Real Phonies: Cultures of Authenticity in Post-World War II America

Conclusion: “Collage Is the Art Form of the Twentieth Century”

239 Conclusion: “Collage Is the Art Form of the twentieth Century” in Jerry Maguire, “completion” is imagined to be possible: the self or subject that one struggles to create actually comes into being through a (good) marriage, after which (the movie suggests) one’s proper role is to assist one’s children in their own becoming. As discussed at the end of the last chapter, the epilogue of the movie suggests that the corporate and the domestic spheres might finally merge through four-year-old Ray’s burgeoning athletic ability. As Ray’s father/agent, Jerry need no longer see his professional and his personal lives as distinct. He and Rod can be all “heart” in both realms. Yet the movie’s endorsement of completion as an achievable goal—an endorsement that Butler would quite legitimately deride as simplistic —is itself undermined through the very repetition that performance theory understands as constitutive of the subject. At various points during the movie, the narrative is punctuated by brief interjections from Jerry’s sports-agent mentor, “the late great Dicky Fox,” who offers such stale career advice as “the key to this job is personal relationships” (37) and “unless you love everybody, you can’t sell anybody.”1 These moments are comedic ; the actor (Jared Jussim) playing the part looks like an old guy who would give stale advice, and audiences frequently laugh when he appears. But his use of cliché—like the performative subject itself, the product of repetition—underscores the naiveté of Jerry’s search. It suggests that the movie, if not the audience, is too sophisticated to be taken in by Jerry’s fantasy of self-actualization. The final goal of the movie is thus simultaneously to idealize and ironize Jerry’s project of becoming. Dicky Fox’s hallowed chestnuts are not the only clichés in Jerry Maguire. Early on in the film, when Jerry prepares his mission statement 240 conclusion for distribution to his colleagues (the move that leads first to his termination and then transformation), he gives it a simple cover with the title, “The Things We Think But Do Not Say,” centered above a solid blue background. He proudly declares, “Even the cover looked like The Catcher in the Rye.”2 The reference is obvious—the dark red paperback edition of Salinger’s novel that had been a primary high school text throughout the 1980s—and analogizes Jerry’s fantasy of a company devoted to “less money, fewer clients” to Holden’s dream of a world without phonies: confused , impractical, and adolescent. The subsequent uncertainty over the genre of Jerry’s manuscript—he insists it is a “mission statement,” but everyone else calls it a “memo” (48)—itself speaks to Holden’s dilemma about phoniness. Jerry writes his fantasy of a company that is outside of any existing model, free from cynicism and the taint of social compromise , whereas those who read it see only a variation on a form. This is a Butler-like critique of the Cartesian subject (or the Cartesian corporation), which imagines that an original subject might exist. And Jerry’s final success , illustrated by his acceptance of the term “memo” in the second-to-last scene, though compromised in his own terms, is a Butler-like success.3 It acknowledges both the possibilities within and the limitations of one’s constitution within pre-given forms. The presence of Holden Caulfield in Jerry Maguire is hardly unique, providing only one example of the ambiguous status Salinger’s novel held at the end of the twentieth century.4 Frequently, illusions to Holden and the novel more generally mark a fantasy of authenticity that has been abandoned , in which the innocence one associates with Holden’s search (and adolescence more generally) has been replaced by a weary sophistication that fondly recollects its own naiveté.5 As this volume has uncovered, the 23. The close-up of the cover of Jerry Maguire’s memo. Jerry Maguire (1996). Sony Pictures. CONClusION 241 mid-century’s concept of authenticity was far more complicated than it may appear when it is invoked at a comfortable distance of a half-century or more. At various points, writers and social critics imagined authenticity in a number of ways: there was the Caulfieldian authenticity—in which the self must possess an inner core and an outer façade, the latter of which is mutable and deployed by the...