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Are you Tom Cruise crazy?

Yes, the tiny megastar proves he's all kinds of nuts in a bizarre video. But how about you?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Here is something you can do.

Set up that nifty little Flip Video camera you got for Christmas just over there next to your couch. Now, plop yourself down in front of it and have a friend sit just off to the side and then both of you slam about nine shots of vodka followed by nine more of extra-strong espresso and then hit the "Record" button as she begins to question you about your deepest beliefs on How the World Really Works, and you answer them employing only tense, cryptic bursts of pseudo-lingo that make sense only to you and the houseplants, all while making sure you suddenly burst out laughing as maniacally as possible at random intervals and never ever blink. Won't that be fun?

And then you can compare. You can go back to your computer and re-watch the now-famous Tom Cruise Scientology video currently winging across the planet like a wacky Ebola virus, and contrast it with your swell little video and go: See? See that? No matter how hard I try, no matter how weird I think I am and no matter how heavily my therapist sighs every time I bring up my love of Shania Twain and banana sandwiches and "Battlestar Galactica" collectibles, I am not nearly as insane as Tom Cruise. Life is going to be OK.

Ah yes, the Tom Cruise Scientology indoctrination video. Surely by now you've seen this little hunk of pop culture manna? Surely, at least, someone you know has watched the video and has described it to you in amazed, slightly disturbed tones and you've maybe responded by shrugging and saying: No no no, it couldn't be that weird ... could it?

It could. It is something to see. It has already enjoyed more than 2 million views so far and Anderson Cooper even filed a swell little CNN report about it and it's still moving fast, this nine-minute slab of crazy that features this very intense, grinning, bizarre movie star talking in barely comprehensible half-sentences and perky Scientology lingo about "SPs" and "the tech" and "KSW" and "half-acks" and all manner of cool culty jargon that, if you close your eyes and blur your imagination just right, sounds remarkably like a high school speed freak talking up Dungeons & Dragons to his kid brother.

Except this particular clip has apparently been edited by an epileptic teenager. It is scored with the "Mission: Impossible" theme song (to which Cruise doubtlessly owns the rights) and it has laughable zoom-in graphics pulled from somewhere deep in 1994 and it is bookended with some of the most bloviated, hammy voiceover work this side of a "Saturday Night Live" parody. All told, it is, as the universal verdict goes, "unintentionally hilarious."

Unintentional, because it's supposed to be serious. It is supposed to make Scientology look intense and cool and badass and righteous and Cruise is clearly meant to appear as some sort of idealized L. Ron Hubbard-drunk demigod, a true hero and visionary (he's an OT VII, after all, the highest rank you can achieve in his "church" without going off to battle evil warlord Xenu yourself), who has apparently single-handedly brought Scientology to over 1 billion people worldwide and who can lift boulders with his penis and bend spoons with his mind and whip up a delightful marinara in his sleep.

It is, in a way, a seminal piece of film. It finally removes all doubt that one of the wealthiest and most successful celebrities of this generation is, indisputably, many, many fries short of a Happy Meal. It's as if you crossed Mitt Romney with Mike Huckabee and rolled it in the hot goo of Ted Haggard and packed it all into the body of a junior-weight high school wrestling champ, with exactly the same level of verbal articulation. Which is to say, a log. A very, very intense log.

Perhaps this is the true joy of watching celebrity derailments and breakdowns and cult addictions. We like to think that would never be us. We like to think, "You know, if I was world famous and had a billion dollars and still had pretty good hair and a killer smile and at least used to be the hottest hunk of malehood on the planet, I sure as hell wouldn't hitch my spiritual cart to the crazy train of a deeply deranged pill-popping sci-fi hack writer who invented a nutball cult religion on a bar bet. Wait, would I?"

Perhaps you are still not sure. Perhaps you think it's still not fair to make fun of Tom Cruise this way, no matter how clearly bats— crazy he so obviously is. After all, he's done some passable movies. He's a decent enough guy. I sort of liked him in "The Firm" and, um, "Legend." Cut him some slack, maybe?

Maybe. After all, everyone needs their little cult, right? Everyone needs their tribe and their myths and their psychological attachments and is it Tom's fault that his intellectual and spiritual development apparently got stuck somewhere between "Star Trek" and the episode where Gilligan gets hit on the head with a coconut and his mouth turns into a radio? No, it is not.

What's more, it's not like this video is all that unusual. Surely there are Mormon indoctrination videos equally as deranged. Surely there are creepy installations playing right now over at the Creation Museum in Kentucky that will make your brain implode for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that half of Americans actually believe that humans really did fly on the backs of pterodactyls. Hell, I'm sure Opus Dei has some sort of S&M fetish dungeon where they take new recruits and staple their eyelids open and make them watch "The Da Vinci Code" on infinite repeat until they swear to worship an angry misogynistic God forevermore, just to make it stop. And hell, the evangelicals in the hugely disturbing 2006 documentary "Jesus Camp" make Tom's Scientologists look like a bunch of geeky Boy Scouts on crack.

So then, maybe we all owe Tom Cruise a big debt of gratitude? After all, it is only through videos such as this that we can gain perspective on our own lives. It is only though ogling such phenomena over and over and maybe only after someone turns this clip into a drinking game ("Every time Tom squirms awkwardly in his chair and can't finish a sentence, drink!"), that we can finally eliminate all doubt as to our own mental stability and say, "Yes indeed, I may be a bit crazy, but I ain't no Tom Cruise crazy."

Or, as Tom would say, "I've canceled that in my area." Yes, Tom. You most certainly have.