Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon People

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.
By Amy Reiter
[06/30/99]

Column
The emperor's new guitars
Photographer David La Chapelle offers a prophecy of scurvy spiritual illness that's as shiny as a fishbowl full of dildos, while the bidding on Clapton relics resembles an auction for remnants of the True Cross.
By Cintra Wilson
[06/30/99]

Nothing Personal
Horsey? perhaps. Bloodsucker, no.
Mohamed Al Fayed tries to charm the royals; Yeow! that's gotta hurt: Clinton ranked less dateable than Rodman or the Donald. Plus: Knock it off, you two cut-ups! John Wayne Bobbitt wants to date Lorena.
By Amy Reiter
[06/29/99]

Brilliant Careers
Arthur Mitchell
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.
By Nancy Hawley
[06/29/99]

Nothing Personal
China's new weapon: Smart sperm
To be Chinese, microscopic and brilliant; Korbut's koach kops to knuckleheadedness; Justice in Utah sweepstakes: First prize? Dinner with the psycho who was birddoggin' ya.
By Amy Reiter
[06/28/99]

Complete archives for People

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

But there is more to this than a few Rock Hudson-style double entendres and gay camp moments; and to understand how deep Cruise's homoeroticism goes, we need to pay attention to the Cruise image, to the body and face and how he uses them on-screen. Indeed, however attractive you do or do not find him, one thing is certain -- the camera utterly adores him. Part of this, I think, is because his boy-next-door features -- the high, even-tempered cheekbones, the just-too-big nose, the sparkling blue eyes -- relax on screen instead of tensing up (see Scott Wolf or Freddie Prinze Jr., two current neo-Cruise boy stars), and so he draws you in, even when his face isn't being terribly expressive.

And then there is the smile -- the big, toothy, preternaturally bright smile that, in its ubiquity, truly seems to beckon to a homosexual audience. Indeed, the fact that it is a "heterosexual" smile may very well be at the heart of Cruise's gay appeal -- which is to say, the more that smile gleams at us, the more its possessor comes to embody an entire spectrum of homosexual desire and fantasy: from the forbidden older brother protector ("All the Right Moves"), to the dangerous carnal predator ("Cocktail," "Interview With the Vampire"), to the straight-boy dreamboat who just might be willing to entertain sexual alternatives ("Top Gun," "Jerry Maguire"). Cruise uses his body in much the same manner -- as a fundamentally ordinary entity that has astonishing erotic range.

We first got a good look at that body in the opening scene of "All the Right Moves" (1983), a clumsy, touching melodrama about a Pittsburgh teenager trying to secure a football scholarship. Clad (once again) only in his underwear, Cruise gets out of bed and does a set of start-the-day pushups -- and it's immediately apparent that although he's supposed to be a playing a football player, his body looks a lot more like a swimmer's: lithe, muscular, perfectly smooth. Indeed, there's something terribly prissy about Tom Cruise's body -- as if he spends too much time working on it, trying to make it look perfect. In lesser hands (Rob Lowe's, say, or Emilio Estevez's) such a scene might easily have degenerated into self-parody -- the smoothed-out, muscled-up gay porn cover boy playing to the mainstream crowd, but Cruise made it work. And I think that's because he can use his body so fluidly -- and so ambiguously.

Take, for instance, the underwear dance in "Risky Business." Cruise bounces around the room, half lost to the music (Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll"), half self-conscious of his own outré exhibitionism. When he concludes by plopping onto the couch and throwing his body into a quivering frenzy, he manages the near impossible feat of making narcissism extremely sexy. In "The Color of Money" (1986), he does an even more glorious dance, this time at a pool hall to Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London." Cruise shuffles forward and back, eyeing the pool table and taking one perfect shot after another, slicing his cue stick through the air to the beat of the music -- until he stops, ostentatiously runs his hand over his impeccably coifed pompadour and repeats the lyrics of the song, " ... and his hair was perfect." If Tom Cruise had never done anything else in film, those two sequences alone might have made him a gay icon -- because in both he gives gay viewers their ultimate movie star: someone half-repugnant, but still magnetic; the perfect embodiment of heterosexual desire, when he isn't acting so gay.

Next page | Why Cruise gets less respect than Rodney Dangerfield