Boy Movies #87

“Loan from the personal archives of Tom Cruise”

Thanks for reading Boy Movies, a newsletter by Ms. Boy Movies (that’s me, Allison Picurro). This issue is several days late, and as punishment the universe decided to strike me down with a mysterious illness that currently has me feeling like doodoo. I’ve learned my lesson and I promise to never keep you guys waiting again. (Lie!) If you want to hang out with me between issues, come say hi on Letterboxd.

This June will mark my sixth year living in New York City. Give or take a little: I went to college here (at a school that, not joking, will soon cease to exist) and, despite getting a job that forced me to be in New York every day, moved home to the great state of New Jersey after graduation, due to being poor. (I’m only, like, marginally less poor now. Relatedly, I have a Ko-fi and a Venmo.) While I identify as both a coastal elite and a city girl, there are a handful of quintessentially “New York things” that I have always been uninterested in — such as parks; people in this city absolutely fucking love to spend hours sitting in a park — and/or are becoming increasingly untenable — I liked the most recent issue of Mess Hall, which gave voice to something I’ve been thinking about as another recession looms: “I feel like the girls are going out to dinner less.” We are! We’re broke.

I don’t think New York has a museum monopoly or anything (relax), but, in case you haven’t heard, New York has many famous museums, and spending a day at a museum feels like the kind of distinctly New York activity that I actually do enjoy. Museums are great because they allow me to indulge in two of my passions: free air conditioning and speaking at a respectful volume. (Notice how the same cannot be said of parks…) Maybe it won’t surprise longtime readers to learn that out of all of New York’s museums, I have been to the Museum of the Moving Image the most. For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure, MoMI is the film and television museum, and it is home to, among other things, an ever-present Jim Henson exhibition and the Miss Diva Supreme puppet from The Exorcist. It is also, until December, home to Mission: Impossible — Story and Spectacle, an exhibition that honors the Mission: Impossible films and provides the average museum-goer with a truly staggering look into the twisted psyche of friend of the newsletter Tom Cruise.

When Leah and I went this weekend, I was delighted to learn that this mass celebration of one of our culture’s most important boy movie franchises takes up most of the museum’s third floor, which makes it more comprehensive than anything else currently on display at MoMI. It has all the typical museum-y things, like costumes¹ and props (or: the story), but the most interesting thing the exhibition has to offer is its spotlighting of One Big Stunt from each film (the spectacle — you understand), complete with storyboards and a behind-the-scenes featurette that delves into how the stunt was imagined² and executed.

Each section also has its own bespoke Ethan Hunt mannequin dangling overhead, their jaws chiseled into uncannily Cruise-like shapes, their limbs bent into uncannily Cruise-like poses. Since my favorite M:I is Mission: Impossible III (argue with the wall), I lingered in that area, learning that Tom Cruise “invited” J.J. Abrams to direct the third installment because he was “impressed” by the work he did on Lost, a show which famously featured Tom Cruise’s cousin William Mapother. The exhibition made no mention of Ethan Other Rom Man — a major oversight that never would have happened if I had curated this thing, but I digress.

One of the items on display is a copy of the Mission: Impossible screenplay, which, a nearby plaque is clear to note, is a “loan from the personal archives of Tom Cruise.” (Period.) The script sits inside a glass case, its pages open on the vault scene (can we all give it up for The Vault Scene), and you know what? Shit’s tight! Even better, shit’s evocative! The sequence is described beat by beat, carefully treading the line between descriptive and overwritten. Doing, like, an ounce of research into the writing of this screenplay makes me believe it was an absolute nightmare to work on, but that’s naturally not mentioned in the Mission: Impossible propaganda exhibition. No matter: It’s easy to get swept away by the fantasy, the same way that it’s easy to get swept away by the fantasy of watching Tom Cruise on screen.

I’m currently taking a screenwriting class and have been thinking about screenwriting a lot as a result — about the difference between prose and stage directions, about the translation of a screenplay from page to screen, about how dialogue sounds when delivered by actors. Greta Gerwig’s scripts for Lady Bird and especially Little Women have been on my mind, both of which became, shall we say, internet famous, thanks to their flowery and detailed descriptions. I saw Ryan Coogler’s Sinners last week, almost the entire first act of which is spent on an extended “getting the band together” sequence, resulting in a much slower build to its operatic second act than I anticipated. And at Katie’s behest, I watched Noah Wyle Presents A Few Good Men for the first time a few days ago, which is an Aaron Sorkin script if there ever was one: verbose and full of jokes written specifically to make men in Sorkin’s exact age group laugh. There are zillions of other examples, obviously, but my point is — and at the risk of sounding like a total ding dong — it’s interesting how often the success of movies relies on a willingness to ignore the “rules” and just do what feels cool and right. I guess that, too, is the fantasy Tom Cruise allows us to believe in.

Tom Cruise — our greatest living showman, and maybe even, as Leah theorized, the Buster Keaton of our era — is a crazy person. We know this, but it’s really rare to see the evidence of it laid out in such a matter-of-fact way. In some of the videos at the exhibition, I heard him say things that, if uttered by one of my loved ones, would make a compelling case for having them 5150’d. Toward the end of the experience, you reach a dark nook where you’re expected to sit on a bench and watch a featurette where Cruise previews the stunts in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. In the video, he gets off a handful of choice soundbites, including “I am always thinking about cinema,” and “I’m committed, that’s the story of my whole life, like, I’m in,” and “You’ll see me inverted.” While I sat absorbing this, an older couple stood off to the side, not approaching me or my bench, just there to observe a few seconds of what Cruise was saying. After a while, they went to leave, but not before the woman turned to the man beside her and said, “He’s very serious.” Her companion agreed: “He’s a serious guy.”

If you have the opportunity, I wholeheartedly recommend a visit to the Museum of the Moving Image’s Mission: Impossible — Story and Spectacle³.

• I reviewed the second season of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, which is the biggest show on TV right now if you’re a very specific type of person. Overall: good, but I have thoughts.

1. But not Ethan’s Born in the USA t-shirt from Ghost Protocol…

2. What I learned is that many of the kookiest M:I stunts have been born out of Tom Cruise saying, “Hey, I’ve never done something like this before,” and everyone around him going, “Right, so that’s because we don’t want to kill you,” and him being like, “Haha! You wish it was that easy to kill me.”

3. Word of advice: Wait until after May 22nd to go! A whole section of the exhibition is currently empty because the museum has to wait for the theatrical release of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning to display the props and costumes and psychotic stories from the alleged final M:I movie. I did not realize this before purchasing my general admission ticket on Saturday and when I tell you I was absolutely fookin’ fumin’...