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Everybody forgets. Nietzsche was super into it. I forget why. Forgetting a celebrity name is common enough that they acronymed “tip of the tongue” to TOT for studying it. I have TOT moments for everything and everyone, but occasionally, something more severe happens, and for no reason I can come up with, it happens most often with Tom Cruise.
When I can’t remember Tom Cruise’s name, it feels like somebody released a hobgoblin into my brain that’s running around snipping wires. Sometimes I think I’m having a stroke. I forget all of Tom Cruise’s movies. I forget everything that happened in all of the movies. I forget everyone he’s ever worked with, and all of their films. The bulk of Hollywood’s output for the last forty years vanishes from my brain. I forget every job he’s pretended to do. I forget about masked orgies. I forget about masks. I forget about space and time travel. I forget about Austin Powers and Mike Myers. I forget ways to describe the word “cruise” and everybody named “Tom” and have found myself saying things like, “You know, my dad’s name and that thing you go on.” Oprah becomes, “that show.” Scientology becomes, “that thing with actors that’s weird.”
The devastation is total. IMDB is useless. Google is useless. I stare at my phone, mumbling, “He was in… in… that… thing where… with… it had a title that… you know, that person… actress? Who was in… where they…” I can offer nothing, not even the vaguest of hints to help someone help me. It’s like I’m being attacked by a psychic trying to erase the idea of Tom Cruise from my brain; every connective concept vanishes before it can be traced back to Tom Cruise.
It happens with other things sometimes, but the severity and frequency of these bouts have led some of my friends to say, “Tom Cruise?” if they notice me struggling for more than a couple of minutes.
My friend Lasse has pointed out that Tom Cruise is the void staring back, which is as good a theory as any. TOT researchers and others have pointed out that a name is actually the least memorable thing about a person, an arbitrary label not even useful for classification. But TOT researchers also say, “You can forget John Wayne’s name but you’ll never forget he played a cowboy in a bunch of movies,” and that’s exactly what happens to me. I can maybe picture one John Wayneish cowboy, but will forget the words hat, gun, cow, boy, horse, and noon, as well as the names and all relationships and events associated with my friends named John. If Roxie is present, I will forget the words “boyfriend” and “civil union” and if she’s not there I will forget she exists at all, or at least the name Roxie, along with Chicago and musical theater and possibly music and theater.
A simple TOT moment is weird enough, because it’s like thinking around a hole in the head: I know what’s it’s not, but I can’t figure out what it is. The Tom Cruise Effect is like everything else is falling into the hole. The entire structure of memory is backfiring like the concept of Tom Cruise is neurological strangelet undoing the connective tissue of thought.
The only reason my frustration doesn’t make me angrier is the phenomenon is so strange, not to mention a bit scary. It’s physically relieving (on the order of a solid burp) to finally recall “Tom Cruise” along with everything else I lost in the search.
I sometimes wonder if I originally stored Tom Cruise in a choke point in my memory, and if I approach it from the wrong angle and it blanks out on me, I lose all the associations on the other side. Or, far more terrifying, perhaps Tom Cruise is somehow foundational in how I understand the world. He is a fixed point in a lifetime of experience, around which I build all that I know, and if I get too close to that truth I am punished with its removal.
