Sumario: | "This anthology centers around the career and enigma of Tom Cruise's stardom, looking at his star image across genres and forms. A prime contemporary example of celebrity, Cruise is both an action hero and romantic lead, and yet is found in homoerotic and homosocial relationships that unsettle and undermine these heterosexual scripts. When a film stars Tom Cruise, a series of unruly forces are set in motion, analyzed in this collection through the lens of desire, ageing, and genre. In fifteen chapters and in three parts, contributors first focus on the way Cruise's star image and performances are built on a desiring gaze, nearly always complicated by perverse narrative arcs and liminal character relationships. The collection then looks at Cruise within the structures of film genre, articulating his star image in terms of the codes and conventions of the western and migrant melodrama picture, the Gothic film, science fiction, and the Cold War thriller. In the final chapters, contributors look at the (lack of) aging in the Cruise star vehicle, each taking a different approach to the question of his authenticity, embodiment, and the familial/patriarchal roles he takes on"--
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