Today’s all-star game card – Tom Cruise
September 2nd, 2008 Posted in Game CardsI’ve been waiting for this one for ages. Yep, today’s card is everyone’s favourite massively wealthy actor and Scientologist, Tom Cruise.
This one was a really difficult one. How do you judge someone who has brought enjoyment to many with some truly great Oscar-winners like Rain Man, clever science fiction works like Vanilla Sky and Minority Report, and cult films like Top Gun? How do you judge someone who, in most of their life, seems to be a thoroughly decent bloke but who, despite all this, is a member of a deeply sinister organisation which is responsible for several deaths, multiple cases of espionage and a legendary litigious record? (I speak, of course, of Hollywood. Who else?).
How do you evaluate a man who jumped up and down on a couch on a global TV show, and is on record as saying that chemical imbalances in the brain do not exist and that psychiatry is evil?
That’s the problem with Tom Cruise: if any other person had idiotic views like these then it would be sad but otherwise irrelevant; but Cruise is an international movie star, with audiences in the hundreds of millions, if not billions. Most people acknowledge that Cruise is nuts, but a few don’t. When someone with that level of power and influence promotes himself as a mouthpiece of an organisation that spouts this kind of dangerous nonsense, then he becomes a problem. And that’s why Cruise gets reasonably high scores for evil and danger. I don’t think that Cruise is an evil man – I think he honestly believes that he’s doing the right thing – but often the line between evil and misguided is a very fine one.
I won’t say what I really think about Scientology because it appears that they sue anyone who tries to criticise them. However, apparently a lot of other people believe that Scientology is a dangerous and insidious moneymaking cult based on a clever brainwashing scheme dreamed up by an insane science fiction hack and habitual liar. But I wouldn’t know if that’s true or not – it’s just something I read somewhere on the Internet.
Tom Cruise
