This Is Water: Tom Cruise Edition
Two views of the same video, 17 years apart
Ever since there was a television in every household, each modern generation has had its own unique library of defining pop culture moments that heralded their entrance into adulthood. The Baby Boomers had The Beatles on Ed Sullivan and the NASA moon landing. Gen X saw the birth of MTV and David Hasselhoff wearing a piano key scarf at the fall of the Berlin Wall. For so-called elder Millenials like myself that grew up right alongside the burgeoning internet, however, this pop culture library includes not only the significant televised moments of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, but also a great deal of nonsensical viral internet videos that were generally sent to us by friends in the heat of procrastination.
Recently, I rewatched one such viral internet video that I first came upon 17 years ago, back in 2005. It was a clip of the actor Tom Cruise being sprayed by a water gun wielded by a prank show host that posed as a reporter at the London premiere of Cruise’s movie, War Of The Worlds. You might also remember having seen this video back in the TMZ celebrity news epoch, but in case you haven’t, here it is:
I can remember my reaction to seeing this clip back in 2005: it was something along the lines of, what a killjoy…this guy can’t take a joke. I remember thinking Cruise’s reaction was overly earnest, intense and a bit weird. It was just a harmless prank; why did he take it so seriously?
Upon rewatching this clip in 2022, however, something interesting happened: my reaction was no longer the same. Rather, it had flipped entirely; now, it the “reporter” perpetrating the prank that received the harsh judgment. Tom Cruise went out of his way to give you an interview and you choose to humiliate him, just to raise your own profile? What absolutely rude behavior; Cruise was right to take you to task over it, and should be commended for maintaining his composure and treating you as respectfully as he did.
So, what happened here? Why did watching the same clip some 17 years apart provoke such opposite reactions in me? Was this merely a function of age — of being in my rebellious early twenties when the first clip aired, compared to my early forties today? Or perhaps it had something to do with my own experience as an entertainer? Something was clearly different now — but what?
In the very same year that a rogue reporter sprayed a hapless Tom Cruise (or perhaps the adjectives are the other way around, given that the reporter and three others involved in filming the prank were subsequently arrested for assault), David Foster Wallace gave what many consider to be the most famous commencement speech in history. The speech, titled This Is Water, began as follows:
“Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
In the next paragraph, he goes on to explain the meaning of this parable:
“The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.”
The water, of course, is meant to symbolize culture — that all-encompassing, ever-saturating set of customs, values, and manners that surrounds us, both inside and out. In the same way that we never feel the least bit wet when we are fully submerged underwater, we never notice anything out of the ordinary when the culture around us matches the culture to which we are accustomed. Similarly, in the same sense that we are largely incapable of perceiving that our bodies are, themselves, 60% water, we are largely incapable of decanting the particular culture in which we were raised from our own identities. As David Foster Wallace explains at the end of his speech, “This Is Water” is more than the title — it is a reminder that we must learn to give ourselves, over and over again, if we are to ever lay claim to the very self-awareness that is our birthright as humans.
The difference between my previous and current reaction to the aforementioned Tom Cruise clip isn’t merely a function of age or experience — although those certainly bear some weight. The difference is mostly a function of water — and not the kind of water that was discharged from a hapless, rogue reporter’s squirt gun. To be clear: the culture we swim in today is simply not the same culture we swam in some 17 years ago.
The superficial analysis of all this is that back in 2005, prank shows were all the rage. Punk’d, Jackass, Viva La Bam and The Jamie Kennedy Experiment were all highly-rated television programs built around practical jokes and outrageous unscripted moments. It didn’t stop there, either. The Oxygen Network had Girls Behaving Badly. Canadian children’s network YTV had Prank Patrol. There was even a takeoff of The Apprentice titled My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss that put Ivy League MBAs through increasingly ludicrous challenges (this one was my own personal favorite of the prank TV genre). The general public seemingly could not get enough of watching strangers face uncomfortable, sometimes ethically dubious situations — so long as someone eventually pointed out the hidden camera and reassured them that it was merely done for a laugh. Hopefully, the water we swam in back then was heavily chlorinated, because…well, never mind.
Of course, such a superficial explanation for why public pranking was celebrated back in 2005 only skims the surface. For a deeper dive, we must first brave the murky waters of the reality TV craze — the “missing link” between the previous era of studio-engineered fame and today’s era of algorithmically-anointed influencers. Reality TV was cheap, quickly produced, and endlessly duplicated, and — in what undoubtedly must have appeared at the time to be some kind of cosmic prank on the television industry itself — viewers took to it immediately. The waters churned, and the previous epoch of television came to a close. In 2005, the top-rated show was no longer an impeccably-scripted television drama starring George Clooney, but a reality singing competition called American Idol.
Aspirational, unpretentious, and often absurd, American Idol perfectly captured the Reality TV zeitgeist by using narrative-based editing to make everyday people — whether incredibly talented or simply delusional — into a new brand of celebrity. We felt a certain kinship with the talented underdogs; that could’ve been me, if I just worked a little bit harder. We felt embarrassed for the delusional contestants and their lack of self-awareness; we not-so-secretly enjoyed it when Simon Cowell took them to task over their questionable auditions. Why would you do that?
Unlike those of the social media epoch that followed, the waters of the Reality TV Era still came with its own set of mostly-human lifeguards calling the shots; the era of widespread, democratized, crowdsourced “viral” content didn’t begin in earnest until about 2006. Before that, fame was still doled out by real individuals wearing suits and ties, and with that came a sense that all television shows had at least some adults in the room — or, failing that, robust legal departments that would intervene before things went completely off the rails. At the time, we might have occasionally felt a tinge of remorse for laughing at auditions by hapless talent show hopefuls, but we assuaged our guilt by reminding ourselves that the responsible adult TV executives wouldn’t do anything morally reprehensible, lest they be swiftly penalized by the responsible adults at the FCC.
Perhaps even more importantly, we still had the retrospectively-beautiful gift of anonymity in those halcyon, pre-Facebook days of yore. The laughter from living rooms across America wasn’t directed at specific, hapless individuals so much as it was directed at the idea of a specific, hapless individual. After all, even the “victims” of prank television were kind of in on the joke, having been immediately transformed into “actors” with the signing of a release form. Suffering an embarrassing-yet-relatable moment on television was often quite endearing, and even American Idol’s most notoriously bad hopefuls were sometimes able to parlay their ridicule into career opportunities.
Beneath all this was the deeper current running through our culture in 2005: silliness. Everything had a bit of irony baked into it, right down to the trucker hat worn by the decidedly non-truck driver host of Punk’d. Supersized sunglasses were deemed fashionable. Hyperbolic “Chuck Norris Facts” circulated through Internet message boards, for seemingly no reason whatsoever. The Star Wars-liturgical Temple Of The Jedi Order was established as an ironic religious organization. The most influential news program was The Daily Show, a satirical program anchored by a standup comedian that aired on Comedy Central. Even NASA got in on the silliness, claiming that they had found water on Mars as an April Fool’s joke (you had to be there, I guess).
Viewed against this backdrop of mischievous prank shows, over-the-top reality competitions, and snarky comedic news programs, Cruise appeared not to get the joke when the clip of his red carpet This Is Water (Pistol) ambush first made the rounds — at least not to the members of the ascendent Millennial generation. In fact, the whole affair resembled the kind of non sequitur, celebrity-skewering humor found in the hit animated sitcom, Family Guy. Life imitates art; silly imitates silly.
Such abject silliness couldn’t last forever, though. The indulgences of the Early ‘Aughts came to an end with the arrival of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, which plunged the entire world into a deep, long-lasting recession. The economic water of the decade that followed was characterized by ultra-accommodative monetary policy and peak financialization, which in turn led to increases in inequality and public debt. Against this new backdrop, perceptions of institutional irrelevancy gave way to feelings of outright distrust. The national mood darkened, as societal ills became too great to hand wave away, leading to the rise of a new class of politicized celebrities and celebritized politicians. Polarization crept into virtually every aspect of life, turning social media from a fun, silly diversion into an ideological battlefield. The stodgy, reasonable centers of both parties became overtaken by their much more aggressive, revolutionary, social media-savvy fringes, and challenges to longstanding tenets of (small-l) liberal democracy came from both sides of the aisle. Alienation ran rampant, as public discourse in our modern-day “town square” grew increasingly heated, unmoored from reality, and largely dominated by grifters and high-functioning sociopaths. The fear of becoming the main character on a hidden camera prank TV show was supplanted by that of becoming the main character on social media itself, with its endless thirst for punishment. Everything felt a bit tempestuous — and that was even before a global pandemic struck. The world turned, and the waters churned once more.
In short, the past 17 years have left us feeling so endlessly pranked — not by reality TV game show hosts, but by Wall Street gambling away our savings under the guise of growth, politicians enriching themselves and their cronies under the guise of governance, and Big Tech stealing our attention and autonomy under the guise of building community — that we now feel a certain kinship with Mr. Cruise post-spray, as he regains his composure and looks the reporter dead in the eye, holding onto his hand so that he can’t slink away. “Why would you do that?” is the question that we wish that we could ask our betters, too.
In light of this, it could be argued that Cruise’s seriousness in this moment was ahead of its time. The rub is that ahead of its time can often look a lot like behind the times; if you choose to swim upstream, you do so at your own peril! Rest assured, though, that the styles and attitudes that feel fresh today are destined to feel stale (or “cringe,” to put it in the parlance of the current ascendant generation, Gen Z) tomorrow; the clarion voice of one generation destined to turn shrill. For proof that absolutely nothing escapes the cultural churn referenced in Wallace’s Fish Story, one might look no further than the late Wallace, himself. Universally praised after his iconic 2005 commencement moment, the culture of constant critique that permeates higher education today seeks to recast his legacy as that of a mere patron saint of “lit bro culture.” However, those troubled by such revisionism in academia need look no further than to Tom Cruise for proof that the pendulum of public opinion always swings back around; Maverick, — Cruise’s 2022 sequel to Top Gun — received top marks by both audiences and critics alike by forgoing all of the elite academic postmodernism altogether and bringing a refreshing, nostalgic sense of silliness back to the big screen. Both of these developments would certainly fail to surprise Wallace in the least; he recognized that both the writer and the critic swam in the same waters as the rest of us. Try as any of us might to reach the absolute perspective of a higher ground, there is no promise for us on land; there is no lighthouse from which to survey the ocean from a distance. There is only water.
This time, too, shall pass. The world will turn and churn the waters once more, with the current carrying us into yet another new, familiar era. Almost certainly, we will look back at some of our own reactions from this time and find ourselves surprised — not in a silly, “ha-ha” way, but more like a talent-show-hopeful-gets-the-rug-pulled-out-from-under-them sort of way. We will become acutely and suddenly aware that the water we swam in then is no longer the water we swim in now, and it will fill us with a pang of nostalgia, and more than a touch of anxiety. After all, becoming self-aware is nothing if not the acrophobia-inducing experience of peering beyond the edge of the soundstage, only to be confronted with the knowledge that we’ve been but the hapless main character of a much larger, cosmic prank show all along. Self-awareness is the state of having received the revelation that, much to our chagrin, the world doesn’t truly pass us by, but mischievously takes us along for the ride — coasting at first, before accelerating at a speed that far exceeds our comfort. And while this might make for great cosmic television, it seems about as funny to us as NASA proclaiming, “This Is Water (On Mars),” and presenting us with a picture of a glass of water perched atop a Mars candy bar.
This Is Water.
All-consuming.
Constantly shifting.
Rudely spraying us in the face.
-SB
10/3/22 - It’s been a while! I’ve kept fairly busy since the last letter I sent, as I’ve been focused on not one, but two Postmodern Jukebox tours: one currently in New Zealand, and another in the US. A decade later, this project still keeps me energized and inspired, and for that, I am eternally grateful! Tix for all of our tour dates can be found here, and a new video is coming to our channel this Thursday.
As always, wishing all of you the best! Feel free to share this piece with anyone that you think might enjoy it, or write to me directly by responding to this email.
Enjoy your week!
Scott