Extremely Lonely and Incredibly Chaotic
Jerry Maguire is about a mid-life crisis, but it's also kind of about college.
Jerry Maguire is a chaotic character. Played by Tom Cruise, he’s a sports agent who suffers a crisis of conscience one night about the greed and backstabbing within his profession. In response, he hammers out a twenty-five page manifesto, prints and distributes it, then gets fired. For the first half of the movie, he’s sweaty, disheveled, and constantly on the verge of a breakdown. He has two people left in his corner: his sole client, Rod Tidwell (played brilliantly by Cuba Gooding Jr.), and his accountant-slash-love interest, Dorothy (Renée Zellweger).
I came into watching Jerry Maguire familiar with two of its catchphrases: the “Show me the money!” refrain and Renée Zellweger’s soft, tearful, “You had me at hello.” I expected some sort of grand sports drama, but instead was pleasantly surprised by a much messier tale. Jerry Maguire oozes charisma, but he is also kind of a disaster person. He gets slugged by his ex-fiancé. He makes a fool of himself. He dodges any sort of Define-The-Relationship talk with Dorothy but then ends up proposing in the heat of the moment because he can’t stand to be alone.
He is exactly the energy I was channeling my senior year.
I’ve been wanting to write about college while I still remember how it felt to be in the thick of it: the dorm room hijinks, the impromptu food outings, the fevered nights of procrastination. And, yes, the chaos. Chaotic was a favored word among my friends this past year, used mostly as a catch-all for anything we did that could potentially bite us in the ass but that we wanted to seem nonchalant about, regardless. Matching on Tinder with someone we had a messy history with. Grabbing coffee with an ex. Waking up and leaving at the crack of dawn without so much as a note or a verbal “goodbye.” The implications here were that we were beholden to no one—we were stewards of our own ships, hurricanes of our own making, people who acted spontaneously and most definitely were not waiting by our phones, hoping to be texted back.
When Jerry shows up at Dorothy’s doorstep, her sister Laurel (Bonnie Hunt) pulls her aside and says, basically: this man is a walking shitshow and all-around Bad Idea. And Dorothy essentially replies: okay, but I might fuck around and fall for him anyway.
For most of my life I have not been Jerry Maguire, but, rather, Dorothy, balancing his checkbooks quietly in the background, stacking acts of service at the altar of my affections. One of my friends recently asked our group chat for clarification on the word “simping,” and then my other friend fired back with “simping is Katie telling [redacted] she’d do his math homework for him,” and I threw my phone across the room because it was—well, true. Throughout middle school, high school, and the early part of college, I would scramble to make time to help my crushes, and it gave me a bit of a martyrdom complex (seriously, I suffered through so many inane Gmail chats). To me, the noblest expression of love was pining silently while making yourself useful, a page taken from one of my favorite love poems, “Variation on the Word Sleep” by Margaret Atwood. I can recite the last stanza from memory: “I would like to be the air / that inhabits you for a moment / only. I would like to be that unnoticed / & that necessary.”
There’s a certain confidence that comes with knowing exactly what you have to offer another person. When you can point to all the things that make you a good prospect—I’m a hard worker! A good listener!—and rest easy on the laurels that make you lovable. But, of course, everyone knows that attraction works in strange and mysterious ways, and you can be good on paper without ever working out in real life. Eventually, I got tired of breaking my own heart, and my solution was to run to the exact opposite end of the spectrum and pretend I didn’t have one at all. The Chaotic Type. The Messy Bitch™. I wanted, in essence, to be noticed and absolutely unnecessary, to function as An Event in someone’s life. I won’t deny that it was fun; I will also admit that it led to my sometimes acting like an asshole.
The appeal of Jerry Maguire, for me, is that he represents the specific headiness of knowing you have absolutely nothing together, and yet, for whatever reason, something about you supersedes the other person’s sense of self-preservation. They walk toward you anyways, moth to flame. (This is a simplification, as the movie tries to emphasize how good with kids Jerry Maguire is, which is kryptonite for Dorothy as a single mother, but let’s be real, it was also just ‘cause Tom Cruise could get it.) (Additional aside—what are writing conventions and rules, lol—this is not an endorsement of Tom Cruise as a person and his Scientology-related schemes.)
They come, but they don’t always stay. After some time, Dorothy looks at her shotgun marriage with clear eyes and approaches Jerry, suggesting they should call it off because she still feels like Jerry is holding her at a distance. Jerry asks, rattled and a bit despairing: “What if I’m not built that way? Great at friendship, bad at intimacy.”
It’s a heartbreaking callback to what’s used as an earlier gag in the movie, the tagline of Jerry’s bachelor video. It’s also not a dichotomy I agree with, because I’d argue that friendship is exactly the way through which Jerry accesses the only real intimacy he has for most of the movie: his relationship with Rod. They’re agent and client, but because both of them are down on their luck, it ends up bleeding into more. Jerry gets angry at Rod, and mean, and desperate, but he also goes to Rod for advice, and it’s Rod’s dynamic with his wife that opens Jerry’s eyes to what he’s been lacking in his own life.
That, too, is true of who I was in college, in the sense that it was the intimacy I had with my friends that saved me in the end. When, inevitably, the dust settled and I was left to deal with my choices. When, despite my better judgment and telling myself I was above it all, I got hurt and disappointed anyways. There was always another bed to cry in, another night to go out dancing. Dorothy and Jerry get a romantic happy ending, and I won’t dispute it (although I think that Jerry needs to actually learn how to be alone before he can truly be happy with someone else), but it’s Jerry and Rod who carry the movie for me, at the end of the day. Show me the money, yes, but also show me there’s a way out of this, and up.
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‘Til next time. <3