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Starring Tom Cruise - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Starring Tom Cruise

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Interdisciplinary star study of one of the most iconic Hollywood celebrities of the last thirty-five years.

Starring Tom Cruise examines how Tom Cruise's star image moves across genres and forms as a type of commercial product that offers viewers certain pleasures and expectations. Cruise reads as an action hero and romantic lead yet finds himself in homoerotic and homosocial relationships that unsettle and undermine these heterosexual scripts. In this volume, editor Sean Redmond shows how important star studies is not just to understanding the ideological, commercial, and cultural significance of one star but to seeing how masculinity, ethnicity, sexuality, and commodity relations function in contemporary society.

The volume is divided into three parts. Part 1 explores the ways that Cruise's star image and performances are built on a desiring gaze, nearly always complicated by perverse narrative arcs and liminal character relationships. This section also explores the complex and contradictory ways he embodies masculinity and heterosexuality. Part 2 places Cruise within the codes and conventions of genre filmmaking and the way they intersect with the star vehicle. Cruise becomes monomythical, heroic, authentic, and romantic, and at the same time, he struggles to hold these formulas and ideologies together. Part 3 views Cruise as both an ageless totemic figure of masculinity who does his own stunts, as well as an aging star—his body both the conduit for eternally youthful masculinity and a signifier of that which must ultimately fail. These readings are connected to wider discursive issues concerning his private and public life, including the familial/patriarchal roles he takes on.

Scholars writing for this collection approach the Cruise star image through various vectors and frames, which are revelatory in nature. As such, they not only demonstrate the very best traditions of close "star" textual analysis but also move the approach to the star forward. Students, scholars, and readers of film, media, and celebrity studies will enjoy this deep dive into a complex Hollywood figure.

ISBN-13: 9780814347188

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Publication Date: 03-23-2021

Pages: 322

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

Series: Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media

Sean Redmond is professor of screen and design at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of Celebrity, Liquid Space: Science Fiction Film and Television in the Digital Age, Celebrity and the Media, and The Cinema of Takeshi Kitano: Flowering Blood. He is the founding editor of Celebrity Studies, short-listed for best new academic journal in 2011.

What People are Saying About This

Professor of Cross-Media Culture, University of Amsterdam - Misha Kavka

This is a book that star studies has wanted, even if we didn't know it—a wide-ranging set of reflections on the desirability, authenticity, and dogged agelessness of contemporary Hollywood's ubiquitous genre king. As equally attuned to the white, masculine normativity of Tom Cruise as to his performative excess, sexual indeterminacy, and spiritual eccentricity, this book advances star studies by elucidating a changing Hollywood landscape through the cultural continuity of its most tenacious star.

Gaylyn Studlar of This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age

Love him or loathe him, there is no denying that Tom Cruise has been one of the world's biggest movie stars for a long time. As such, he deserves serious scholarly attention, and this book provides it with fifteen smart essays that adroitly address just about every imaginable facet of the star's cultural, sexual, and symbolic resonance.