Tom Cruise, the Nietzschean Superman

I have seen most of the Mission: Impossible films, but I couldn’t tell you much about their plots, not in any real detail anyway. The basic formula doesn’t change much: retrieve a top-secret gizmo from the most impenetrable place on Earth, disarm a nuclear device with a few minutes to spare, dodge a few double-crossing agents and, from time to time, kill off the leading lady to make way for a new, younger, one.

The most recent instalment of the series, The Final Reckoning, involves an evil AI called “the Entity” and nods to Dr Strangelove with its theme of nuclear jitteriness. But Tom Cruise summed it up best in a late-night show interview: “There’s a mission, and it’s impossible!” And that’s all you really need to know.

While most of us don’t watch these films for their plots, what we do remember are the insane stunts: Tom Cruise climbing the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, Tom Cruise hanging onto the side of a plane as it takes off, Tom Cruise running very, very fast, Tom Cruise holding his breath under water for six minutes, Tom Cruise riding a motorbike off a mountain.

Cruise famously performs all of his own stunts, a fact I was acutely aware of while watching a heart-and-show-stopping scene in The Final Reckoning, where he swings around on the wings of a biplane as it loops, dives and rolls. At one point, I turned to my partner and whispered, with a laugh of amazement, “He’s 62!” I wasn’t the only one thinking it. You could feel the entire cinema tense up, everyone lifting slightly out of their seats. It was one of those cinema experiences that reminds you why going to the cinema is a thing in the first place. We weren’t watching Ethan Hunt, the main character of the franchise, we were watching actor Tom Cruise push the boundaries of entertainment and of human possibility.

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The term “Übermensch” comes to mind here. When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche introduced the idea in the 1880s, he was thinking about how to prevent humanity from drowning in nihilism after he announced the death of God. Nietzsche imagined a superior being who could build his own values and overcome his limitations through self-determination, a creative ability to shape the world according to his will. The idea of the Superman is a wishful idea of what each of us could be, the potential to which we might be able to aspire, a better (according to the philosopher) version of humanity.

This concept has been coopted, distorted and caricatured into near oblivion, and if we stretch it a little further, there is definitely a lens through which we can read both Cruise and his alter ego Ethan Hunt as embodiments of the Nietzschean Superman. Throughout the Mission: Impossible franchise, Hunt imposes his will on the chaos of the world, bending the rules of governments and institutions to enforce his own values of loyalty and justice, and, of course, to save the world.

Cruise himself seems to have decided long ago that the laws of physics and of human mortality do not apply to him, and he is sometimes described as an alien, not just due to his long-standing affiliation with Scientology, but because of his apparent über-humanness.

No matter your opinion of Tom Cruise, it’s impossible not to be at least slightly fascinated by him. Never has someone exuded more natural charisma while seeming entirely removed from any recognisable form of human experience. It doesn’t seem possible for him to exist without pushing life to its literal limits, putting himself in situations so extreme that he is likely the only person to have ever lived them. Even the way he eats popcorn reflects his desire to live to the max. The Übermensch is the one who enthusiastically says “yes” to life, through joy as well as pain.

But let’s not get carried away. Nietzsche would no doubt disapprove of a hero like Hunt who operates within a traditional moral framework and whose mission isn’t to transcend humanity but to preserve it. And Cruise’s personal commitment to a rigid hierarchical structure like Scientology would probably not sit well with the philosopher either.

When Nietzsche introduced the idea of the Übermensch, he was trying to imagine what our evolution as a species might look like. He envisioned a being as far beyond us as we are beyond our ape ancestors. Even Tom Cruise can’t live up to this Nietzschean standard. But by Hollywood’s standards, Cruise is the closest thing to a real Superman.

I’d be willing to bet that if the stuntmen of early Westerns or the wing walkers of aviation’s early days had been asked to imagine their ideal entertainer – someone as far beyond them as they were from, say, medieval jesters – they probably would have dreamed up someone like Tom Cruise. Someone who has spent years building stunts on a bigger scale than anyone in history, and continues to execute them flawlessly into his sixties, who advocates for the theatrical experience of cinema, who is credited with almost single-handedly saving the cinema industry during Covid lockdowns, and who likely influenced the Academy’s decision to introduce a Stunt Design Oscar starting in 2027.

A more cynical view might be that Cruise’s image as the saviour of cinema, and as “the last real movie star” is the result of a savvy PR campaign aimed at diverting from the more controversial aspects of his personal life. Whether or not that’s true, there’s something undeniably intoxicating about Cruise’s unhinged enthusiasm, and he shows no signs of stopping. He recently said he plans to keep going well into his hundreds.