“Stardom’s production of catastrophe would herald a reconstituted subject—the star—a rearrangement of the classical humanist subject into an exceptional subject of modernity. The star not only experiences accident but, more importantly, survives and, better yet, thrives on it—her persistence in the face of ceaseless catastrophe raises the threshold of commonly held psychical, physical, and conceptual limits of human motility.”
– Jennifer Bean, Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body
“I am the disk.”
– Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
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The scariest picture of Tom Cruise isn’t really of Tom Cruise at all: it’s of three of his simulacra. Facing the camera, arms around each other in matching white button-downs, half a volleyball team’s worth of Tom Cruises gaze waxily before a backdrop of disinterested party-goers. A Twitter caption reads: Tom Cruise’s stunt doubles.
If you know even one thing about Tom Cruise—aside from the fact that he believes he can heal all through the power of Xenu—you know he doesn’t ‘have’ stunt doubles. For the better part of 20 years, the biggest movie star in the known universe has relentlessly telegraphed his dedication to risking his very own, very singular, very expensive body everywhere moving images are shown. To watch a new Mission: Impossible film now is to first watch 15 behind-the-scenes Instagram reels of Tom Cruise tumbling through negative space, or clinging to the side of a plane, promising to “see you at the movies!” These paratexts, which aim to affirm Cruise’s stunt prowess and his star power in the same gesture, are part of the point. Knowing Cruise survived 500 skydives and 1300 moto-cross jumps to nail the one that closed 2023’s Dead Reckoning doesn’t deprive the scene of its thrill. It produces it.
In the film’s sequence, Benji (Simon Pegg) and Cruise’s Ethan Hunt hem and haw a bit—“What do you expect me to do? … Just jump?”—over whether Ethan will, in fact, just jump, completing the stunt we already know he will complete, because it was egregiously featured in nearly every poster, trailer, and YouTube featurette. Your mileage for this brand of winking showmanship may vary. Me? I could drive for days. Cruise’s commitment to reminding us of what he’s about to do, how deranged it is that he’s about to do it, and how he has really already done it 100 times before—99 of which might easily have killed him but didn’t so that now you can watch this movie in this theater—works because it understands something true about the relationship between cinematic fantasy and filmic realism, between spectacle and shocks you feel like the jar of a trackless Orient Express train. We need to be told the risk, it says, because nobody believes what they see on screen anymore.
And why should they? There are no Tom Cruises in the scariest picture of Tom Cruise: they’re all him, the ‘stunt doubles,’ and they’re all fake. The image is a work of generative A.I., which went viral shortly before the release of Dead Reckoning. Where other Missions have seen Cruise battling a slew of corrupt men motivated by apocalyptic ideologies, in Dead Reckoning, Hunt’s antagonist isn’t a person at all. It’s a formless artificial intelligence system rightly and hilariously referred to as ‘the Entity.’ If it is a less-than-tidy allegory for contemporary Hollywood’s digital strife than the one that governed Top Gun: Maverick (2022)—in which Cruise’s Pete Mitchell goes to the ends of light and speed to prove it’ll always be more fun to watch a person blow up other depersonalized people than to countenance a computer doing it—it is perhaps only because it is a more literal and more anxious one.
The Entity is a blue weave on a black background; it is a bad screen saver. At one point in the film, it throws a party ‘inside’ itself. (A choice line of dialogue: “You could even say that this party…is that interested party.”) When it is first explained at length, 20-odd minutes into a cold open that spans several days and three continents, the syncopated, tri-adjectival descriptions are intercut with an anonymous figure, moving cannily through federal security checkpoints. The Entity is a “godless, stateless, amoral enemy.” The anonymous figure is walking through a long room filled with typewriters. The Entity is “patiently listening, reading, watching.” The anonymous figure is slipping into the back of the security briefing. The Entity is able to “beguile, blackmail, bribe, or be anyone it wants.” The anonymous figure is removing his mask. This is Tom Cruise. A threat that is “everywhere and nowhere and has no center.” This is the Entity.
In this publication last year, Nicholas Russell wrote persuasively on the way Dead Reckoning insists upon itself as an analog object, even while it “lurches helplessly into the digital realm.” I agree with the critique: Dead Reckoning is the first film in this franchise to be shot entirely in digital, and the first that is persistently, distractingly marred by cruddy CGI. Still, I wonder how helpless the lurching is. The film’s diegetic technology—typewriters and prosthetic masks that have long been an IP staple—are presented as analog failsafes, yes. But even the failsafes are failing. The typewriters (most of them, ironically, digitally rendered) are too slow to keep up with all the data they need to transfer out of the Entity’s reach. The suitcase-cum-printer that comprises the mask machine fries itself and dies just when the IMF team needs it most. It’s this latter fritz that prompts the film’s showcase cliff-jumping stunt, because how else is Hunt going to catch his train? The lapse in analog technology produces the need for a bravura performance only Cruise can deliver. And so it goes.
But the Entity can perform, too. The Entity could even beguile, blackmail, bribe, be—be an actor. During 2023’s SAG strikes, Cruise drew eyes as the highest-profile performer to take part in AMPTP negotiations, lobbying for better protections for stunt workers and, for actors, guardrails on performance-augmenting A.I. It seems pertinent to note he wasn’t actually in the room: they Zoomed him in. Three years prior, a TikTok account comprised entirely of deep-faked Tom Cruises became so wildly popular that it birthed Metaphysic.ai, the “leading generative A.I. platform for photorealistic, Hollywood-grade content” (their motto: “We create impossible”). In the Final Reckoning, a flashback to the third Mission film reveals the Entity’s true origins, and Hunt’s critical role in them: “Without you, Ethan,” Esai Morales’ elusive terrorist, Gabriel, insists, “there’d be no Entity.” Whether all this runs counter to or forms the basis of Mission and Maverick’s insistence on their star’s embodied singularity depends on whether you think Tom Cruise is real in the first place.
“One day, sooner than later,” Ed Harris intones in an early Maverick warning that, had the film come out later, could have been cribbed straight from a note passed between studio heads and SAG reps, “[the Air Force] won’t need pilots at all. Pilots that need to sleep, eat, take a piss.”
Tom Cruise doesn’t need to do any of these things, to my knowledge, either. In character or out: we rarely see Hunt or Maverick break for rest or sustenance. We almost never see Cruise do anything save for jumping out of an airplane or watching himself break his own ankle from six angles on The Graham Norton Show or standing on top of the BFI. Even when he tries to be an average guy, he’s fisting popcorn in such a way that no one can believe he’s really consuming it or making stunt work out of the simple act of exiting a car. That is to say: we almost never see him do anything that suggests he has normal human needs, thoughts, or habits at all.
But, in the movies, he does nearly pass out as he approaches the speed of light. He does pale, and wince, and sweat like he’s having trouble not dying—because he is. He really is. As the New York Times Magazine attested in June of 2023, it can be difficult to know where, if at all, Tom Cruise exists. Until last month, when he appeared to embark on a bewildering and/or totally contrived affair with Ana des Armas, photogs hardly ever papped him. If he is real at all, it may only be in the moment a talus bone snaps. A knee kisses gravel at motorcycle speeds over 90 miles per hour. A breath gets held so long it becomes not breathing. Tom Cruise exists most fully at the brink of—high-octane, highly entertaining—non-existence. The leap from there to “obsolescence,” for a guy who jumps out of airplanes everyday, should be a cinch.
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In 1916, action serial star Pearl White belayed herself off the roof of a New York City high-rise, dangled hundreds of feet in the air, and painted her initials on the facade. Her director, with whom she was promoting the next entry in her Iron Claw series, stood by and begged her to come down the entire time, lest they be unable to finish the picture. The message was clear: she does all her own stunts! Also, they could kill her—as could, by extension, the movies.
The instinct to put Tom Cruise in conversation with old-school figures from Hollywood history is not a new one. The liveliness of his locomotion has garnered comparisons to Chaplin and Keaton and Kelly, in excess. The connection to the action heroines of the early 20th century is similarly unsurprising: Anthony Lane, in his 2018 review of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, likens Cruise to Helen Holmes, White’s contemporary and star of the Hazards of Helen series. It’s easy for this sort of comparison to fuel the “good old-fashioned movie-making” nostalgia that motivates so much of Cruise’s contemporary mythos, and so much of the writing and talking about it, including my own. It’s always satisfying, of course, to attempt a clear, linear line: from the first movie stars to the so-called last one.
But there’s nothing old-fashioned about the movie star; there never has been. In her work on early action serial queens like White and Holmes, scholar Jennifer Bean coined the term “technologies of stardom” to describe the way that the early star system (made up of on-screen performance and off-screen publicity, pre-studio stables) became the “pre-eminent machine of modernity” through its unique ability to countenance technological disaster by “producing, and hence containing, catastrophe.” The specific constellation she’s tracing came into brightness in a moment defined by advancing technologies—and riddled with anxiety over them. What movie stars did was not only furnish nascent narrative cinema’s realist effects by touting risk to their physical bodies (sound familiar?), but also allow audiences to rehearse their uneasy relationship to technological change by “[asserting] a stance that disarms the destructive effects of technology by fully embracing its dangers.”
Taken to its furthest extreme, Bean’s argument suggests that—in translating the “spontaneous leaks, jams, sputters, lunges, and combustion[s]” of technology into the risk of bodily harm—early movie stars mediated our relationship to new machines not by resisting, but by becoming them. And at the furthest extreme of anything, of course, is where we catch up to Tom Cruise again.
For Dead Reckoning’s final trick, a practically-effected train runs off its tracks—conveniently, the 20th century technological disaster par excellence—and straight into a glut of CGI. Cruise doesn’t quite stunt his way out of this one: rather, he attempts to grasp his way out of it, clinging to analog objects as a prelude to further motion, before eventually giving in, parachuting into a basin of digitally-augmented sky. It reframes the response to analog failure that occurred a few scenes earlier. When Cruise flings himself into the space left by old technology’s outmoded modes, is he bridging a widening gyre or syncing with it? The mind returns to the film’s making-of featurette. In it, the risk the stunt poses to Cruise’s physical person—“You know, the only things you really have to avoid while doing a stunt like this is serious injury, or death,” one stunt coach notes—is offset by another’s awed assessment of the actor’s commitment to repeating the exercise: “He was just…a machine.”
Though Bean locates the tensile bodies of her female action heroines very much apart from the “hardened, prosthetic, metallic male bodies elsewhere populating, if not peopling, the horizon of a technologically altered world,” we can afford Tom Cruise no such distance from his digital rivals. He doesn’t afford it to himself. It’s not so much a question of gender: Cruise has often, to his presumptive chagrin and my total delight, been lit, shot, ‘coded,’ whatever, as at best ambivalently masculine, sometimes outright androgynous—even high femme. (Tony Scott, on the question of Top Gun’s leading lady: “We already have the girl. I’m gonna shoot [Cruise] as if he was f—ing Jeanne Moreau.”) Moreso, it’s a question of the kind of technology Cruise is facing. Where the locomotive, the machine gun, and the Fordist assembly line all suggested and demanded armored bodies comprised of discrete, interlocking parts and semi-reliable response to stress-testing, 2025’s technological horizon is diffuse, disparate, embodied only in the hazy terms of haptics.
Early in the Final Reckoning, Cruise steps into a coffin-like box and dons a new mask, no longer the prosthetic IMF spy toy, but a black, Vader-esque thing filled with the warp of the Entity. This, we’re told, is how it communicates, the closest thing it has to a body or a mouth. Over a disorienting montage, a disembodied voice instructs Hunt that, to save the world, he will need to “let the [Entity] in.” In where, exactly, is initially opaque: to the world’s last standing intelligence systems? To a fictionalized version of the Doomsday Vault? To Hunt himself? It doesn’t matter: in is where the Entity needs to be. We’ll be reminded of this three or four times. But to receive the Entity’s crucial message, of course, Hunt had to first go inside it. Later, a last ditch effort to stop the A.I. while saving an IMF team member overlays a computer system hack with an ersatz thoracostomy. Final Reckoning is perhaps the franchise’s bloodiest film. Does any of the viscera suggest we’re not living in, as other characters also warn, “the Entity’s reality”? In the Hollywood Reporter piece about Cruise’s attendance at SAG negotiations, the term that’s used to describe A.I.’s co-option of actorly performances is “ingested.” Like the Mission films’ analog tech, the body—no matter how extraordinary, no matter how at risk—no longer seems a surefire sign of anyone’s authentic humanity, or of anything real at all.
What does this mean for Cruise’s crusade for an authentic cinematic experience, his dedication to a realist project that might save Hollywood and/or the world from the creep of sentient technologies? Well, it means it’s a disaster of epic proportions, probably. And in that way, it means it’s working perfectly—a well-oiled, star-powered machine.
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In the first Mission: Impossible, it only takes about twenty minutes for Cruise to become the apparatus. It’s a classic De Palma trick, one of his many hang-ups and fetishes, to needle the perversity of the cinema machine as such: we see the party where, eventually, Ethan Hunt’s entire IMF team will die, through his eyes—which is to say, through the lens of a movie camera. Even before this current epoch of late-career navel gazing, most Tom Cruise movies were about Tom Cruise being in—just being?—the movies. It may be the biggest stunt: to flirt with the disaster of some computerized co-option of the self. Certainly no one has trained for it harder.
The actor’s longtime eagerness to deliquesce into his on-screen personae—prompted, at least in recent years, by an image-armoring avoidance of investigation into his infamous personal life—makes him eminently available as just that: pure image, nothing more or less. You can find an hour long interview with deep-fake Tom Cruise, but the ‘real’ Tom Cruise hasn’t sat down for a filmed interview longer than 15 minutes—or deeper than “my body is a car”—for something like 15 years. At the highest level of Scientologist indoctrination is the suggestion that spirit transcends the body, that physical matter doesn’t matter anymore. Cruise is likely already there, or he is fast—running the way he does—approaching.
For this reason, among others, it feels wrong to call Tom Cruise the ‘last’ movie star. Not least because it suggests a narrative of linear progress that we should know better than to believe in any context, but especially a cinematic one. It was Tom Gunning who famously overthrew the notion that cinema developed linearly, improving and becoming more itself over time. For him, the now-canonical idea of the “cinema of attractions” suggested that certain quintessential effects—delight at speed, attention to scale or light, and especially love of motion—found in the first films did not disappear as the medium moved toward narrative modes. Rather, the spectacle of these attractions migrated from early cinema, to experimental film, to Hollywood special effects and stunt work. If Cruise is one such attraction, it is perhaps in part because, formless, he can reemerge in any form.
The other reason it is difficult to call Cruise the ‘last’ anything is because he appears to be the first something: the first example of what an A.I.—or, at the very least, a less-human—movie star might look and be like, what it might convince us of or want us to believe. To call this troubling is an understatement, but I don’t mean it in a bad way.
To me, the Cruise project—the phenomenological appeal of it and of him—is tied up in the star’s ability to be, like the Entity, “everywhere and nowhere” all at once. The body, if it is recovered anywhere in the latest Mission movies, is in the antsy twitch of an audience member who watches them. For all the anxiety over credulity that runs through Dead Reckoning and Final Reckoning, it is hard to deny that, in a theater, the overwhelm of image and sound conspire to make any threat to Cruise feel as present as he is absent from the room. Co-active with Cruise’s anti-A.I. efforts is his well-known insistence on the necessity of theatrical exhibition and distribution. If he exists at all, it is in the way my body reacts when he nearly slides off the silver face of the Burj Khalifa, larger than life and somehow taller than ever, capped at the big screen’s roughly 50 feet. I dig my fingers into the skin above my knee like it’s happening to me. The thing is: it is. It really is.
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The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria hosts an exhibit on view until December 2025 called Mission: Impossible—Story and Spectacle. Putting aside the fact that “story and spectacle” is almost exactly the thesis of Gunning’s essay on the cinema of attractions, the exhibit warrants a visit from anyone curious about the peculiarities of Tom Cruise’s enduring ability to hold our attention. Not that it will help anyone to confirm his literal existence: comprised of nested screens which present and represent the franchise’s biggest stunts (the largest just sees Cruise running), each discrete set piece is accompanied by suspended mannequins which recast the star’s body in plastic. More than anything, it resembles the party that the Entity threw for itself, inside itself, from some no-man’s matrix behind huge monitors.
On the other side of the Mission exhibit, you pass through a permanent installation on cinema’s technologies, old and new: film and digital cameras, 35mm stock and animation studios. The layout is a circle. Just before or after you end up at Mission again, you’ll find yourself facing a corner dedicated to pre-cinematic forms and optical toys—machines that taught us how to see before we knew what it was that we were looking for. Here is the zoetrope and the thaumatrope. Here is the magic lantern, with its many painted slides. Here is the motion capture photography of Eadward Muybridge, whose Zoopraxiscope allowed him to project some of the earliest images of animal bodies acting on space, then time. Here is our first bit of protocinema. Here is, for better or for worse, our forever running man.