Mission: Impossible and the Search for Authenticity

Mission: Impossible — Fallout came out recently, and it was, to put it mildly, pretty successful.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the film, and of the franchise at large, has been its stunts, all performed by Tom Cruise itself. They’ve certainly made for good publicity, which in turn doubtlessly contributed to the movies’ success. But is there more to the appeal of these stunts? Since we quite literally can’t seem to stop talking about them, is there more to our seeming addiction than the mere thrill of entertainment?

I’d like to suggest that they respond to a certain cultural need. They offer us movie magic — that exhilarating, visceral sense of awe and wonder at what we see onscreen– in a landscape where it’s lacking. But it is the form of that magic that is revealing, of both the collective desires of our moment and a certain Zeitgeist (and yes, I’m talking about a summer popcorn movie here). Mission: Impossible satisfies our need for the real over the illusory — that is, for the authentic, whatever that might mean. That is the particular form of movie magic in our time.

The Real and the Illusory

Let’s step back in time for a moment to a landmark film: the 1977 Star Wars. One of the reasons this film, and the Original Trilogy, were so successful is because they revolutionized visual effects. The technology simply didn’t exist to do what Lucas wanted to do, so he and his team (Industrial Light and Magic) literally invented it: miniature models and special cameras for filming them made possible the spaceships and space battles ; the fantastical locations were actually detailed matte paintings, painstakingly created by Ralph McQuarrie for a trompe l’oeil effect. The end result was visual wizardry that quite literally had never been seen before, and many fans lovingly remember the magic of seeing these films in theatres.

Cloud City, Matte Painting by Ralph McQuarrie

By contrast, the prequel trilogy relied heavily on CGI; in fact, it arguably created a more fully realized world of digital effects than had ever been done before. Technology had advanced enough that pretty much anything — animated aliens, stunning locations, amazing physical feats — became possible without the painstaking physical work involved in the Original Trilogy. And the prequel trilogy is not at all unusual in this sense. In many ways, it’s become easier to CGI something than to film it practically, on location, using actual setups and safety harnesses and stunt doubles (and then your movie won’t go overbudget when your leading man breaks his ankle). Which is not to say that animation is easy work: there’s a reason video games take years. But it is true that modern film is so chock full of visual wizardry that it’s difficult for either spectacle or painstaking illusion to, in themselves, evoke a sense of wonder and magic.

Consider Coruscant: a planet-city is, as an idea, a remarkable thing, but as one of animated shots of non-existent locations, it pales in comparison to the Original Trilogy’s matte paintings. In fact, for all the dazzling variety and painstaking detail of the prequels’ digitally rendered world, it feels intangible, insubstantial, and weightless. Similarly, Marvel and DC are putting out a movie a year full of space battles, gigantic spaceships, non-human characters, magical powers, and visually stunning (and impractical) locations. The result is certainly flashier and more spectacular than anything the Original Trilogy could achieve — yet these digitally rendered spectacles have become largely unremarkable, if not outright frustrating, to viewers.

And so, in a fascinating 180-degree turn, movie magic no longer takes the form of visual wizardry or complex animation, but of the practically performed. It’s not illusion, but rather reality, that creates the appeal. That’s where the Mission: Impossible franchise succeeds, with Fallout as the pinnacle: in a world where a greenscreen and a few keystrokes make almost any image possible, it insists on doing the most stunning, dangerous, daredevil stunts practically. It’s actually Tom Cruise climbing the Burj Khalifa (the world’s tallest building), doing helmet-less stunt driving through the traffic of Paris, hanging off the side of an airplane as it takes off, sprinting off a building, or dangling from a helicopter. These scenes are debatably realistic, but they are inarguably real, and consequently breathtaking.

Actually Tom Cruise, actually dangling from a helicopter for Fallout.

And, like the practical difficulties faced by Lucas’ team, getting Mission: Impossible’s stunts onscreen came with a set of logistical challenges — and part of the appeal lies precisely in seeing those difficulties surmounted. Like the folks at Industrial Light and Magic several decades ago, Director Christopher McQuarrie and Cruise literally had to invent ways to film what hadn’t been filmed before. In the first half of Fallout, for example, Tom Cruise makes a HALO (high-altitude, low open) jump from 25,000 feet — the first time an actor has been filmed performing such a feat, as it’s usually reserved for military special forces. It required quite a bit of technical ingenuity, including developing an entirely new helmet for Cruise that could serve as both prop (it allows his face to be visible) and oxygen mask, building the largest wind tunnel in the world to practice, and figuring out a way to actually get Cruise on camera, falling through the air at a dizzying velocity, without midair collisions. The latter was achieved by sticking a camera rig on the head of a world-class skydiver and doing a lot of practice runs. Towards the end of the film, a helicopter chase sequence so complex nothing like it has been filmed before the crew to invent an entirely new set of camera rigs, get them approved by the New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority, and film Cruise (who had to get a helicopter license just to do this scene) flying maneuvers that most pilots don’t even attempt, on a helicopter weighted differently due to the cameras.

The result is the kind of awe and wonder I can only imagine was experienced by those lucky enough to have seen Star Wars in theatres in 1977: the wonder at seeing something that had never been done before on the screen. Like with Star Wars, part of the wonder is at the sheer human ingenuity inherent in putting those things onscreen — but there is also that raw sense of astonishment at how real the experience feels, because it actually is real.

In short, with its commitment to practical stunts and visceral experiences, Mission: Impossible offers moviegoers is a sense of authenticity that is, in itself, remarkable. We live in an astounding technological moment: alongside almost-ubiquitous CGI, we have video games that are astonishingly close to the real — yet not close enough to avoid the uncanny valley effect. Photoshop, creative camera angles, and filters have made us wary of any image we see. Social media profiles purport to give us unlimited access to the immediacy of another’s life while being a carefully curated collection of snapshots. We know how easy it is to create artifice, and because of it, what we crave — in our lives and in the movies — is the slippery and vague ideal of authenticity. Even if we realize, as we must realize, just how slippery and vague it is, perhaps less attainable than it ever was.

We crave it so much, in fact, that our art reflects it. In a recent manifesto aptly entitled Reality Hunger, David Shields argues that the defining qualities of today’s artistic movements are

“A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional…Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture….”

“Unartiness” has become the realism of the day, and Mission: Impossible purports to give it to us. For example, the aforementioned HALO stunt couldn’t be filmed in IMAX, because sticking the camera rig on the head of another skydiver created a bit of a weight limit. The result is a shaky and occasionally blurry sequence, lending it what director Christopher McQuarrie called a “documentary” quality. It feels unprocessed, unfiltered, unartful due to the physical limitations of filming the stunt practically — limitations that would not exist in the greenscreen world. Out of sheer practical necessity, the sequence offers a sense of authenticity — and by all reports, audiences were wowed.

Filming Cruise’s HALO stunt at a height of about 25,000 feet

That kind of raw immediacy, full of serendipity and spontaneity, is also famously part of McQuarrie and Cruise’s filmmaking process. Both Rogue Nation and Fallout began without scripts, but with locations, and the story evolved as it was being filmed. Improvisation formed a big component, with the trajectory of the plot often dictated by how the previous scenes had turned out. In fact, McQuarrie has gone so far as to suggest that making the Mission films is a bit like the missions themselves: full of improvisation, chaos, and figuring it out on the go. And if you watch carefully, the movie reveals its seams just a little. But this is a strength rather than a flaw, offering a sense of the real in a genre where the allure of aesthetic perfection is strong.

But Why Stunts?
If we desire authenticity, then surely there are myriad other ways to offer it. Why go to all the trouble?

Perhaps the answer lies in another aspect of the Zeitgeist: the recent travel trends toward ‘experience’ and ‘adventure’ travel — which often includes “danger tourism.” Travelers want the authentic experience, with adventure and a little danger, but in time for wine hour at our hotel, of course. And we definitely want those seemingly death-defying stunts to be Instagrammable.

But for some, this pursuit of danger has become a moneymaker. The experts and the gurus who started out simply trying to go faster, higher, further started documenting it. As AFAR’s David Gibson writes:

“From the ranks of this army of experts came the social media star. Suddenly, not only would a big following in the channel of the moment gain you free gear and sponsorship dollars, but fractions of cents per eyeball would accrue in your bank account — and eyeballs add up. Big stunts could make big dollars, and that was great for a lucky few.”

Big stunts make big dollars. A truer statement perhaps doesn’t exist about the Mission: Impossible franchise. In fact, when our cultural need for the “authenticity” of lived experience meets the desire for both pursuing and consuming the extreme and (seemingly) dangerous, the result starts to look a lot like Mission: Impossible. The franchise is like the megamillion, blockbuster version of the YouTube star filming his freeclimb for the eyeballs and the income: doing and documenting the actually dangerous feat that most of us can only pretend at when we crop and share the photos of our perfectly safe, three-hour swimming with sharks experience.

For example, Mission: Impossible II opens with Ethan Hunt freeclimbing a rock face with no harness or safety, at a certain moment even hanging precariously by his fingertips. It’s reminiscent of the innumerable photos of tourists hanging off an outcropping at Pedra do Telegrafo in Brazil:

Opening of Mission: Impossible II
Tourist at Pedra do Telegrafo Source

The difference lies in the fact that Pedra do Telegrafo is perfectly safe: there’s a platform a couple meters under the outcropping, such that the seemingly terrifying photos are all staged (read: inauthentic, but with the veneer of authenticity that posting them on social media inevitably offers). By contrast, Tom Cruise actually climbed that rock face to film the opening scene, with nothing but a thin safety rope (later digitally removed) keeping him from falling thousands of feet to the ground. Director John Woo reportedly couldn’t even watch.

That sequence feels oddly prescient, however terribly the rest of the movie has aged: it gives us, in close-up, high-definition, the authentic, actually-dangerous version of all those staged Pedra do Telegrafo photo ops. It’s not the seeming authenticity of those Instagram shots, but the actual authenticity of the danger.

Or perhaps you recall that time Cruise climbed the Burj Khalifa. During filming, he took a selfie on top of the tallest building in the world — because he could. Was he taking Instagram culture to the extreme? I don’t know. But I do know is that the Selfie Museum in Los Angeles offers visitors the opportunity to take a selfie atop the “Burj Khalifa,” and even provides the selfie stick. While us mere mortals fill our Instagram feeds with our authentic experience photographing a trompe l’oeil background, Cruise has done the real thing.

Cruise atop the Burj Khalifa
Yours truly, at the Selfie Museum in Los Angeles

I can’t help but think that, in perhaps some perverse way, we derive pleasure from watching Cruise do the things we all wish we could put on our social media feeds.

Honesty and Emotional Stakes

And yet, remarkably, these stunts have a reason to exist beyond showing off Cruise’s impressive skills, and that’s the final piece in the puzzle of Mission: Impossible’s success. It’s not just that it offers us the blockbuster equivalent of a social media star pulling dangerous stunts on camera; it uses this drive for bigger, higher, faster, more to create meaning. Cruise often says that the primary intention of the stunts is to tell a story, and no stunt showcases that better than the HALO jump sequence. Parachuting from 25,000 feet and getting it on camera is not just stunning; the height means that the fall is long enough for Ethan Hunt to have a midair tussle with August Walker, the antagonist of Fallout. This scene beautifully sets up both Walker’s characterization and his attitude towards Hunt, such that their later confrontations take on layers of meaning.

But there’s more.

The famous Russian director Stanislavsky used to judge the performance of actors very simply: he merely demanded that he be able to look at the performance and say “I believe.” This is the greatest challenge Mission: Impossible faces. The spy movie genre, in general, maintains a tenuous relationship to what’s real. Mission: Impossible, in particular, has made pulling the rug out from under the viewer one of its defining features. The first movie opens with a scene that seems typical of the genre: a beautiful, bloody dead woman in a hotel room, and someone interrogating the bad guy with the use of force. But soon, the walls fall away, the masks come off, and we find out it’s all staged. This scene has defined the franchise since: people are consistently not what they seem, sequences turn out to be imagined, masks are constantly being removed. The plot of the third movie, for example, revolved around finding the “Rabbit’s Foot,” and we never even find out what it is. As the plot twists and the rug-pulling and the trickery and the cleverness pile up, the walls could fall away at any moment to reveal the artifice of it all. Maintaining the audience’s belief in the face of this is paramount, but also a delicate act, a house of cards that could come tumbling down at any moment.

Moreover, there is a paradox in the very premise of Mission: Impossible that challenges believability: the movies are about doing the impossible — that which, by definition, cannot be done. As soon as it is done, it becomes the possible. It’s a tall order: to perform at the limits of the possible while convincing the audience that those limits exist. The characters must do what seems impossible according to the rules of reality as we know it — and then convince the audience that it is possible in that same reality whose limitations we’re familiar with.

This is a paradox that cannot be resolved in the magical world of CGI, because such a world has no limitations. Mission: Impossible wouldn’t work in a greenscreen world; it would, quite simply, cease to retain any meaning. It can’t perform at the limits of the possible if those limits don’t exist, and in a CGI world, anything can happen. The audience must be convinced that the story is happening in a world whose laws and limitations are shared by theirs rather than transported through illusion into a world where magic or digital trickery circumvent those limits.

Tom Cruise, actually clinging to a plane in midair. No, that’s not a greenscreen.

It’s the stunts that do this convincing. Performed by the actors themselves quite literally putting their lives on the line, they (and the press that inevitably surrounds them) reveal just how risky and challenging they are. And consequently, they reveal to us the physical limits of the world in which the story exists. When Cruise performs his stunts as a superspy protagonist intended to stretch the limits of the possible, he reminds us that those limits exist. This isn’t Superman inexplicably flying through the air, charged up on solar power; there’s no magical abilities that will suddenly burst forth with the aid of CGI. This is Ethan Hunt performing the (im)possible as it is defined relative to our reality, not a cinematic one, and an actor who commits himself, bodily and physically, to verisimilitude.

This makes us believe, too, that Ethan Hunt is a person who just might exist rather than the abstract embodiment of wish fulfillment. Richard Newby has written an excellent piece about how Mission: Impossible has committed itself to a vulnerability normally absent from action films, refusing to make Hunt the wish fulfillment stand-in that the protagonists of the genre usually are. Sure, Hunt is very, very good at what he does; he belongs to something called the Impossible Mission Force, and characters have described him as “the living manifestation of destiny.” One of the primary appeals of the movies is precisely how skilled he is; they offer the satisfaction of watching competence porn. But because Cruise does the stunts, he reveals that Ethan Hunt is not superhuman. In fact, the argument could even be made that he’s about as human as Cruise: after all, while Hunt can hold his breath for 3 minutes, Cruise can do it for 6, and of the two of them, it’s Cruise who actually knows how to pilot a helicopter. Ethan Hunt is only partly a fiction, and though much of the credit for that goes to Fallout’s acting and scriptwriting, the stunts, with all the invisible work they do to win our credulity, deserve equal credit.

Which means that, at the end of the day, the audience, like Stanislavsky, can say “I believe.” I spent a long time thinking about whether there are moments in the movie that are “cheating” in terms of the contract between viewer and audience (and I think you’ll know the moments I mean). But if I’m being honest, I have to admit it wasn’t, because I believed. Precisely because of its commitment to practical performance over cinematic illusion, Fallout offers an honesty, a credibility to its story and its emotional stakes — which is a lot to say about a franchise that has magical evil viruses and perfect 3D-printed face masks.

Towards the beginning of Fallout, for example, is a scene that repeats a trope from the first film: a fake room with a scenario staged explicitly to get a confession. As a TV screen behind Ethan Hunt announces that three nuclear attacks have happened because of the plutonium that he had allowed to get away, Tom Cruise acts the hell out of his character’s guilt and regret. And in that moment, I believed that Ethan Hunt had failed, and that millions of people had died because of it. In a franchise where tricking the audience is par for the course, I believed that the more-than-human protagonist had failed. And at the reveal, I didn’t feel cheated, which his telling of the enormous invisible work the film has performed to gain my trust.

The moment that was the catalyst for this piece, though, was the finale, as Ethan Hunt fights to shut down the countdown on a bomb that’s about to go off. He’s not anywhere in the vicinity of the blast radius, but his friends are, so it’s their lives on the line. And just as we watch the bomb’s timer count down, the screen goes blank, as if an explosion had wiped everything out. Then we see Cruise, hanging off a rocky outcropping, and it’s unclear if he reached the key that defuses the countdown. And for a moment, we wonder whether Ethan Hunt, superspy, hero, and protagonist, has failed. That’s not how spy movies usually go, and this is a multimillion dollar franchise, and Paramount wouldn’t let Cruise kill off all the characters, and — and — but those are all intellectual considerations. Emotionally, however, we’re primed to believe it, because the film has spent two hours showing that it’s willing to actually hang Cruise by a thin rope hundreds of feet in the air. Consequently, whether we like it or not, the part of us that’s not thinking about Paramount’s bottom line — the part that is, instead, on the edge of our seat, wishing for a stress ball — believes that everybody might actually die.

Cruise hanging off Pulpit Rock in Norway for the Fallout finale

And that experience — which goes far beyond the thrill of entertainment and the surprise of the plot twist, which challenges your understanding of what is possible — that is movie magic. I didn’t think it would require Tom Cruise to dangle precariously hundreds of feet in the air, but I’ll take it.

Anastasia Klimchynskaya

Written by

Graduate student at University of Pennsylvania, interested in science fiction, science and technology in culture, and travel.

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