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Jerry Maguire
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Sometimes,
in watching popular movies, there are a few images or events, quite detachable
from the rest of the film, which really stick with me. Sometimes these
memorable images are not the most dramatic epiphanies or turning points. One of
these – just a single shot, really – comes 20 minutes into Singles (1992), a network-story
of the romantic entanglements of well-to-do twentysomethings.
Two
characters, Linda (Kyra Sedgwick) and Steve (Campbell Scott), re-meet on the
street after a glancing club encounter, and there’s the first stirring, the
first sign of their future intimacy: they converse on a street at night, in
front of a large magazine and newspaper stand that is run by a grumpy old guy.
But the words Linda and Steve speak don’t figure in the scene at all (they are
omitted under the blues song on the soundtrack); the very moment that Steve
takes a step out-of-frame toward Linda, the film cuts (on a temporal ellipsis)
to a slow track along the magazine rack, finally arriving at the duo talking
animatedly. It’s a typically smart movie-abbreviation. The main attraction is
this: for a stretched-out five seconds or so, we look at that rack going past,
and see the magazines of our era laid out in their surreal, democratic
confusion: the glamour, lifestyle and fashion magazines, Time, Fortune, Metropolis, Photo, Better Homes … Then
the scene steps out, to take in the shot/revere shot of another, nearby couple
(the respective best friends of Linda and Steve) that is not immediately
clicking … Fade out on a long shot reconstituting the differential positions of
all four players in the Game of Young Love; the magazine rack itself is the
last thing illuminated and visible in the disappearing image.
For
me, this is among the loveliest moments of 1990s cinema, because it
acknowledges something so familiar, pervasive and grounded in unspectacular
reality, like browsing at the contents of a magazine rack – something that I
happen to do, compulsively, many days of my life. It’s within or alongside this
kind of everyday profusion of ridiculously ephemeral stuff that, in Singles, love or friendship is born.
This scene made me sigh so deeply; I thought to myself: how sweet it is, to
live a moment like that, and to see it portrayed so well (and so deftly) on
screen.
The
writer-director of Singles, Cameron
Crowe, held a special place in my heart even before I saw that film. As a
writer, he scripted two important movies of the 1980s, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982), and the
lesser-known The Wild Life (Art
Linson, 1984). That was after a career in journalism, particularly rock and
showbiz journalism for Rolling Stone magazine. He was one of those participant writers of the New Journalism school:
to research Fast Times, he put
himself through high school again for a while, just to know what it was like for
young kids in the early ‘80s; and he went on the road (at a ridiculously young
age) with rock bands (the source of his later Almost Famous [2000]). By the
end of the ‘80s, he had hooked up with a powerful executive producer, James L.
Brooks of Terms of Endearment (1983) and The
Simpsons fame. Crowe’s debut feature as director was Say Anything … (1989), and if you’ve never seen this touching,
poignant teen film, do so immediately, because it’s a real gem.
The
hero of Say Anything … is Lloyd, a
sensitive teenage guy who weeps and pines and lives for romantic love; he’s played
by the incomparable John Cusack. Lloyd is an innocent, with scarcely an evil or
complicated impulse in him, and his heart is true. But, as for Romeo and
Juliet, some kind of external happenstance intervenes to throw the lovers
out-of-sync and on divergent courses. But Lloyd comes back one final time, to
woo and win his beloved, and he does so in a modest Romeo style: by standing
outside her place and holding a ghetto blaster above his head, one that is
blasting the Peter Gabriel song, “In Your Eyes”.
It’s
perhaps the daggiest, uncoolest sight in the modern popular cinema – in a Tim Burton
film, it would be a wicked, cruel joke at the expense of everybody who ever
liked Peter Gabriel – but in Say Anything…,
the moment, once again, is just beautiful.
What
makes it touching, above all, is the type of movie that it sits in. In a familiar
James Brooks style, Say Anything … is
a slick, extremely clever confection, shamelessly trafficking clichés,
stereotypes and generic movie formulae. It moves within a movie reality, a movie
universe – and to achieve that well is an art unto itself. But Crowe’s great
gift as a popular artist is to pull off, within that universe, plaintive
moments that ring true to everyday experience.
There’s
another, less charitable way of looking at the Magic of Cameron Crowe – and it
comes up, in a big way, in Jerry Maguire.
You could say that Crowe’s films are basically quite conservative; they preach
traditional sermons, and peddle the usual, old-fashioned values. They’re in
favour of the family, romantic bonding for life, material success, and they
embrace the status quo without too many complaints or doubts. The same could be
said about the films of Brooks (for which I also have plenty of time): this
facile, smooth, life’s-like-that kind of cinema is one of the styles that mark
the apolitical 1980s in Western popular culture.
What
can makes this slice of cinema funny and sharp is a way of playing – in the Woody Allen manner – on all-pervasive, common
neuroses. Acknowledging these neuroses means letting in a certain degree of
sarcasm about how we all live today, with our fads and lifestyle/media
obsessions. There’s a bittersweet twinge of pain and dysfunction in these
movies, a creeping doubt that maybe there’s something just a little wrong with
the way we live – and, in the case of The
Simpsons, this twinge of despair, of ironic recognition, becomes almost a
St Vitus’ dance of nihilism and doom. But even The Simpsons, ultimately, embodies this ‘let’s just muddle on like
fools because nothing’s ever going to change’ mentality of the 1980s and ‘90s.
Jerry Maguire is, on many levels, a
monstrously fascinating and puzzling film. One of the modern effects of the New
Journalism movement in which Crowe began his career was to take aspects of
everyday life – zones of work, behaviour or people’s hobbies – and turn them
into amazing, alien worlds for the hungry gaze of everyone else. Suddenly, ordinary
people and normal life become the privileged zones of a great Mondo Weirdo, a
carnival freak-show all around us at times – once we have been trained to see
it and enjoy it this way. This began in the ‘70s, in the observational style
(crafted within fictional vehicles) pioneered by Robert Altman and Michael
Ritchie; its ‘80s counterpart is the queasy True Stories (David Byrne, 1986). Accordingly,
an entire movement in documentary filmmaking has seized on this often sarcastic
but also lovingly populist idea: that suburbia is full of nuts and obsessives,
that the most mundane workplaces are full of intensely interesting crazies
living full-tilt.
If
you put all this together – neurotic vision, New Journalism, cultural &
political populism – you land somewhere near the measure of one our greatest
modern obsessions: lifestyle. The categorising
of lifestyles, breaking them down into their minute parts, their codes and
protocols; guides to lifestyle, how to swap one lifestyle for another.
Lifestyle is the great yuppie obsession bequeathed to us by the ‘80s – this
notion that a way of living can be bought and sold, mastered and consumed, and
maybe not just once but often, serially. The 1960s had already given us the
darkest and most prescient vision of this intense consumerist mania in John
Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966).
Jerry Maguire pretends to be a
feel-good story about a guy who loses everything and then struggles back
through the obstacles to love, understanding and selfhood. But, really, it’s
about lifestyle. Jerry (Tom Cruise) is a corporate-aspiring, New Age kind of
guy. He’s a sports agent, but that specific job seems almost incidental, as
though he could have any number of jobs (Crowe earlier considered making him a
movie or music agent). Jerry appears to have absolutely no roots whatsoever: no
past, no old friends, no family you can possibly imagine. As cultural theorist McKenzie
Wark likes to say, Jerry no longer has roots, he just has aerials: a weightless
character, plugged into every modern communications technology available,
especially his ubiquitous mobile phone. If nothing else, Jerry Maguire is the supreme ode to that particular modern gadget.
Jerry
is a workaholic; he works to succeed, to make money. A familiar enough modern
type; Michael J. Fox has played it a few times. What comes out of Jerry’s
mouth, obsessively, is an unending stream of pep talk and psychobabble. It’s
not just his workaday persona; it’s his entire personality. The lifestyle is
all: he’s into personal affirmations and, in a frenzy of positive,
I-love-myself vibes, he even pens and distributes his own Mission Statement. The
casting of Tom Cruise in this part is so brilliant that it borders on cruelty – Simpsons-style cruelty. You stare at
Jerry the New Age-guy and you see Tom the young, impossibly good-looking
super-celebrity, Tom the Scientologist, Tom the husband of Nicole Kidman, Tom
the charismatic, wired-up but strangely bland and vacant media personality.
What
on earth is this movie saying about its hero? Is it a critique, a satire, an
affectionate homage, or an outright celebration born of Yuppie Fever? Us not
being sure is what makes this film so gruesomely captivating.
I’m
not saying much about the plot, the character arc or the nominal moral lesson
of Jerry Maguire, because I truly
believe these are not its most important aspects. Instead, it is single-mindedly
about making a spectacle of certain modern values and contemporary behaviours.
One review tartly commented that it makes no sense and is self-contradictory,
because it preaches that “money doesn’t matter as long as you have a lot if it”.
But I’d argue that our New Age Yuppie ideology depends precisely on that
contradiction – thrives on it, in fact – and so does Crowe as a filmmaker.
It
really is all about having your cake
and eating it, too: finding yourself, but raking it in as well, not denying
yourself any of that good old, material, market-mania splendour. This is a film
that captures the great 1980s high: money is sexy, lifestyle is sexy, careerism
is sexy and – wouldn’t you know it – it’s lonely (but sexy) at the top.
Even
if you’ve only seen the publicity for Jerry
Maguire you will know that, in a key scene, the hero’s one remaining client,
Rod (Cuba Gooding Jr.), persuades Jerry to chant, at the top of his lungs down
the phone, “Show me the money!”. It’s a hilarious scene, superbly crafted by
Crowe. But how disgusting can you get: a slick Hollywood blockbuster with the tag
line of “show me the money”?! You have to go back to the crazy, ambiguous
satires of Frank Tashlin – Will Success
Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) or It’s Only Money (1962) – for a
comparable degree of spin on consumer society, capitalist economy, pop culture,
and the mad new lifestyles that go with these monstrous re-inventions of the
industrial world.
And
I’ll confess to an alarming moment of cognitive (and cultural) dissonance here:
could Crowe have been recalling, distorting, even (in his mind) paying homage to
the indelible sight of John Cassavetes as a Prospero-figure dancing madly and
chanting “show me the magic” in Paul Mazursky’s Tempest (1982)? If so, pick me up off the floor.
I’ve
come a long, long way from where I started – extolling those small, human,
ordinary moments of recognition in the cinema of Cameron Crowe. But Jerry Maguire in fact has plenty of those
moments. Most of them happen around the female characters – especially Jerry’s
business partner, Dorothy (Renee Zellweger), who becomes his love-and-marriage
partner, and her sister Laurel (Bonnie Hunt), who is a little bit today’s Eve
Arden, wisecracking, detached, jaded, but also secretly pining on the sideline.
There is corny, obvious, contrived stuff in the romance component: Dorothy’s
child, Ray (Jonathan Lipnicki) – in truth, any child in this movie – is
hyper-cute, hyper-lovable.
It
makes little psychological sense that Jerry marries Dorothy without really
loving her, and then spends half the movie avoiding the consequences of this fact.
Although that does fit, on another level, with his whole spaced-out identikit,
as though acquiring an instant, loving wife works for him as a handy careerist
pick-me-up. And there’s a rather unforgivable running joke – very James L.
Brooks – about Dorothy’s sister as the host of a divorced women’s group, a
bunch of gals who are angrily talking all at once whenever we spy them in the
lounge room. (This gag is somewhat borrowed from Brooks’ script for the
marvellous Starting Over [1979].)
But
again, I can overlook just about all of that. Because there are such sweet
moments involving Dorothy and Jerry’s fumbling moments of romance – and even
Laurel as she listens to their first night of lovemaking from upstairs, and sighs.
And when Crowe adroitly puts on top of these small, telling moments his
indelible, eclectic selection of music tracks – everything from Bob Dylan and Bruce
Springsteen to the soulful instrumentals of Durutti Column and His Name is
Alive – then this weird, unruly, compelling pop confection sends me – for a
moment or two – to a fragile, ephemeral Heaven.
MORE Crowe: Elizabethtown © Adrian Martin March 1997 |
