- Title
- Searching for the 'Desert of the Real' in the Films of Tom Cruise
- Creator
- Haywood, Loraine
- Relation
- Starring Tom Cruise p. 94-111
- Relation
- Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series
- Publisher
- Wayne State University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- In Joseph Kosinski’s American Savior narrative, Oblivion (2013), Tom Cruise as Jack Harper / Tech- 49 comes face- to- face with his own image (Jack Harper / Tech- 52) in the “desert of the real” (Baudrillard 2017, 1). Astronaut Jack Harper is the real subject of which the drone technicians are exact copies or DNA maps. This shock revelation is a confrontation with the Real of death. This encounter can be used to explore theories that Jacques Lacan and Jean Baudrillard considered as maps of human reality. This tearing of the map finds the real territory underneath, and it is that search for realness that typifies Tom Cruise in his performance; as Slavoj Žižek (2003, 63) explains, “Authenticity lies in the act of violent transgression from the Lacanian Real.” Facing death in the performance of ever more dangerous stunts, Tom Cruise screens fables as the star of Savior narratives that reconstitute American greatness. The fable “On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges curiously engages in the same themes of empire, the territory, the map, the city, and the deserts that inform this discussion. The fable traces the development of the disproportionate map, which does not satisfy the pretensions of the Empire. The cartographers made a map where the scale was an exact copy, only “in the Western Deserts there remained piecemeal Ruins of the Map” (Borges and Bioy Casares 1973, 123). The fable conveys the psychoanalytic geography of the Empire that wanted an image to encompass all its territory. As image, Tom Cruise performs as the Empire if we use the fable that was the basis for Baudrillard’s enigmatic concept of the “desert of the real.” Chris Lukinbeal (2004, 247) explains that “film and television act as maps for the everyday social- cultural and geopolitical imaginaries and realities of everyday life.” America in film is analogous to the fable because of the colonizing religious odyssey of its foundation narrative, imperial overreaching, arrogance, and its desert geography that sustains its New World utopia. Tom Cruise repeatedly, in film, readily sacrifices the body to the belief in the dream of mapping the human odyssey. But the excessive nature of his life is not limited to filmic representation as he presents a transgressive form of “masculinity as performance” (Peberdy 2010, 231). In a search for the “desert of the real” in the films of Tom Cruise, the Real of his desire to fill in the gap, his drive for perfection, is impossible because it is the confrontation with the Lacanian Real of death.
- Subject
- Tom Cruise; Hollywood; movies; actor
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1434410
- Identifier
- uon:39438
- Identifier
- ISBN:97808143471950814347193
- Language
- eng
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