Brainman

Recently, child-star turned former-child-star Brooke Shields released Down Came The Rain, a book detailing her battle with postpartum depression. Postpartum depression is a particularly insidious and often misunderstood illness, and whatever you think of Brooke Shields, this is a gutsy and commendable move. What’s more, if someone of Brooke Shield’s profile can be so publicly candid about her depression, we’ve come a very long way in learning not to stigmatize mental illness.

However, we haven’t quite come far enough to prevent me from saying that Tom Cruise has gone completely bat-shit crazy.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no problem with most of his behaviour in recent months and years. Personally, I thought bouncing up and down on a couch on national television to show everyone how much he loves Whatsherface was a touching display of affection. That’s certainly how it’s regarded in the Scientologist culture, and it’s nice to see Tom honouring the ancient traditions of the Old Country.

Divorcing Nicole Kidman was a bit strange, but for all I know he might have had perfectly valid reasons for not wanting to go to bed each night next to Nicole Kidman’s lithe, statuesque, perfect alabaster form, her full, soft lips parting seductively as her languorous trails of red hair cascade over her exquisite JESUS TOM WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING??? Sorry.

But the cheese slid pretty comprehensively off Tom Cruise’s cracker the day he criticised Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants, telling Access Hollywood this was both dangerous and harmful to her career. Pushing the standard Scientologist position that psychiatry is a harmful pseudo-science (whereas personality assessment via a mysterious ‘e-meter’ is perfectly acceptable), Cruise followed this up with a rambling, self-aggrandizing rant on the Today program (as transcribed by that Drudge fellow):

TOM CRUISE:
No, you see. Here's the problem. You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do.

MATT LAUER:
...aren't there examples, and might not Brooke Shields be an example, of someone who benefited from one of those drugs?

TOM CRUISE:
...all it does is mask the problem, Matt. And if you understand the history of it, it masks the problem. That's what it does. That's all it does. You're not getting to the reason why. There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance.

Oh ok, so there’s no such thing as- no, wait. See, the guys in the funny white coats don’t just make this stuff up, Tom. They have this thing called Scientific Method- maybe you’ve heard of it? Oh, you have?

TOM CRUISE:
if you start talking about chemical imbalance, you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt, okay. That's what I've done.

Oh, I see. It’s just that I must have missed the part where you acquired the advanced degree in psychopharmaceuticals necessary to understand and evaluate those papers, Tom. But since it turns out you’re a fully qualified brain scientist, just how do you suggest we deal with cases of severe clinical depression?

TOM CRUISE:
But what happens, the antidepressant, all it does is mask the problem. There's ways of vitamins and through exercise and various things.

“My God, there’s a jumper on that bridge over there! Quick, I’ll get him to do some pushups while you go get a greengrocer!”

The rest of the interview was basically Tom Cruise saying Matt Laurer’s name over and over again in an effort to confuse him. Face it, ladies: Tom Cruise has finally lost his shit.

The resulting “War of the Words”, as the press inevitably dubbed it (thank God it’s not 1987 or else we’d have headlines like “Tom Slams Brooke’s Cocktail of Drugs”), saw Shields criticize Cruise’s “ridiculous rant” while various state Governors also came out in her support. Curiously, no-one in the media seems to have thought to ask a doctor of some sort for their opinion on the matter. But then, in America today it’s probably cheaper to get one-on-one access to Tom Cruise than to a doctor ZING!!!

So what makes Tom Cruise think he can overturn fifty years of experimental psychophysiology with one morning show appearance? The obvious answer is his Scientology faith. But just because someone believes that psychiatrists have been repressing humanity for literally billions of years (and invented pain and sex to help them do so), or that 75 million years ago the galactic tyrant Xenu stacked hundreds of billions of frozen humans around the Earth’s volcanoes before blowing them up with hydrogen bombs and then (yes, then) brainwashing them with a "three-D, super colossal motion picture" for 36 days- does that mean they deserve our ridicule? And sure, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard did describe past life experiences that include being "deceived into a love affair with a robot decked out as a beautiful red-haired girl", being run over by a Martian bishop driving a steamroller, and turning into a space walrus that then died when it fell out of a flying saucer, but surely we can’t convict him of having a somewhat slippery grip on physical reality just on that basis. And yeah, Hubbard made the whole religion up and it’s a massive intellectual fraud that preys on the weak and insecure to make money, but they also supposedly own the Pancake Parlor, and I like pancakes.

Even though Cruise was just towing the Scientology party line, the sheer fact that a debate like this (if Hollywood’s lukewarmest stars yelling at each other passes for a “debate” now, which I suspect it does) could occur at all speaks to something deeper and more disturbing.

In the US (and increasingly here in Australia) educators are debating whether schools should teach “Intelligent Design.” This theory holds that Darwinian evolution just can’t account for the complexity of the living structures of the Universe, suggesting these were created by a purposive intelligence. Now, I’ve had my first year philosophy of religion students work out what’s wrong with Intelligent Design in a matter of seconds: it’s a response to an inability to explain something, rather than an explanation in itself. Saying that evolution is wrong because it can’t yet explain everything (and therefore God must have created everything) is like saying that just because we can’t yet perfectly predict hurricanes we should scrap meteorology and give offerings to the Rain Gods. Evolution can already account for plenty of phenomena that, before Darwin, looked to be obvious instances of purposive intelligence.

Ah, but “ID” is hard science, not religion, according to its proponents. Fine, except there don’t seem to be many actual biologists signing off on it. The vast weight of two centuries of astonishing progress in our scientific understanding of the development of life on earth is being sidelined because some Christian fundamentalists have infiltrated school boards and gotten a few politicians to endorse them. George W. Bush has welcomed the idea of kids being taught this crap alongside evolution "so people can understand what the debate is about." This, you’ll recall, is the same George W. Bush whose Administration has tried desperately to pretend that global warming is based on questionable and unreliable science, despite the fact there are about five scientists left who don’t believe in it and they all just happen to work for oil companies.

We’ve come to the point where unqualified celebrities and politicians are taken as the arbiters of scientific truth, rather than, say, scientists. In the process we’ve thrown out centuries of progress and discovery, but the upside is we can now say anything we like and assert it to be true without having to back it up. So with that in mind, I hereby proclaim that buying me lunch cures cancer.

What’s that? Why, that’s very kind of you. Shall we say 12:30 at the Pancake Parlor?