gayin’ 4 Tom Cruise

Animation breakdown ✨

Anon I am shaking your hand. Thank you for being so correct. That is exactly it. Rock of ages is in fact a pretty bad film and when you watch it you can sense the shame and resignation in every single actor’s performance—except for TC who really said maybe the movie sucks but I could never ✨💅  I love that he agreed to do the movie because he just really wanted to do a musical, of course he wanted to do a musical! the man is a performer and his style of camp is perfectly suited to the musical format! And like you pointed out with Stacee he leans heavily into the performer-playing-a-performer-playing-a (etc) aspect of the role, you can see in each song how he explores that aspect for Stacee in different ways. there’s of course a metanarrative element too, as a great admirer of TC I would never disrespect his craft by suggesting he’s basing Stacee off of himself, but when you’re watching a TC movie 99 times out of 100 in analysis you have to keep in mind that this character is played by Tom Cruise. Stacee Jaxx is a legendary performer played by a legendary performer. He has personas on personas on personas, so much mythos crammed into not a lot of screen time.

For this post I’ll just talk about pour some sugar on me cause you haven’t seen the movie anon but at some point I’m probably going to write a longer rant post about my thoughts on stacee’s arc as a whole

I loveeee the way the song functions in the movie because to me it’s the moment where it’s possible to understand Stacee for the first time. Stacee is fucking confusing in the beginning of the movie, TC’s performance makes him hard to parse and off putting, and then when you see him on stage at least for me there’s this sense of everything clicking into place...you understand how Stacee could be a rock god, and a sex god, and a reluctant sex god, and a burnout, because for the first time you realize that he is not primarily any one of those things. Primarily, he is just a damn good musician. In Pour Some Sugar on Me, I’m so struck by Stacee’s sheer effortless competence. I could write odes to TC’s physicality in that song, not just because he’s gorgeous (he is) but because of how routine it all looks. It’s clearly deeply ingrained in Stacee’s body to go through these motions, it's practiced to the point of instinct, it's controlled, it's beautiful, and he's completely invested in the performance to the exclusion of everything else. It’s obvious from watching him that there’s not a single thought in his head except perfect execution and the adrenaline and power rush that comes with it (I adore the manic gleam of his eyes when he sings ‘do you take sugar?’ not to mention the return of that expression at the end, when he seems dazed, completely out of it and totally satisfied). He's pure function. You understand for the first time that the point of Stacee Jaxx is not to be a human being, but to perform. 

It makes the “reluctant sex god” idea posed in the previous songs completely comprehensible, because despite how blatantly sexual the scene is, it's obvious that Stacee himself is not trying to seduce anyone. All the sexual parts of the performance are part of the performance. Part of the art form. Stacee showing personal sexual feeling onstage, or Stacee’s own relationship with sex interfering with the performance of sex he’s executing, would be the work of a lesser artist. Sex is on the program, so Stacee plays it! Incidentally, we see outside of that scene that Stacee the human, the person outside of the persona, doesn’t like sex at all—but for Stacee, fulfilling his own human wants and needs is not his primary purpose. His primary purpose is to be a damn good musician. That’s what he was made for, and it’s the only thing he’s good at.