ben
tapeworm’s
almanac

May 2021 (ii)

not Tom Cruise, not Tom Cruise, not Tom Cruise

The first time I saw Tom Cruise who was not Tom Cruise was on Bill Hader’s face. In a video that went viral a couple years ago, Hader is on the Late Show, telling David Letterman about meeting Cruise at a read-through for Tropic Thunder. Each time he does an impression of Cruise, his face seamlessly morphs into Cruise’s, as if possessed. Too funny to be frightening, it was still deeply strange.

The second time I saw Tom Cruise who was not Tom Cruise was in a promotional video for a new AI company called Flawless, which hopes to improve film dubbing by digitally altering actors’ faces so that it appears they are delivering lines in multiple languages. Cruise performs the famous courtroom scene in A Few Good Men—but in French! A not-quite-Cruise demands la vérité from a not-quite-Jack Nicholson. Weird and intriguing, it also seems like a much more expensive and disorienting solution to dubbing than the one we already have: subtitles.

The third time I saw Tom Cruise who was not Tom Cruise was on TikTok. He was playing Dave Matthews Band on guitar and smiling with a crazed intensity that I assumed was self-parody. It took me a while to realize that @deeptomcruise was not Tom Cruise at all, but a deepfake project made by a Cruise impersonator and a Belgian VFX guy. What I mistook for self-parody was really just parody—or some eerie possibility between the two.

The real Tom Cruise, for his part, once told Playboy in an interview that “Individuals have to decide what is true and real for them.”

ben tapeworm

ben tapeworm’s almanac is amateur apocalypse pamphletry.

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