Here I've been thinking about Durbin, Bolton, Gitmo, the anti-Hillary book, the Downing Street memo and other weighty matters while the biggest story of all has been right under my nose.
How, I wonder, could I have failed to turn my attention to one of the great episodes of media manipulation, especially since it has drawn the attention of some of our finest critics?
Have I been out to lunch on Tom and Katie?
Okay, don't answer that.
Forgive me for thinking that the Cruise-Holmes "romance," which culminated in an Eiffel Tower engagement so heartfelt and private it was followed by a news conference, was just another bit of Hollywood myth-making. Forgive me also for thinking that if the twice-married Cruise goes through with it and Katie Holmes doesn't pull a Jennifer Wilbanks, it won't last long. I'm so jaded from reading about whether Brad is breaking up with Jennifer but pursuing Angelina -- and wasn't it just yesterday that Tom Cruise was cruising with Penelope Cruz? -- that I assumed the latest gossip was just an attempt to hype Tom & Katie's respective films.
But no, it's a major cultural moment that tells us a great deal about the symbiotic relationship between celebrities and the press. Or so I'm hearing.
Jack Shafer says in Slate that the two-month courtship has caused "editorial turmoil" for celeb chroniclers. "The blitzkrieg relationship of the A-list star and his C-list TV-star fiancée, which peaked last Friday with a proposal of marriage atop the Eiffel Tower and a press conference afterward, has caused the celebrity magazine formula to warp and buckle.
"The aggressiveness of the TomKat timetable completely violates the industry formula. If the magazines are going to invest pages in a star-on-star romance, they want the thing to unfold like two seasons of Desperate Housewives so they can string along their readers -- and reap the longer-term economic benefits. After the first rumors of on-set canoodling, paparazzi shots of a disheveled lover leaving a romantic sleepover should appear. Then they should be photographed on vacation or walking their recently adopted pup before aerial shots of their jointly purchased love nest are published. Finally, the editorial interruptus also known as 'wedding watch' begins. The buildup should usually last six months to a year or so before breaking into something big, like a distant-yet-opulent ceremony that's canceled once or twice. The magazines want a preview of the wedding dress and engagement ring, and they want the couple to sell the wedding pics and the honeymoon pics, to pose for at-home photos in the Xanadu they build in the Hollywood Hills, to share the marital troubles they overcome, and then finally, to feed their newborns to the publicity machine."
Hey, somebody has to do the tough work of journalism.
"Hence the editorial crisis: Even though the convenience relationship/marriage is a time-honored Hollywood tradition, the rapid pacing of TomKat: A Love Story has fractured not only reader expectations but the magazines' faith in the enterprise from almost the beginning. Instead of swooning over the couple, the magazines were asking polite variations on the question, 'What's up with this and why is Cruise acting like such a freak?' "
Frank Rich provides the theater review, saying that "in repeated public appearances, most famously on 'Oprah,' the Spielberg movie's star, the 42-year-old Tom Cruise, has fallen to his knees and jumped on couches to declare his undying love for the 26-year-old Katie Holmes, the co-star of another summer spectacular, 'Batman Begins.' Forget about those bygone Hollywood studio schemes to concoct publicity-generating off-screen romances for its stars-in-training. Here is a lavishly produced freak show, designed to play out in real time, enthusiastically enacted by the biggest star in the business. On Friday, after popping the big question to Ms. Holmes at the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Cruise promptly dragged his intended to a news conference.
"But though the audience for this drama is as large as, if not larger than, that for Orson Welles's [long-ago hoax], there's one big difference. The Cruise-Holmes romance is proving less credible to Americans in 2005 than a Martian invasion did to those of 1938. A People magazine poll found that 62 percent deem the story a stunt. To tabloid devotees, the reasons for Mr. Cruise's credibility gap are the perennial unsubstantiated questions about his sexuality and his very public affiliation with a church, Scientology, literally founded by a science-fiction writer. But something bigger is going on here. The subversion of reality that Welles slyly introduced into modern American media in 1938 has reached its culmination and a jaded public is at last in open revolt.
