Tom Cruise, the “Couch Incident,” and the Limits of Public Elation

hy are the details of Tom Cruise’s “couch incident” on The Oprah Winfrey Show on 23 May 2005 still so fresh that the incident seemed to have happened only yesterday? Well, it did happen yesterday, and it keeps happening, thanks to YouTube and other online media resources that have captured, recirculated, and remixed the scene, yielding such notable manifestations as the “Tom Cruise Kills Oprah” video, which accentuates the incident’s outrageousness by looping the segment of the “interview” in which Cruise grasps Oprah by both hands and matching it to the visually animated shock of an electric charge. It is the visual iterability of the scene itself that has secured its iconic status and brought it into such sharp focus in the foreground of other images and scenes, on-screen and off-, that continue to shape the composite persona of this immensely popular star. Sure, Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson may have had their newsworthy manic moments around this same time, but no one was there to film Crowe throwing that telephone at an employee of the Mercer Hotel or to capture the anti-Semitic tirade that Gibson launched at one of the Malibu officers assisting in his DUI arrest. The online reproduction of the police report was just a weak substitute for the “real” thing. “I’ve never seen you like this,” exclaimed the bewildered and almost speechless Oprah during the incident, her shock and disbelief offering a suitable response as a witness to what might be described as a most inappropriate use of televisual talk show space. Unless you play it as Joaquin Phoenix did on Late Night with David Letterman, proper interviewee behavior involves responding to questions posed by your host while maintaining relative positions conducive to polite verbal interchange; it is only during a sanctioned and prearranged “performance” (singing a song, dancing a Tom Cruise, the “Couch Incident,” and the Limits of