Thursday, August 24, 2006

Xenu made him do it

Taking a page from the playbook of the Philadelphia Eagles, Paramount Pictures has T.Oed* Tom Cruise. While Terrell Owens got the ax for yelling at his quarterback on the sidelines and fighting a team representative in the locker room, T.C. was let go because he proved fond of jumping up and down like a madman on Oprah's couch and eating his baby's placenta.

What surprised Hollywood wasn't so much that an ailing studio cut ties with a high-maintenance star, but the way Paramount boss
Sumner Redstone gleefully cited Cruise's off-screen behavior as the rationale behind the decision to drop him.

It seems to me that a lot of Cruise's "erratic behavior" is a result of his belief in
Scientology not jelling with the way normal people go about their business.

I'm not going to defend the practice of Scientology -- it appears to be quite silly. Nevertheless, enough people take it seriously enough for it to be considered a religion. It might be a religion based on space travel and pseudo-psychiatry, but that's because it was founded in 1952 when such things were in vogue.

Back when the "real" religions were founded people knew nothing about the way our brains work or about the universe around us. So these "real" religions were, and continue to be, justified by the exsistence of an unseen magic, pure and simple.


If a religion were to invented today, God would probably live inside the internet and we can only hope there would be little mention of Paris Hilton.

Yes, I do smell a whiff of religious intolerance in the ostracism of Thomas Cruise Mapother IV. If Tom Cruise had picked any other religion outside the mainstream Judeo-Christian umbrella, there would at least be some people standing up for his odd beliefs and behavior.


That being said, we have tradition in America of keeping our constitutionally-protected weird religious practices to ourselves. So to some extent Cruise has brought his troubles on himself. There are plenty of other Scientologists in Hollywood, but we didn't hear about placenta-eating until Cruise brought it up.

Cruise needs take a page from Madonna and try to use his made-up religion for good. Recently, Madonna proposed using
Kabbalah water to clean up nuclear waste. We all laughed hysterically, but it was nice to see her trying to help.

When Scientology drives Tom Cruise to do things like
make Brooke Shields cry for using antidepressants, he just comes off like a huge jerk. The kind you wouldn't want to hitch your multi-billion dollar movie studio to.

*Of course the Eagles were taking a page from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers playbook when they Keyshawned T.O. Maybe one day a studio will Cruise Lohan.

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