tom cruise: staving off psychosis?

Music: A Shoreline Dream: Avoiding the Consequences (2007)

At this point I suspect many of you have seen the video of Tom Cruise incoherently babbling about Scientology (thanks to Jim Brown for posting about it over on The Blogora). I've written some stuff about Cruise and Scientology before, but I think I can now explain some of the strangeness better: yes, Tom Cruise is border-line psychotic if you reckon with two ideas. The first idea---or rather fact---is that in his crucial formative years Tom's mother left his abusive father and raised him alone (that is, his pop abused him and then a paternal figure was absented). The second is that Scientology represents a kind of fight club; in the diagetic space of the film Fight Club, Scientology would be "Project Mayhem." Cruise is thus a real life version of Tyler Durden, with all the homoerotic charge such a comparison invites. Let's unravel the mystery!

For the last couple of days I've been working on an essay co-authored with Tom Frentz on the film Fight Club. Tom wrote most of it; I'm just injecting some Lacan. The gist of the argument is that contrary to Brookey and Westerfelhaus' arguments about the flick's homosociality, it pretty much follows a very basic Oedipal model: the entire movie could be said to represent the struggle of secondary identification. Daddy gets killed and mommy gets screwed by the movie's end. The "splitting" of Tyler's ego represented by Jack is a failure to integrate the paternal metaphor, resulting in psychosis.

Ok, so, what does this mean? It's not as complicated as it initially sounds. The Lacanian read of the Oedipal is basically that, like the unconscious, it's structured like a language. Basically, the first object of identification for a child is the mother. The child believes it is actually its mother. Daddy enters the picture in secondary identification: Daddy basically says, "you are not your mother" or "you cannot have your mother" or variations of this. Now, this is just a heuristic, a story or myth to explain the emergence of the social subject: without being told to dis-identify with mother, the kid is in a nascent psychotic state with no connection to the outside world. (Think about psychosis here as an inability to "connect" with the outside world or to follow basic social norms.) Now, daddy brings in the social by means of prohibition. Lacan refers to this process as a function of the father: that is, the bearer of the first "no you can't" is not necessarily a male, as it could be a woman, because the person really is inconsequential. What is key is what Lacan calls the "introduction of a third term." In fact, for Lacan the process is entirely allegorical, for the paternal metaphor is just that: a metaphor. So, when we speak of the father we're usually talking about signification as such. The interference of daddy (or rather, represented by daddy) is really a signifier—the "Name-of-the-father" which represents an ideological quilting point for the subject, the moment when signifieds stop slipping and start to get fixed to signifiers. Or at least that's how I understand the process.

Fight Club is thus representative of a psychotic slippage---its overwhelming homosociality/homoeroticism is literally a Mommy-problem, too much mommy, much too much mommy, and thus a longing for an integration of the paternal metaphor: the demand for a "No!" or the plea for Moses to come down the mountain and tell us what we are not allowed to do. The problem, in other words, is the absence of fathers. As Tyler says at one point in the film, "we're a generation of men raised by women, I'm wondering if another woman is what we really need." Hence, it's not that "no women are allowed in Fight Club," as Brookey and Westerfelhaus argue, but rather, that there's simply too much Mommy and the dudes are overcompensating with violence (violence is always an overcompensation, the meaning of ecstasy).

Now, what of Tom Cruise? Elsewhere I've written about Tom's psychotic behavior in terms of the culture wars and a clamoring for the spiritual. In light of more recent work (stay tuned to CSMC this semester) I'm starting to think rather that Tom's wackiness is about the father: Hubbard is the primal father, of course (especially given all the misogynistic rules about women's behavior in Scientology), and Tom would seem to be yearning, quite publically, for that paternal metaphor, the almighty "no" of God that would pull him away from the maternal bosom. He is psychotic in the same way Norman is psychotic in Hitchcock's Psycho, incapable of disidentifying with mumsie. If Fight Club is any sort of pedagogy, the only solution to his psychosis is to paradoxically expose and bring down his own Project Mayhem. The only solution, in other words, is for him to leave his church and publically denounce them and declare his independence. (Personal) revolution is the only answer for Tom. Scientology is just another mother, another narcissistic mirror that must be shattered for the much more stable neuroses to take over.

Next up: Obama's spiritual addressivity; is he, or isn't he, a daddy?