Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Katie Holmes is turning into a zombie in front of our eyes. Pass the popcorn.
Jul 13, 2005 | It will come as news to no one that there's something hinky about the Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes Relationship Extravaganza. It's a hilarious sham, so transparently ripe for satire that it -- along with a couple of shark attacks and a hurricane -- has managed to distract us from things like the Downing Street memo and how many people are dying in Iraq.
Hooray for Hollywood! Providing sweet relief from reality since World War I!
But it's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. And if the cover story in August's W magazine is any indication, "Batman Begins" star Holmes has had both her peepers gouged from her gamine face by a sharp Tom Cruise stick. Reading the piece, it's hard to ignore the rather awkward position we, consumers of America's cotton-candy media, have gotten ourselves into. Holmes' goring just officially stopped being fun or funny; suddenly we're not simply fans or spectators, we're accessories, standing idly by in uncomfortable paralysis as she gets her body and mind snatched on a national stage.
In her interview with W's Robert Haskell, the 26-year-old Holmes -- a television star who's been speaking competently to the press for almost a decade now -- comes off as nothing less than a chilling fem-bot, repeating her Cruise-azy scripted shtick over and over and over again, all while being closely monitored by her omnipresent Scientology baby sitter, the skeevy Jessica Rodriguez.
"I've found the man of my dreams," "I've never met anyone like Tom," "Tom is the most incredible man in the world," "Meeting Tom -- I'm just exhilarated. He makes me laugh, we have fun, we understand each other, everything is so aligned. I feel so lucky and so -- like I've been given such a gift ... And it's just really amazing." These are Holmes' non sequitur replies to Haskell's questions about everything and anything, including her recently dissolved five-year relationship with ex-fiancé Chris Klein.
In a 1,700-word piece, Haskell can't get Holmes to talk about anything else, and when he asks her reasonable questions about whether it's been hard to adjust to living with "her man" after knowing him for just six weeks, she nonsensically replies, "He's the man of my dreams."
Anyone remember HAL trilling, "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do ..."
There's been a lot of speculation about how in on this Holmes has been. But regardless of whether she signed a five-year contract or is truly in love with a movie star 16 years her senior, whose mug she had taped to her teenage bedroom wall, it's creepy to hear a grown woman say things like, "Tom and I will always be in our honeymoon phase." In this cynical age, from an adult who has already been in and out of a five-year relationship, that can't just be naiveté. It sounds more like someone who's been drained of her common sense, divorced from her own instincts about men or the nature of love. Rodriguez even prompts Holmes at one point to tell Haskell, "You adore him."
This beautiful, bright young woman from Middle America is in a dark place. It's so gothic that you can almost see her five years from now, in the dead of night in her neat Stepford subdivision, blood spattering her crisp white apron as she quietly hacks at her husband's stunted body with the MTV Movie Award she won for "disturbing behavior."
Or maybe I just want to be able to see that. Because that would somehow add dramatic, campy levity -- a satisfying cinematic twist -- to what seems to be a very real and very public unraveling that I can't figure out how to process.
It's profoundly sad that Holmes seems not just to have drunk the Kool-Aid, but to be wearing the pitcher it was stirred in over her head. But it's just as sad that because we are celebrity imbibers first and human beings second, we can't bring ourselves to politely look the other way as she stumbles around.
It's tough to make the American public choke on a Hollywood-manufactured story. We throw back our Bennifer and Brangelina cocktails without asking what's in them. Did you hear that Lindsay Lohan recently lost what looks like three-quarters of her body weight thanks to healthy eating and regular exercise? Go on, throw us a bone; we'll chase it.
But even venerable gossip Liz Smith -- a columnist who generally toes the Hollywood line and who has been giving the TomKat hoax an admittedly tepid stamp of approval until now -- finally broke down on Monday and called the W piece, "the scariest piece of celebrity journalism in a long time."
If Liz Smith is calling the W story "scary," if People magazine is publishing polls asking who thinks the Cruise-Holmes relationship is fake, and if W is flirting with Scientology's litigious reputation with the cheeky Holmes headline "Cult Classic" and the lead sentence: "The statistics on arranged marriage are surprising ..." it's clear that the Cruise-Holmes situation has become dire enough that even the manufacturers of this stuff are feeling uneasy about their product.
