Tom Cruise is Looking for a Few Good Men

It's a risky business.

The maple was bright and lilting in the breeze after two days of soaking rain. And as the woman walked through the shaded path along the wet stones, her hair caught the dappled light. It was effortless and simple and it hurt his eyes to look at her.

The hero walks away. He walks away with our pain and our unrequited love. He stares out into the wilderness and knows it is the only place he belongs. The hero tames the lawless masses and fights the outlaws even as he is one step from being one himself. He follows a code, draws a line in the sand, and breaks all the rules. He has dreams we never see and is plagued by nameless nightmares. He fights. He would die a thousand deaths before he betrays his duty as a Man. It is a duty with the highest cost and no return if it’s done right. Charles Portis writes in True Grit, “There is nothing free except the Grace of God.”

But these days, everyone wants something for nothing — even lies. The cheaper the better.

The American Man, the hero of our story, knows the price of Truth and the cost of lies.

The thing is, you have to come from a place of truth if you want to pull off a lie. Tom Cruise is the most authentic truth teller in a sea of plastic tchotchke, designer knock-offs, and self-important bullshitters. He’s the picaresque American Tale Cinderella story and I’m here for it.

The billion-dollar smile.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Tom Cruise — running through the stages of Generation X in every complete iteration of drama and comedy and parody and that time he played a fantasy elf or the one with his Irish accent. The last movie star. But maybe that was three movie stars ago before we lost our sense of humor. Before we lost our sense of the serious, before we lost our sense of self, before we lost our sense of the world.

You see, the world belongs to Tom Cruise. Or does Tom Cruise belong to the world? As the world turns, drama and sand through the hourglass of our lives. Carnival rides, car crashes, and outer space water slides. Nothing makes sense in a world that’s spinning without direction or gravity. Fake? Real? Do those words have meaning anymore?

For the world to make sense, it would first have to exist. But the world doesn’t exist because Tom doesn’t exist. He pops into our consciousness as a fully formed Actor, and no one casually knows about his childhood, parents, or if he reads books, or if he had training wheels on his 1968 Huffy bicycle. Sure, there’s the thing about him and his oddball alien-spirit machines and hierarchy of overcooked noodlers with bowties and crisp sport coats. But who among us doesn’t have a quirk or conspiratorial belief that doubles as a fun conversation starter at parties or the dog park? Not I! What’s his favorite movie? Did he read comic books? Does he have any pets? It’s all a little odd in a social-media tell-all era where everyone knows the superficial details of a celebrity’s life but not the name of the neighbor across the street.

It's one of those accepted, unquestioned truths you never think deeply about until some outsider points out the quirkiness as if it’s some data glitch only a nerd could appreciate and you carelessly shrug your shoulders and the imperfection is sloughed off and disappears through the sewer grates of information — where all the excess slop flows out to the sea, never thought of again.

It’s easier to forget it and to go to the theater and drop forty bucks at the AMC Superplex five o’clock show starring the guy who said something silly on Oprah that really wasn’t so silly to keep us from spending those forty bucks on a video game or at the boardwalk or on a trendy new hat that looks ridiculous perched on your head.

Besides, it’s Tom Cruise.

Isn’t that who we came to see? Don’t we want to be entertained? To forget about the world outside the theater’s dark shroud, to know and believe in the world only as it exists on the storied wall of flashing images imprinted on our glassy eyes and the booming audio funneled into our ear canals. To have in two (give or take) hours a respite from our drudgery or our frustration or the fact that the world is a whirling sandstorm of debris relentlessly wailing against our brains, pounding our skin with a thousand pricks of stinging sand. Nothing you can do about it but escape to a room of strangers and marvel at the pointlessness of it. Millions of dollars and thousands of people and equipment and plans and writing, rewriting, and rewriting again and publicity and press releases and cutting the right trailers and puffing up of Executives and Producers and Directors and Movie Stars. For a few hours of entertainment and fake dialogue and fake smiles and garbled background noise and fighting for the armrest and a ten-dollar box of artificially colored gummy candy, and you can’t even get the last piece wedged at the bottom of the box.

Life plays out from the beams of a projector — be it in the sticky-floored movie house or the soft tendrils of your nighttime unconscious. Tom Cruise running on screen doing impossible things in an impossible world, and you're helpless to his charm, curated smile, and familiar face. He is the last movie star in a starless sky.

We hate the world so much that we don’t even notice there is nothing except the repetition of emptiness.

And everyone wants something out of nothing because they don’t understand the value of everything. We have everything we need in front of us and we don’t know it. What is real? What do we have to give each other anymore when no one wants the real thing, but they want to think they have the real thing? Why stretch your ambitions and desires and dreams toward the nearly impossible when you can have right now the inauthentic closest thing or imitation of the thing or the knock off of the thing if everyone — including you — doesn’t know the difference anyway?

Why bother to struggle through the torment of your little slice of life when you can be king of a huge swath of the artificial one?

I don’t want Tom Cruise; I want the idea of Tom Cruise. This person who exists exactly as we want him in every sense. Whether he’s the villain, the love interest, the action hero, or the antihero. He’s everything we want him to be in that billion-dollar smile: 90 percent charismatic electricity and 10 percent scheming mischief. A little risky, a lot rewarding. We all get the prize at the end of the film. We all want the endless running man and the searching eyes, and the character arc that leads to redemption. The hero of our lives, our lies, and our truth. A perfectly genuine faker.

It's nothing against Tom Cruise. In fact, it’s this is a sincere acclamation of a master of deception. He knows what we want and gives it to us good and hard. And we love him for it, don’t we? Erich Segal writes in The Class, “Quiet heroism or youthful idealism, or both? What do we know? That life without heroism and idealism is not worth living — or that either can be fatal?”

Thanks Tom. You’re the best. Never change.

There is a 1968 essay written by Joan Didion about her Hollywood hero, John Wayne. Wayne is still an American legend, icon, and unmatched avatar for a kind of Americana that persists in the pure of heart and those who believe in a Code, ethos, and principle of life that eschews phoniness even as it perpetuates a halcyon era sculpted by golden-hued memories of trail rides, gun fights, and straight-edged good-versus-evil. John Wayne played John Wayne, but he played our John Wayne. Didion writes:

I tell you this neither in a spirit of self-revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams. It did not seem possible that such a man could fall ill, could carry within him that most inexplicable and ungovernable of diseases. The rumor struck some obscure anxiety, threw our very childhoods into question. In John Wayne’s world, John Wayne was supposed to give the orders. “Let’s ride,” he said, and “Saddle up.” “Forward ho,” and “A man’s gotta do what he’s got to do.” “Hello, there,” he said when he first saw the girl, in a construction camp or on a train or just standing on the front porch waiting for somebody to ride up through the tall grass. When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something going wrong inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles, but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the early morning sun.

"Hello, there." Where did he come from, before the tall grass? Even his history seemed right, for it was no history at all, nothing to intrude upon the dream.

Maybe Tom Cruise is the Man we’ve been searching for. Of course, he’s not John Wayne. There can only be one. I can’t write about Wayne now, or this essay would melt into a swirl of tears and exasperation about the myths that keep us from choking on the big bites of self-hatred we keep swallowing with an insatiable appetite.

But Cruise can be the American we’ve lost and longed for, the Man of men who can stand in for all things we were told men aren’t supposed to be. Brash and cocky, reckless, bold, tender to love, hardheaded to challenges, principled stubbornness, patriotic, funny, handsome, and dangerous. But he understands what he is and who he is and what his purpose is.

There’s a clarifying piece up from Alex Perez who stomps on the cowardly political masquerade that covers up hackery, timidity, and fear. “What kind of man am I?” Anger is no substitute for creativity, hard work, and sincerity and aren’t those all the qualities of our Tom-On-Film? Justified frustration at the things just out of his reach, but give him another 23 minutes and he’ll get to the finish line, and in the process outrun a few bullets, jump on the top of a speeding BMW, and catch the lady in distress all while a single bead of sweat drops from his determinedly furrowed brow.

This is the American man.

But in 2025 he’s has been beaten and abused and tortured into a silent “seething rage” (as Perez frames it) and only when it’s safe does he regain his courage. He’s lost the plot. He gave up on Tom, but Tom never gave up on him. So now we have politically drenched angry young men who wouldn’t know the meaning of love and loss and redemption and fighting for something beyond the whites of his toenails if it looked at him in the face and said, “Show me the money!”

You see, Tom is both the cautionary tale and the redemption story. He’s the only one who believes in you and the last one who believes in himself. The man of action in a stagnant world. “Reality can be beaten with enough imagination,” wrote Mark Twain, the only writer I’ve ever heard Tom Cruise mention, also as his favorite.

Tom Cruise isn’t carrying the torch of his own myth in the way John Wayne did or even Earnest Hemingway if we’re serious about discussing American Men and myths and how our modern culture tries too hard to overcomplicate the sterling simplicity of it all. Tom Cruise isn’t coded to a certain genre or archetype. He is the embodiment of film itself, of entertainment, of the moviegoing experience. This is why so many look to him — and only him — to save movies from their self-destructive tendencies and society’s newfound antisocial behaviors. Who else could perform such a feat? We know he is the one because he shows us in every single movie he makes.

In his 1997 Paris Review interview, playwright and author David Mamet explains this in terms of doing. Not thinking or saying or make-believing:

It’s action, as Aristotle said. That’s all that it is—exactly what the person does. It’s not what they “think,” because we don’t know what they think. It’s not what they say. It’s what they do, what they’re physically trying to accomplish on the stage. Which is exactly the same way we understand a person’s character in life—not by what they say, but by what they do. Say someone came up to you and said, I’m glad to be your neighbor because I’m a very honest man. That’s my character. I’m honest, I like to do things, I’m forthright, I like to be clear about everything, I like to be concise. Well, you really don’t know anything about that guy’s character. Or the person is onstage, and the playwright has him or her make those same claims in several subtle or not-so-subtle ways, the audience will say, Oh yes, I understand their character now; now I understand that they are a character. But in fact you don’t understand anything. You just understand that they’re jabbering to try to convince you of something.

And I write as someone who knows next to nothing about men, only slightly more about women, given the fact I am one, and less than both about friendship, to the friendship among men which seems better suited to be referred to as a fellowship. Or for John Wayne, there is an understanding and an agreement to follow between otherwise solitary figures. [Insert Bro Code joke here]. And there is less intellectual or emotional probing than the actions between them that solidify the fellowship. And you cannot enter into such an understanding if you cannot believe in it or yourself.

This is a great gift from our heroes. This is a gift from John Wayne and even Tom Cruise. To give us something to believe in. To show us how to act with a purposeful belief in ourselves, even if everything else is fake.

John Wayne with his grandson.

John Wayne made sense of a time in America when civil unrest made many things in the country seem senseless. Tom Cruise has ushered us through an era when advancements in technology made humanity seem less advanced. In both, it is easy to confuse naiveté with innocence — about men and women, friendship, belief, and love. All of those things can betray you if you want them to.

But Tom Cruise will never betray you. You’ll never get a half-performance, and he will never make impossible demands of you, the audience. He won’t gossip about you or use you for his gain, and he will never break his promises. Never. He will always be there, playing Tom Cruise.

That is the truth. A real thing in a fake world. Besides, who else could possibly play Tom Cruise?

Thank you for sitting through this off-ramp post. I’ve been blessed with great readers from this small collection of writing, and my goal is to make sense (at least most of the time!) and to connect with someone out there who might be traveling his own path. Keep a light on for the Truth, the Beautiful, and the Good — it might be the only way we find each other.

Sincerely, Jenna