stone's "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989) where Cruise, playing all-American jock turned paralyzed Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, lies beneath a Mexican prostitute. As she writhes atop him, moaning and kissing him, Cruise begins to shake with tears, slowly at first, but then almost violently -- his character exhausted by an inability to feel anything below the waist, and yet still seeking some way back to masculinity. Here, and in so many other moments throughout his career, Cruise is unafraid to portray a man completely overwhelmed by his own sexuality. He can't do it, but he can't not try to do it, either -- and within that contradiction he finds a fragility that is deeply resonant. And it's here, too, that I think we locate one of the primary sources of a gay audience's identification with him -- as a man who can never divorce sexuality from self-consciousness.

In "Born on the Fourth of July" he's playing a literal version of a common gay state of mind -- the man paralyzed by sex. "Risky Business" and "Losin' It" offer something similar -- unable to control his impulses, and yet completely terrified to act upon them, he's acting out emotions that just about every gay person has experienced firsthand. In these films (and in many others) he may be playing straight characters, but through his confusion, desperation, all-consuming need and occasional self-hatred, he winds up offering the closest thing we have to a homosexual sensibility in movies today.

Next page | A tableau of orgiastic ecstasy or just gay kitsch?