The Internet is amazing. I have discovered astonishing things. Were you aware that, in thirty-one films over the past twenty-five years, Tom Cruise has died only twice? Unless you count Interview with the Vampire, where he plays the living dead. And it’s not as if his characters take no physical risks. In Top Gun he’s a fighter pilot, in Days of Thunder a race-car driver. Sometimes, when I watch a Tom Cruise movie, I whisper to the screen: die, Tom Cruise. You have the power; you are most likely the producer of this film. It would be so easy: a fiery high-speed crash, a blackout at five Gs. But I (almost) never get my wish. This man—this super man—is invulnerable to alien invasion, pelting frog-rain, and murderous sex-cults. Has Scientology made him immortal? Do bullets practically bounce off him because his thetan levels are so low, or high, or whatever the fuck it is they believe?

People hate on T-Cruise for the wrong reasons. Instead of ridiculing his “religion,” or his insanity, or his asinine grin, shouldn’t we be holding him accountable for what he’s done to cinema? Let me explain: I love going to the movies. Movies seen in the theater have a raw edge of unpredictability and excitement. I first saw The Ring by myself at midnight in an empty theater. The closet shot nearly killed me. In a theater, the experience is bigger than the movie alone. Watching it with a bunch of strangers in a big public space enhances it; the nature of the event is that things can go wrong, or wrongly right. When I saw Be Kind, Rewind at Triphammer Mall, the film actually melted in the projector and burned out right at the moment in the movie when Jack Black’s magnetized head makes the TV screen go all wonky. The lights came up; many people left. It took a full ten minutes to get the thing synced back up again, and we were treated to the spectacle of the sweating, frantic projectionist running back and forth in the booth while we munched our popcorn and swilled rum from empty coca cola cups.

It’s just not the same when you pop in a rented DVD. Seeing the whole thing contained in its little plastic box brings home the fact that all of the “events” in the movie have already happened. Everything is decided. The packaging reminds you that it’s already been seen by a small army of marketers and manufacturers, not to mention the viewing public. Neatly sealed up and attractively, comfortingly varnished, it’s not alive or changeable anymore—it’s a corpse in a coffin. Movies seen in the theaters aren’t fully sanitized yet. Before the reviews and box office numbers start rolling in, you can’t be certain that the film you’re seeing isn’t the year’s filthiest, most unpalatable movie. There are still little wrinkles to iron out, things subject to change. For example, though I have absolutely no proof, I’m convinced that the cut of Disney’s Aladdin shown in theaters contained the lyric (in reference to Saudi Arabia), “where they chop off your ears if they do not like your face.” Either Disney was forced to change the song in the VHS version in reaction to a public outcry,* or I was a pretty disturbed little seven-year-old.

That sense of wild possibility is really dampened when the star has accumulated so much power and prestige that he literally can’t be killed. In the dark, between mouthfuls of raisinettes, you turn to your neighbor and whisper, “what do you think will happen?” And she whispers back, “well obviously he wins—it’s Tom Cruise!” It renders the supposedly “thrilling” action movies he makes totally boring and predictable. You already know how they’re going to end.

As a counter-example, take Leonardo DiCaprio, whose career, while much shorter than Tom Cruise’s, is relatively fraught with mortality. Out of nineteen films, DiCaprio buys the farm in five, a whopping twenty-five percent. When a director needs to cast someone who freezes to death in the middle of the North Atlantic, or gets shot in an abandoned tenement in Boston, or slowly bleeds out in the hills of South Africa, what makes him snap his fingers and say, “DiCaprio! DiCaprio’s the one!” I guess something about Leo just screams fallible human being.

I can’t help but think that Cruise’s inability to die is connected to the kind of roles that he plays—none of DiCaprio’s junkies and gay bohemian poets and tortured madmen. T-Cruise couldn’t play those roles, because the audience would see him and think of couches and Katie Holmes and black turtlenecks—not Howard Hughes or Arthur Rimbaud. Because he is so much in the public eye he naturally upstages his characters and can’t convincingly portray anything other than a well-intentioned, superficially-flawed generic protagonist. How boring! How sad! God shield our better actors from such fame.

*What—no Arabs in your focus groups, you racist sons of bitches?