Adam Oster, Novelist

Tom Cruise has been a pretty integral actor for most of my life. His first film credit actually happened the same year I was born, and it would only be a couple years later when he would strike it hard with films like Risky Business. The following years would give us iconic films like Rain Man, Top Gun, Cocktail, Days of Thunder, A Few Good Men, The Firm, Mission: Impossible, and Jerry Maguire, just to name a few items quickly.

These are all films I’ve seen. When it comes to movies like Rain Man, Mission: Impossible, and Jerry Maguire, they are films I’ve seen countless times.

And I remember almost nothing about them.

I have this really weird block in my mind whenever it comes to films starring Tom Cruise. Like, with Rain Man for example. I absolutely love that movie. I’ve seen it more times than I care to count. This is the only film out of Cruise’s filmography that I remember anything from, and it’s still only bits and pieces, and honestly, nothing to do with Cruise himself, but Hoffman, which should be expected.

I guess the film I actually remember the most of, in spite of him being in it, would be Austin Powers 3, but since he only makes a brief cameo in that flick, I don’t know ii should count.

But, I remember the first time someone told me about the homoerotic volleyball sequence in Top Gun. This sequence that is supposedly iconic and difficult to forget. I, having watched Top Gun tons of times as a kid, to this day have absolutely no memory of that scene existing. In fact, when I think about the movie itself, all I get are blanks and the theme song. Well, that’s not entirely true, I often get memories of scenes from that movie only to realize that they are actually scenes from Hot Shots.

Mission: Impossible was a huge movie during my high school days, and there were a couple years there where you couldn’t down the hall in the dorm I lived in without hearing the memorable music from that movie playing from someone’s room. I know I’ve watched it numerous times. I remember going to the theater to see it even. And I couldn’t tell you a single thing about that movie outside of the sequence where he hangs from the ceiling because they’re trying to be sneaky about something. Was that the one with the noise level needing to be extra low?

I’ve watched whole movies, like Minority Report, before getting toward the end and going, hey, I’ve seen this one before.

Because, for whatever reason, my brain decides that it shouldn’t keep track of this information. Because, for reasons I absolutely can’t explain, my mind needs to block out Tom Cruise from itself.

Which causes me countless questions of why? Is there some sort of multiversal paradox that could occur if I were to remember Tom Cruise outside of anecdotes told to me outside of my actual viewings of them? Is his middle-of-the-face tooth too much for my feeble brain to comprehend past some short term memory?

Why am I forced to live this life where people want to talk to me about Tom Cruise movies I’ve seen and I have to act as though I’ve never seen them before?

At least I don’t feel like I’m missing out on much from them. I’ve never come out of one of his movies thinking that they were the most amazing thing ever. But with his connections to Scientology, I can’t help but wonder if there’s some sort of Thetan symbiosis where Xenu simply doesn’t want me to know that Tom Cruise exists because our alien spirits can’t know we’re on the planet together.

That’s probably the most sensible answer, right?

But seriously, I can’t be the only person who has this issue, can I? Maybe with Tom Cruise, but surely someone else has some famous actor that they have seen in tons of films and can’t remember a single thing about them. Please? So I don’t have to feel crazy?