Tom Cruise’s Body of Work (with Aled Maclean-Jones)

Aled Maclean-Jones: Thank you, Russ. It’s a real pleasure to be back.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, so I think there were two things that led into writing the essay. The first was I was thinking a lot about this kind of question of usefulness, and the fact that over the last two to three years, there’s been a lot of discussion about how useful can humans be, and I think particularly humans who are doing mainly things with their minds and their brains. And so, I was quite tuned to this thing.

And then, secondly, the other thing that happened to me was I started to have kids and a family. And, it’s very interesting because when you have young kids–and our eldest daughter is just very embodied: she’s very, very good at picking up sports, she’s very, very physical, and so on and so forth. And, as someone who is always been a professional, clever person in some kind of aspect, it was a bit like, I don’t really know what to do with this.

And so, I was mulling over. I was on holiday with her and most of my family on the Isle of Wight, which is a small little island off the South Coast of Britain. And, I was mulling over this question of embodiment whilst watching her play on the beach. And then, I went to the, I think it was the only real cinema on the Isle of Wight, which is in Newport, and watched this Mission Impossible–the final film in the Mission Impossible franchise–Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning. And, it all kind of came together, and then there was a frenzied evening where I began to pull it all together.

And so, that’s kind of it. It was a combination of technology, my own daughter’s physical attributes compared to mine when they were her age–which were dire. And then, Tom Cruise was the spark that lit everything together.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yes, I suppose–

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, no, not at all. Not at all. I remember one of the first interactions I had–so I think about that Stewart Brand, particularly the essay when he’s talking about the around-the-world race and the idea of sailing in particular, and sailing is always–and it’s interesting because a lot of the books I’ll read in my spare time are from the 1950s. There was a very famous British author called Nevil Shute, who is kind of forgotten now. He would always write about useful people, and one of the main–he was obsessed with airplanes, and so on and so forth. I think we will circle back to this in a roundabout way–trust me, trust me, listeners, at some point, back to Shute himself, actually–because he was obsessed with aeroplanes. He was a very famous aeroplane engineer, but he always loved boats as well, and boats and messing around with boats.

And, the idea of being alone on the water and having to be self-sufficient is very attractive. I saw recently, I think it was a post that went viral on Twitter, and it was of someone who is just sailing on their own. They were talking about what they do to make sure that they avoid large ships. So, they’re going to sleep and they’re waking up every half an hour and checking it. And, it was interesting seeing the comments and stuff, because I think that the act of the body in action is still something that really enthralls us. It’s always fascinating with the Winter Olympics have just been, and to see the figure skaters do so well and become so famous. And, in a world where so much is fake, there are these few things that you can’t really fake anymore, and they still hold the ability to captivate us.

And so, just to situate the listener in terms of Cruise, what I really was talking about in this essay was this kind of, like, 10 to 15-year period, I would say, of Cruise’s work that I would probably begin in the early 2010s, when he moves and situates himself to the United Kingdom and starts to work in particular with Chris McQuarrie. The first film–I think it’s called Edge of Tomorrow, in which Cruise basically keeps on–so he keeps on living the same day again and again and again. And, it’s really a film essentially about embodied knowledge. So, they have to figure out how to defeat these aliens, and every day he has to learn a little bit more about the world he’s in and figure out how to navigate the world and be a little bit more useful in the world. Right?

He starts–he’s like an Army PR [Public Relations] guy, basically. And then, so he starts and he lasts about two minutes. He just goes over the plane to the channel and then the aliens kill him. And then, over hundreds and thousands of cycles, he gets better and better and more useful in this world. And, ends up being able to basically use that knowledge that he remembers every day–that no one else knows, no one else understands, only he knows inside him–to be able to solve the problem and defeat the alien menace. And, I think that stayed with them, Cruise certainly, and McQuarrie and their collaborators. And then, that infected, I think in particular, the Mission Impossible franchise.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. I imagine if it’s me and you, Russ, in this situation: there’s no writing in it. You know what I mean? I would be trying to create eight memoirs and stash them in places and–

Aled Maclean-Jones: I’d write on my own body and all that sort of stuff. You know what I mean? But it’s very much like, it is the ultimate example of learning by doing, you know what I mean?

And, I think that was certainly–and I think it’s interesting as well because, so, he goes on from doing Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise, and you then get basically the first really embodiment inflected, I’d say, Mission Impossible film, which is Rogue Nation, which is the British one. It’s like a love letter to Britain. It’s a very, very funny film in lots of ways. It has a very fantastic ending at Churchill’s birthplace, and there’s a very English–I think Tom Hollander plays the British Prime Minister, and he has a digital red box that’s going to blow up, and the password is Kipling. The password is Kipling. I remember that. The password is Kipling. But, it’s very interesting to see the first scene in that and compare it to the earlier films. So, if I think about the opening of Mission Impossible 2, which is quite a famous opening where he’s rock climbing up a [inaudible 00:13:26] back in Utah.

And, it just looks effortless, and he looks like the coolest guy alive, that he’s just doing it. It’s very, very easy.

And so, in the opening of Rogue Nation, I think, he has to get onto a Russian cargo plane, essentially. And, what I love about it is he gets on this cargo plane–it’s actually filmed somewhere in Cambridgeshire or Suffolk or something, and they turn it into Belarus–I think Minsk. Not entirely convincingly, because at this point as well, I think they’re beginning to understand people are starting to watch these less for the plot and more for the insane act of Tom Cruise embodiment.

But what I love about it is he gets onto the plane and then he takes off, and there’s no style to it at all. It doesn’t look stylized at all. His hair is flushing back, and he looks like a skeleton; and then it’s coming forward, he looks like he’s got a bowl cut.

And, what I always really enjoy about that film in particular, and I suppose what’s really going on, is that it’s the effort that is being shown. And, it’s the fact that this is all happening within the body: that he is just learning how to hold onto a plane on the fly. Because he doesn’t jump onto it; and he’s perfect. His feet are scrabbling about for the first 10 seconds before he finds the right purchase. There’s no ginning up beforehand. There’s no idea that he’s done this before. The idea is entirely that he’s learning as he’s doing, and also interestingly with the help of technology.

One thing that’s very interesting, and drew me to Cruise, and sets him apart a little bit from other writers who talk about tacit knowledge, is they love a craftsman. They love getting away from the technology and retreating into electronic cottages or into the woods and learning to do things through hands. What I love about these films, and the way that Cruise approaches it in particular, is that he’s like, ‘Actually, technology can be pretty good. And, just because it has batteries and electric circuits, that’s not necessarily a problem.’

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, totally. And, it’s always going back to Merleau-Ponty and that classic quote of his, ‘Our body is the general medium for having a world.’

And then, I always love the formulation. I think this is Polanyi’s formulation, isn’t it? He takes it a little further, and the idea that we know more than we can tell: those situations where we are behaving instinctively and applying things that we know but almost can’t explain. There’s a psychologist, [inaudible 00:17:55] of course, the unknown thought. The thing that we know, but we can never verbalize or never understand. And, I think about this in a few aspects of my own life, you know what I mean? Because I’m trying to be more and more useful.

The first is, I remember I had this period where I was, like, ‘I’m going to stop using a satnav,’ because I had this head. This is kind of a muscle, you know what I mean? And, I was, like, ‘Okay, what I’ll do as I–‘ I was doing some research at the British National Archives, which are down in Southwest London. And so, what I would try and do is, I would drive every day and learn the route. Right? So, instead of using the satnav, I would try and figure out how do I get from my place in Northwest London all the way down to Kew, basically.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah. Well, yes, well, I was thinking–

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Google Maps. Google Maps.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, I’m meaning Google Maps. Yeah, because we were just following this route kind of lively. I was like, ‘What if I can try and learn this thing myself? And, what happens?’

And, it’s very interesting, of course, because there is a little bit of a collective actions thing here, because I always loved how–certainly, this is maybe me, I’m, like, 32. But, certainly my dad would have had very strong views. And, this happens in the United Kingdom in particular where the roads are old. And you’ve got bits of old Roman road; you’ve got bits of kind-of wind-y B roads and stuff. People would always have very, very strong views about directions. Right? ‘Oh, the best way to get from where I grew up to London, ‘Ohm you go this way, you go that way.’ And, that’s completely gone. And so, I was trying to bring it back, you know what I mean?

And it was very interesting, because you also need the world to be slightly receptive to this because it’s not something that we really value. Because the thing that was very interesting was I found a video of the 1990s of someone doing a similar route. And, the signage–there’s so much more signage to help you along the way. There’s so many more markings.

But of course, now people don’t really use the markings, so the markings kind of have eroded away. And, it’s difficult because this is something that we can’t really explain or we don’t really value in our every day. So, when we’re thinking about signage and stuff, we’re not really prioritizing it. The world has to be slightly hospitable to this kind of, like, style of, ‘Okay, I know this,’ but I don’t really know. Let me learn. The world has to be kind of able to let you learn. It has to be a bit more of a playground than perhaps it is if we’re, to take a driving example, just using Google Maps and Waze.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah. And, it’s interesting as well how it’s used as a marketing tool. That’s always interesting to me, is this slight–return. You see this a lot particularly in marketing and stuff.

One bit I think I mention in the essay is, Sinners–obviously extraordinarily popular movie last year–and one of the pieces of marketing around it very early on that kind of did really well was just Ryan Coogler talking about film formats. Right?

So, instead of saying, ‘Oh, here’s what you’re going to see in the film,’ like,it was a really clever bit of marketing genius of talking about, ‘Okay, here are all of the things that have gone in. I’m going to trust you that you’re in a safe pair of hands when you’re watching this film. And, I’m going to do that, but I want to show you how much I know about the different types of formats and how they work’ and they’re kind of instructive.

And it’s all because obviously, it’s a counter to this idea that we have now that everything’s being dumbed down. And, actually if you look particularly in films, a lot of the marketing now is around the kind of mind behind–the mind behind the film. And the idea that Christopher Nolan doesn’t allow phones on set, is a good example. Or I remember for the Barbie movie there was a 15-minute video of Greta Gerwig talking about the influences of Powell and Pressburger, and so on and so forth, and all of these kind of workings and stuff.

And, I think it’s very interesting, with black cabs in particular, there is a bit of–you just feel like this–that’s how they get their trust. That’s what elevates a cabby above someone in Uber. And, they’ve really latched onto and led into it.

And, you see that across the board now, because ultimately these feats of embodied knowledge still wow us. I felt myself being wowed watching Ryan Coogler talk about all of these formats. You know what I mean? Because people, we like learning these things, don’t we?

Aled Maclean-Jones: Totally. And, I think that’s for me where the interest in the more recent Mission Impossible films came from, right? Because I quite liked them early on and I’ve always liked–but for me, when they decided to take this moment and they were, like–you’ve got the film itself you’re watching and then there’s this meta-film that’s going on as well, which is just, ‘We’re just going to do spectacles of skill, and you’re going to enjoy and watch these spectacles of skill.’ And, you’re going to be, ‘Oh, it’s amazing that Ethan Hunt,’ this kind of character, ‘is doing that.’ But, ultimately when we’re watching it, we’re really, like, ‘I can’t believe–how does Tom Cruise do that?’

And obviously, in a sense, it kind of makes for worse films. The film that I focused on, which is the final film, and its predecessor, are the most spectacular films in terms of Cruise’s embodiment. But, that comes at the kind of sense of the loss of a plot, I would probably say, particularly the penultimate one, which was Dead Reckoning, which is just essentially several set pieces pulled together with the loosest of threads.

And that’s why the best ones are the ones before that. The best one is called Fallout, where it’s Tom Cruise versus Henry Cavill. And, that I think has the best blend of an actual plot that they’ve actually bothered with; but then these incredible, ‘Okay, we’re going to fly helicopters in New Zealand,’ and stuff.

But, yeah, it’s very interesting. And, it’s interesting with Cruise as well and his approach to stunting; and he essentially is kind of the stunt coordinator for–certainly in the later films, he is the one who is holding the pen[?] on these stunts. And also the kind of safety. He has a lovely catchphrase that he uses that wasn’t in the essay, and it’s like, ‘Don’t be safe. Be competent,’ which is what he says to the team, basically, of stunt performers he has. And, I think that’s a very good example of the way he’s thinking about these films, but also his role within them.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, totally, totally. Yeah. And, it’s interesting as well because there’s the underlying story. Maybe we can talk about the last film itself in a minute. But there’s an underlying story here, and you see this a lot with lots of–where he’s clearly taken a step back and thought a lot about the craft of acting. It was interesting because I got a few actors literally post-DM me on Instagram after seeing the essay and asking me, was there anything about incorporating it into their own work?

And, it was very interesting because the two bits I point them to–I think Timothée Chalamet basically says what happened when he basically–I think it was after Dune, I think he got in touch with Tom Cruise, and Tom Cruise just sent him essentially his email, and was, like, ‘You basically just need to learn all of these attributes if you want to be a lead, if you want to be like a star.’

So, he sent him a Rolodex of his go-to experts in every field. So, he basically said, ‘In old Hollywood, you’d be getting dance training and fighting, and no one’s going to hold you to that standard today. So, it’s up to you.’ So, he sent him a motorcycle coach, a helicopter coach. Can you be a helicopter coach? I don’t know. And, all of those kind of things. And, I think one of the things that he clearly sees his role as, as the elder statesman Hollywood, is teaching all of these younger actors the importance of craft in a world where, I suppose, you are able to do all of this stuff within a hermetically-sealed studio with a very advanced green screen around you–if that makes sense.

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, totally, totally. Yeah, so maybe that’s a good way. I’ll talk first maybe about Top Gun: Maverick. This is obviously outside of the Mission Impossible franchise, but Cruise is, I think, probably the most embodiment-heavy, the most, like, ‘We’re going to blunt[?] you over a cudgel with this kind of embodiment question.’ I think the motto in the film they keep saying is, ‘Don’t think, just do.’ Often, it sounds like you’re reading Polanyi off the pages.

But, the opening scene is very interesting. The opening scene is: Cruise is a test pilot. So, Maverick has 30 years and he hasn’t ascended to be a senator or something, isn’t it? [inaudible 00:31:07]

Aled Maclean-Jones: He’s just quiet, isn’t he? And so, again, a good example of how I think he’s living literally in an aircraft hangar with–and it’s Tom Cruise’s personal, I think, P-51 Mustang there. Again, the idea that the line between Cruise the actor and Cruise the character has completely collapsed at this point. And, it even inflects film.

And then, he’s sent to, I presume Groom Lake or somewhere, to test out this highly experimental plane that can go to Mach 10. And, he’s set to do Mach 10, isn’t he? And then, what happens is, he then goes up and he tests it before the Evil Admiral that loves drones–played by Ed Harris–can stop and gut the project. And, it’s this classic thing where you’ve got Cruise, who is this stick jockey, who has this–there’s something about they want to get rid of humans–but Cruise wants to make the argument, and that’s where the film makes the argument in the first 10 minutes for humans being useful.

And, it’s very interesting to think about that scene and the history of that scene, going to your point, Russ, about peril. That scene is a copy of–it’s inspired by a scene in The Right Stuff, which is a film based on the Tom Wolfe book about pilots testing to be astronauts. And of course, The Right Stuff is the ultimate example of things that the we–the whole point of The Right Stuff is you can’t write down but you know it, and you have to learn it. And, the way Wolfe talks about it, it’s a pyramid, isn’t it, for the pilots? So, that they just have to do all of these tests to be able to see whether they have the right stuff, but they can never know it or write it down because it’s simply implicit knowledge.

And then, that scene is based on an earlier scene, which is a David Lean film called The Sound Barrier, which is from 1946, which is about test pilots at that point who were trying to break the sound barrier. And, the reason it’s Mach 10 in the Tom Cruise film is because it’s always 10, because 10 was what the gauge was when you were going supersonic.

And, that was an incredibly lethal period of history, right? So, I think it was something like 42 test pilots died trying to reach the sound barrier basically, in the period directly after World War II, because it was incredibly dangerous. They essentially were flying, in Britain anyway–I think in America they were a little bit more enlightened–but in Britain, certainly they were just taking Spitfires, World War II planes, and you would fly them very high and then dive them down. And, the idea was that you would be able to dive a certain speed, you could go supersonic.

But, of course, the plane would shake itself apart. So, the original story, the original pilot who did this and died, was very famous–was a guy called Geoffrey de Havilland Jr, who was the son of the main aerospace engineer, who is called Geoffrey de Havilland Sr. And, his son was the test pilot and his son died. Quite literally, the plane broke apart. They found his body a couple of days later in one of the estuaries. And, that was what inspired Lean to basically create these sequences in The Sound Barrier. That sequence then became the sequence where Chuck Yeager breaks the supersonic barrier in The Right Stuff. And then, that becomes a sequence in the beginning of this film. But, we’ve got Tom Cruise, but it’s almost–and going back to your point about peril, it’s like Geoffrey de Havilland Jr’s death is reverberating and being relived again and again and again.

And, it’s updated for every generation. The Sound Barrier, it’s for the World War II generation, post-World War II generation. In The Right Stuff, it’s for the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s crowd.

And now, for a whole new generation, de Havilland’s death is being recreated again by Cruise in order to thrill us, because it’s that sense of peril that happened to Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. when he got into his cockpit that I think Cruise is trying to recreate. And of course, at the end of that scene at the beginning of Top Gun: Maverick, the plane breaks apart, right? And we think he’s going to die, but he doesn’t die because he’s Tom Cruise obviously, and it would kind of ruin the entire film. But, that idea, linking it to the idea of peril and how much that enthralls us, I think is definitely at the heart of these kind of films.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I think that’s definitely right that there are these two sides of it. There’s the romanticization of it, and that can go in several directions, I think, then, that begin to cause problems. One of the reasons why I’m very attracted to the more recent Cruise films is their treatment of technology. So, one way is you see a rejection of technology entirely, and the idea that it would all be better if we were back–if the Industrial Revolution hadn’t happened, that’s one way that I think you see a more negative side of it. And then, this kind of lionization of essentially slightly ridiculous situations, and you can see where that leads.

I think for me, what I always find really interesting is that ultimately what’s really going on, I suppose, in these films, is that they’re taking embodied competence to the nth degree, aren’t they? So, in the Mission Impossible film I wrote about, you essentially have, there’s this evil AI called The Entity–very enjoyably named–that is taking over all of the nuclear arsenals of the world. And, Cruise and company have to kind of go offline in order to defeat the AI and its cronies, who are all completely useless, because all they basically do is they just point guns at people and tell them what to do. And then, you have this incredible fantasia of competence where they’re flying–I think it’s a Douglas DC-3–they’re flying it, very old, the kind of plane that Indiana Jones flies. And, they are doing navigating by compass and they’re using secret codes, and all of this sort of stuff.

And then, I think the most ridiculous at the beginning is, I think Ving Rhames is soldering a hard drive. There’s some good soldering. Tom Cruise loves a solder. They love soldering in Mission Impossible. They’re always soldering. Everyone’s got a soldering iron somewhere. And, he solders a pen drive and hacks and figures out this way to defeat it himself in his own brain in an underground hospital room in London. And, I suppose the point I think is–it’s all done with a bit of a wink and a nudge[?], isn’t it? In a sense that it’s taken to the nth degree to start to make us think a little bit more about what’s the equivalent of the satnav [satellite navigation], the being-without-Waze, and so on and so forth? Because, by showing us the most embodied person of all time playing the most embodied figure as well, you begin to see some of the softer sides of what makes it good as well.

So, the ones I think about, one is–it’s interesting, isn’t it? Ethan Hunt, Cruise’s character, is very different to action heroes, because the films always begin with something going wrong. And, he never knows–there’s never any plan. So, it’s not like with James Bond, where things go wrong but it’s normally because people haven’t listened to Bond. Bond kind of knows what’s going on. He’s seen the source code and knows what’s going on. Hunt has got what Keats would call negative–he’s got loads of negative capability. Right? He’s got this feeling inside him that no matter what happens, it’ll all turn out for the best.

And so, this obviously goes to a ridiculous scene where he goes to see the President of the United States. And, they’re like, ‘Well, we’re going to basically nuke the rest of the world in order to stop the [inaudible 00:42:26] ourselves.’ And, he’s, like, ‘Oh, well, no, or you can just hand the key that does it to me.’ ‘What’s your plan?’ ‘Oh no, I don’t have a plan. You can just trust me.’ You know what I mean?

And, that sense of negative capability, obviously is–we can’t all have that sense of negative capability. I would definitely be the first in that situation to be, like, ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t[?] trust me. I’d probably just nuke the rest of the world.’ But, I think that that’s one element of what does usefulness give you, because it’s not really–and in itself, I think one thing is it does give you a sense of, ‘All right.’ It makes you less neurotic. ‘Whatever will happen, things are kind of going to be all right.’

So, that’s the one thing I think about.

The second as well is: If in our own lives we don’t see many, many embodied acts of skill or feats or anything, then we in ourselves will forget them.

So, I always love J.G. Ballard, because often in his works and his short stories, you have these characters who are so at one with the machine or at one with the image or the representation, they forget they in themselves have their own bodies. And, it was interesting because when you were talking about those moments when life and death happens–like, when I think about embodiment, I actually think only about one thing really. I don’t think about war or anything. I think about having children. Like, the act of childbirth. For me, that is the ultimate bodily act. And, it’s interesting when you think about when there’s life and death–my wife just had her third child last week. And we live our lives: so, at the moment there’s a one in gazillion chance of me dying on this Zoom call. But, when you go into a labor ward, that number, those odds change and you feel it. You really feel it in the–you feel it. Okay, fine. We’re to several thousand. And, you think–that’s a jump that you feel.

And, the fact that we are able to see these feats of embodiment then makes you much more used to these things that are to come, because it’s such a strange and alien and incredibly embodying thing to witness something like childbirth and stuff. To see that on any scale, someone doing something amazing with their body, I think makes us more used to these things. You know what I mean? [More to come, 44:51]

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, yeah, and I think that was what was so interesting to me about childbirth, is no matter how it’s done, like, as a man, someone who can’t do it and experience it, and in a world where, in a sense, it doesn’t–if it’s natural, if it’s [inaudible 00:47:48], however it happens, in a sense, if it’s there, however it happens, it’s this incredibly bodily thing. You know what I mean? As a man, you just kind of watch it and you’re just, like, ‘Oh, my body can’t do–.’ It’s something that you are confronted with the limits of your own body instantly. You know what I mean? You’re, like, ‘Well, there we are.’ And, you can understand how it’s something that’s slightly beyond the rational–I find it anyway. I definitely understand how 300, 400 years ago, if you were a bloke and you were outside and whatever, and you could hear all that going on and see that, and it’s beyond rational explanation.

I can’t remember who it was who said it, but the idea that–I think it might be Sheila Heti or somebody–but the idea if it wasn’t such a patriarchal society, the dominant philosophical question would be essentially whether or not to have a child here. That would be the dominant–rather than to be or not to be or anything like that. That was the stuff that men, that we kind of made up to make up for our inability to do this sort of stuff.

I think that goes into the broader point of this question of alienation. I think the question around screens and so on, it was generally framed in terms of attentiveness and questions and our concentration spans, and so on and so forth. And, it’s always interesting to me when I’m very deeply in a scroll or something, or monitoring the situation, how quickly I forget my own body exists.

And, that, for me, is almost the thing I personally in my own life worry about, is that question of alienation: is that I’m just less and less in touch in my own body. I’m just, personally, am someone who could talk a good game on Ryle and Merleau-Ponty, and really, I could stick it to Cartesian dualism any day of the week. But the way I actually live my life–and I’ve lived my life majorly–is as a brain on a vat, you know what I mean? Where I’m just fueling the brain with content and writing and reading and stuff, while I’m not paying that much attention to my own body and stuff.

And so, I think that for me was that question of alienation. And, I think in a sense that also begins to move us towards a slightly more nuanced view of AI as well, because the one thing I have really enjoyed doing that has been quite embodying in my own life over the last six months, I’ve been doing a lot more around the house. And, that has kind of been because AI is a very good tool when it comes to helping you being a handyman and instructions. Our toilet seat broke and I was like, ‘Damn it, I’m going to fix the toilet seat.’ You know what I mean? And, there was just all of this trial and error, and it was a bit like Cruise getting on the Airbus A400–

Aled Maclean-Jones: I think I got through two or three toilet seats because I ordered the wrong one every time, because I was like, ‘I don’t want someone to come in and tell me how to do this.’ So, I ordered two wrong toilet seats. The wrong screws twice as well. It turns out the people who lived in this flat before us had some very niche Italian toilet manufacturer. So, I did it myself and I wanted to do it myself, and I find AI very helpful there.

And, I think that’s what’s very important as well, is it’s not a situation where AI instinctively means turning your brain off. It’s not so much about the technology, for me anyway: it’s about the way that you use it. You can use any technology to–in the same way there’s a difference between going–I’ve got TV right here, going and watching, I don’t know–yeah, a Powell and Pressburger film or something, and watching something completely mindless on YouTube. The same way with AI. If I get it to write an essay for me, then that’s obviously going to be disembodying. But, if I ask it to be my handyman friend and tell me how to put this plug into the toilets, the toilet seat fix is, that’s a good thing. And, beginning to think that’s why I like embodiment so much, is it allows us to start to think in a more textured way about technology.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Exactly. Exactly, yeah. I’m just like, comparative, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you weren’t using–exactly.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, it’s interesting. It seems to me the trend is towards this almost symbolism, isn’t it? You know what I mean? They become symbolic, and I suppose that’s what’s so interesting, isn’t it?

It really goes back to your point about the linking it to peril, you know what I mean? And, that Cruise is learning to–these people will be learning to do these things with planes and so on and so forth, because it was very, very dangerous; and they were trying to push the frontiers, and so on and so on.

And now, essentially, it’s symbolic. Tom Cruise is an extraordinarily accomplished pilot and stuntman, but it’s to entertain. It’s almost the concept of the stunt in that going from, okay, I’m in a position where I’m going to physically fight because I have to be good at physically fighting, to: I’m going to physically fight in order to entertain people.

And, I think that it’s this kind of idea of stunt culture. And you can see it as well. Sports is obviously the other arena of this, isn’t it, where you have these extraordinarily talented physical athletes? And, what has been going on now is that you have athletes who are doing physical acts. And, the reason they get paid so much, and so on, in sport is for entertainment.

And so, the question, I suppose is, where people can differ on it is this world of where all physical movement is almost in a sense, a stunt. Is it one where we can do without it or is it one where there is something valuable in it? Is there a value to Cruise doing these things on the screen, or Josh Allen throwing a football for 70 yards, or is it just something that we will lose and that we can just wave goodbye to? I think that there’s a value to it even on the symbolic level because it shows us the virtues of it and we can apply it to our everyday lives, I suppose. But, I can see how people could argue the other way as well.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah. And, I suppose as well, also it’s about thinking about our definition being different about what is a spectacle of skill?

So, a good example here is Cruise. Cruise, when they were filming Top Gun: Maverick, set up kind of this school, and they were all taught how to do all of these kind of–and how useful it was that they could do all of this stuff, but they were around–not flying a fighter jet, but around being able to just behave whilst they’re flying and know what they’re doing, and so on and so forth.

And, one of the people, of course, in the film, is Monica Barbero, who plays one of the pilots. It’s very interesting because she then went on to play–she was in the Bob Dylan film, I think. I can’t remember which one it was. But, yeah, I think it is, yeah. The Bob Dylan film with Timothée Chalamet in it, essentially. And, she had never played guitar or sung in her life before. And, this might be apocryphal, but I think what happens is, of course she then gets offered the role. And I think she goes to Cruise. I think she may go to Cruise or something, and he’s like, ‘Well, just learn.’ And then, she learns. And, watching her sing as Joan Baez in that film is absolutely incredible. It’s an amazing spectacle of skill and one that you are, like, ‘Oh my God, how has she done that?’ You know what I mean?

And so, I think also it’s about expanding our definition as to what spectacles of skill are. You know what I mean? Because obviously, the act of acting in itself is a spectacle still. When people are watching Hamnet and enjoying Hamnet so much, they’re enjoying Jessie Buckley’s ability just to act the thing she’s asked to act. Again, it’s almost like Cruise, isn’t it, in a sense? In that, often when we are seeing actors do really amazing things, we are also marveling at the acting. And, I certainly felt I was doing that at some points in Hamnet, for example. I was like, ‘Okay, Shakespeare or whatever, the film’s gone, I’m just watching this person act on screen and being completely blown away by it.’

So, yeah, I think probably for men it’s just that we have this massive neurosis about it. I do really love that Arnold Schwarzenegger book being called Be Useful, because I think he doesn’t realize, but he’s sort of stumbled upon the nature of the male condition rather than–it’s less like a self-help guide, more just a rumination on the male condition and the desire that we all have to try and be useful as men and stuff.

But also, it doesn’t have to be warfare-based, as well. My other favorite spectacle of skill last year was The Rehearsal, which was a comedy show in which Nathan Field–who is a comedian–it’s about flying. It’s about the act of flying and the act of flight, and so on and so forth. And then, it’s all building up to the climax. Russ, have you seen it?

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, yeah, so the climax is that he basically reveals that he’s been secretly learning to pilot a 747, and he can do this. And again, it’s just so discombobulating, because we put people in boxes: The idea you can be a comedian and also an airline pilot, like, what is going on there? And then, he flies a packed plane of people. He takes off and he flies and goes back down. And, obviously it has the whole strange level of it. But, again, the fact is simply that you have to watch this because it’s somebody doing something, this kind of spectacle of skill in a way that–and it’s not really about warfare or anything like that. It’s just simply active embodied knowledge, whether it’s–like Alysa Liu, the figure skater who has just gone completely stratospheric because of the Winter Olympics. I think that men, I think, agonize over it, but I think a spectacle of skill is an equal game. I think both women and men can–everybody is impressive in different ways, but what has stayed the same is how attracted and allured we are to them. Even more so because they’re rarer now. They’re rarer now, because we don’t see these incredible spectacles in our everyday life. And so, they are so enthralling, and I think they will just carry on being more and more enthralling to us.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Yeah, it’s true, it’s true. I think you can be completely agnostic as to whether it will or not without denigrating the value of it in its own right, I suppose. It’s what drew me to watchmaking, as well.

But, it’s just very interesting to see how that plays out. Because it could go in an interaction. It’s very striking. My wife’s family are all very clever people, big podcast listeners and stuff, professional, clever people. And, her youngest brother just became a mechanic. Never went to university and stuff. And, if you think about the anxieties that the rest of my wife’s family are facing, you know what I mean, about, ‘Will knowledge completely automate us away and we’re going to become very useless?’ I mean, I think Toby wanted to move to another garage and it took him about two days, got five job offers, off you go. You know what I mean?

And so, whether it ends up being this sting in the tail and we end up with this return to the body–which I’m not really arguing in favor of because I think it’s too early to tell. But some people certainly are. But, whatever it is, I just think that there’s something in each of us that’s very useful. I find it anyway, from whether it’s being able to thinking about driving rather than just blithely lively follow Google Maps, or fix toilets, or drill. Or again, yeah, drill my wife out of the toilet when the door bolt got seized. And, I remember, obviously this is the most pathetic male thing ever, but yeah, pulling it out and feeling so proud. And, I think I’ve still got the door bolt somewhere. It’s actually next to the wedding ring, which makes me sound like a fictional character. So, that kind of line writes itself, basically.

But, yeah, I think where I was coming from, it was just with my own struggles and watching it done on a cosmically, comically overblown scale. And then, thinking about, ‘Okay, well, I’m never going to be able to ride a motorbike. I’m never going to be able to jump out of a plane. I never want to jump out of a plane. But, how can I take some of this stuff for myself?’

Aled Maclean-Jones: No, no, totally. Totally. Yeah. No, totally. So, I think it’s one of those things where I think about, there’s a Norwegian writer called Karl Ove Knausgård, who just did this series of books about his own life. And, his life is completely mundane as they come. It’s nappies and going to rhythm time and stuff. And, like, Jeremy Strong, the actor, is a big disciple of him. You know what I mean? I think he once did–GQ [Gentleman’s Quarterly] asked him to do this thing where celebrities, they come out and they do their, ‘Things I can’t live without.’ And, they’re meant to say, ‘My phone. My lip balm.’ And, Jerry [Jeremy] Strong gets out this copy of Knausgård and he looks very seriously at the camera, and he says ultimately, ‘What Knausgård reminds us by showing his life in so much detail, is that there are no small moments.’ And, I think that’s definitely true.

I think it’s not what Cruise is thinking about when he’s jumping out of a plane on fire or something and plummeting to earth and being beckoned by shepherds in probably one of the many religious overtones in that film. But it’s something I think about anyway.

Aled Maclean-Jones: Russ, thanks so much. Absolute pleasure as always.