Showbiz
THIS SUMMER, TOM CRUISE TURNS 60 — to the astonishment of us all. His face may be a little sleeker and puffier, the nose and jawline discreetly modified, the hair richly ungrey. But Tom Cruise is the Eighth Wonder of the physical world. The bod is tight. The buttocks are granite. The gaze is focused. The teeth are dazzling. The career is strong. Basically, he looks better than most 40-year-olds. He doesn’t look that different from the boyish Lt Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, the speedy US Navy Flyer he played in the legendary action spectacular Top Gun, in 1986, that propelled him into ionospheric celebrity. And, of course, he’s in this summer’s sequel, for which he will be on the Cannes red carpet— Top Gun: Maverick, unselfconsciously doing much the same thing.
I watched Top Gun again the other day for the first time since it came out. What struck me was not so much the homoeroticism, based on the locker-room rapport between unclothed alpha males (“I’ve got a hard-on.” “Don’t tease me”), famously satirised by Quentin Tarantino in a monologue in the 1994 film Sleep With Me. Actually, it was the beach volleyball scene in which Maverick (Cruise) and Goose (Anthony Edwards) are winning handsomely and, every time they get a point, Cruise gives Edwards two resounding high-fives, up high and down low, with smacks that must have reverberated up the Western seaboard like sonic booms. My own palms were flinching and tingling at the sheer machismo. Poor Edwards must have been in agony.
Tom Cruise is the last Hollywood icon standing, the last real movie star. In an age of franchises, intellectual property and superheroes, Cruise is the defiant survivor of a time when the currency was the superstars themselves, with their unchanging personalities and their professional duty to keep young and beautiful. Despite all the affection I have for the great man, he is a living embodiment of the theory that true stars don’t have something extra; they have, in fact, something missing, some weird gap or void into which the audience projects its desire.
From his early manhood in the 1980s, Tom Cruise could “open” a movie: he was an “abovethe-title” star, that quaint phrase coming from an age of titles being spelt out on marquees. Most actors of Cruise’s age will have long since accepted their character roles as fathers or grandfathers. They will have taken mature “bearded” parts, like 44-year-old George Clooney in Syriana or 57-yearold Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips. Not Tom.
Actually, it’s not quite true to say that Tom Cruise doesn’t do beards. He grew a wild and straggly beard for Born on the Fourth of July, when he played the radically anti-war Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic; and he grew a neat, tailored beard, indicating wisdom and inner strength, for The Last Samurai, portraying a US cavalry officer in 19th-century
