Dignitaries and handlers alike flock to the central temple where Tom Cruise spends 18 hours of every day sleeping still with his eyes wide open. The ceremonial robes are maroon today, which signifies danger. Someone has to tell him. Someone Has To Tell Him Justin Bieber Wants A Fight.
“Enter,” Cruise says. “Speak.”
“Your worship, I – ”
“What is it?”
“I’m afraid I – ”
“What is it?”
It is explained very slowly to him: on Twitter (“A high-profile social media platform for Nazis, sir. The studio were very keen you sign up for it. Simon Pegg’s on there”), Justin Bieber (“A hyper-popular slow-motion breakdown in the body of a child-turned-superstar, sir”) has challenged Tom Cruise to an MMA fight (“A sort of legitimised prison scrap, my liege. You cannot scoop an eyeball, but that’s about it”). Three rounds, five minutes, slim-to-no rules. You cannot wear a shirt. You cannot fish-hook a mouth. You punch Justin Bieber until they have to flash a torch in his eyes.
“We take the fight.”
“Sir, reading it back, I really think it was more a very deranged jo – ”
“We take. The fight.”
And so the training begins. Bieber’s camp is notified (“It wasn’t a real challenge!” Scooter Braun says, sweating into a phone. “He just hadn’t slept! Call off Tom Cruise!”) and Cruise rises at 5am. Shuttle-runs up the temple steps. Pint glasses filled with raw egg yolks. So far, the normal Cruise routine. But then he intensifies: speedbags, log lifts, a daily session where five or six devotees try to snap at his skin with a belt. “Carbon becomes diamond through pressure,” Cruise spits through his teeth. “Iron when blasted becomes steel.” He hasn’t eaten in days. He hasn’t slept in weeks. At night, he prowls along the ramparts like a panther, feral at the moon.
Bieber, for his part, embraces the inevitable. After a bungled attempt to leave the country (an Instagram Live stream of him boarding a private jet is overwhelmed with the same comment, over and over and over: “TOM CRUISE WILL FIND YOU”), he turns around, shrugs into a grey hoodie, and starts some tentative fight training.
At the core of both protagonists, the same iron truth: they are more similar than they would like to admit. Both men love their gods with an intensity that borders on the feverish. Both are electric bolts of charismatic energy in the bodies and faces of the top 1,000 most attractive men to ever live. They have both been hyper-famous since their youths and had their minds and sanities unutterably contorted by that. A 31-year age gap, two industries pushing up against the edges of each other but never overlapping, two human franchises squeezed together in one eight-sided ring. The chance is that they enter the UFC Octagon and something beautiful happens: like wild animals, they recognise the primal strand of shared consciousness between them and quietly and tenderly hug. But Cruise has just started dipping his knuckles in vinegar to try to harden the skin around them. “We’re not going to hug,” he says, blindfolded and spryly dodging knives being thrown at him by shaven-headed pilgrims. “We simply will not hug.”
Fight night down in Vegas. Desert heat mixed with the aftershave smell of the hotel foyers. All the lights are on and buzzing. Limousines honk at each other on the sizzling roads. The palpable smell of violence as the wind dies slowly around them. The crowd, a many-legged beast stomping in unison, is chanting the same war scream over and over: “Cruise! Cruise! Cruise!” Backstage, Tom is focused: wrists wrapped, knuckles clenched, chewed raw steak being spat into his mouth like a baby bird. His entrance music is an audio recording of an electrocution.
The first round is just a tease. Cruise, head shaved and body neatly waxed (he seems to be covered in a thin layer of oil or grease? He seems to have … human blood smeared on his face like eye-black?), toys with Bieber, letting him spray punches towards him while he darts backwards around the Octagon – on the cards, judges award the first round to the singer. But then Cruise tightens the knot: a sudden leg grab has Bieber on the ground, wild and screaming; after a break, Cruise blackens one of his eyes.
The third round cannot be easily described in a family paper, but just know how it ends: Cruise bounces on the red and mince-like remains of Justin Bieber like it’s Oprah’s sofa. The ensuing celebrity funeral is so star-studded and Instagrammed that it ends up being like a very morbid Coachella.
Tom Cruise does his own stunts, Justin Bieber. He jumps into and out of helicopters for breakfast, and he does not believe in hell. Why on earth would you offer him out for a fight?
Rubbed out: the riddle of Love Island
To Love Island now, the only place and thing that matters on this grim Earth, and the news that 20-year-old south-London rugby lad Sherif has been ejected from the island for reasons unknown. He has since released a statement so deliberately shrouded in mystery and intrigue that it is basically my own personal Da Vinci Code to unlock. I know the madness this is going to push me to. I know how this ends. This ends with me and Tommy Fury breaking into the Louvre under the cover of darkness to exhume the bones of Mary Magdalene.
“In a case of poor judgment, I broke the villa rules and as a result agreed with the producers that it was best for me to leave the villa,” Sherif said. “I regret that I didn’t conduct myself in the right way and, as a 20-year-old guy, it’s something I know I will take on board and learn from.” OK, good. But what did he do? What did he do? WHAT DID HE DO?
The first cryptex is a list of villa rules, obtained by the Mirror, which is short and baffling: no books or magazines, no more than two drinks per evening, no being naked (I don’t know how that can possibly be enforced, seeing that the show is pretty much a celebration of the human body and the sexual possibilities thereof, but what do I know), no discriminating against staff, no mic removal, no phones. And then there’s this one: no masturbating. At all. Because, technically, the Love Island villa is a public place, and you cannot masturbate in a public place. You can orgasm into or around another human being: sure, fine. Do it to yourself: prison.
I am not going to speculate as to whether Sherif wanked himself out of the best sponcon opportunity in history: Twitter has already done that for me. But I am fascinated by the idea that Love Island is under an anti-masturbatory junta, a one-strike-and-you’re-out regime where 20-year-old men – ostensibly in there to be performatively horny for the multitude of HD cameras assembled around them – do horny in a way that is deigned to be illegal. Is Sherif the most persecuted man in history? No, that would be absurd. But also: absolutely yes. If someone else had wanked him off it would have been fine. Life really is unfair.
