"The Man He Almost Is": Jerry Maguire and Judith Butler

When Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise), the leading character of the eponymously titled film, describes in retrospect the events that led to his "breakdown," or "breakthrough" as he prefers to call it, he emphasizes the role played by conscience (Crowe 37).¹ Why did he lose his job as a sports agent, start his own company, get married, get separated, and finally reach a state of "completion" (177), both professionally and personally? Because, he explains, "A hockey player's kid made me feel like a superficial jerk, I ate two slices of bad pizza, went to bed, and grew a conscience" (106). This newly-grown conscience compels Jerry to write an admittedly "touchy-feely" mission statement—one which proposes a sports agency founded on "fewer clients, less money, more attention, caring for them, caring for ourselves"—describing not only the sports agency Jerry wants to create but also, as he says, "the me I always wanted to be" (38). There is no difference between founding a company and forging a self in Jerry Maguire: professionally, Jerry creates an agency to help his clients realize not only their professional ambitions but also the "Love, Respect, Community . . . and the Dollars too" that are the apotheosis of celebrity culture (120); and personally, Jerry struggles to achieve "intimacy" (163), to "talk, really talk" (113), and to become, in his wife Dorothy's terms, "the man he wants to be . . . and the man he almost is" (137).

How this transformation takes place forms part of the subject of this article, although my focus is less on Jerry Maguire per se than on what Jerry Maguire renders visible in and about contemporary culture: namely, its tendency to offer competing accounts of the self as either a process or a project. When Jerry Maguire was released in 1996 the idea of the self as project was a commonplace one. It has long been the enabling belief of the self-help industry, whose narratives of decline, crisis and epiphany, and self-conscious transformation provide the obvious referent for the film's opening monologue and montage. Like an addict testifying at a meeting, Jerry describes the heady world of professional sports, his gradual realization that "in the quest for the big dollars, a lot of the little things were going wrong" (34) and then, the moment: leaving the bedside of an injured hockey player, Jerry hears the player's son call out "Hey! Mr. Maguire!" and he turns. In the moments that follow, Jerry's opening assertions that "I am the sports agent . . . It's what I do" (33), in which being and doing are understood to coexist without conflict, is replaced with existential doubt expressed in voiceover: "Who had I become? Just another shark in a suit?" (36).² The mission statement that follows from the incident constitutes a blueprint for both a new profession and a new person.

If Jerry's efforts to make a project of himself represent a recognizable construct in mainstream American culture, however, it is less familiar in contemporary critical discourse, in which the self as a process has emerged as by far the more familiar paradigm. As often as mainstream American texts have celebrated the prospect of self-transformation, poststructuralist critical writing has as often doubted its possibility. Yet in inadvertent homage to one of that paradigm's central theorists, the idea of the self as process is also evoked by Jerry Maguire's opening sequence. Put the hockey-player's son in a policeman's uniform and the moment inadvertently reenacts Louis Althusser's most famous example of interpellation, in which the policeman's hail of "Hey! You there!" constitutes the subject within the realm of state authority (Althusser 174). Importantly, the similarities between the two moments begin and end there. For Althusser, the policeman's summons represents an inevitable procedure, the moment when the State "‘recruits' subjects among individuals, or ‘transforms' individuals into subjects" (174); whereas in Jerry Maguire, the child's call is figured as an opportunity.³ The hail that the hockey player's son embodies operates less as conscription than as an...