1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 26: Jerry Maguire

JERRY: “What do you know about dating a single mother?”

ROD: “Plenty! … Single mothers don’t date. They’ve been to the circus, they’ve been to the puppet show, and they’ve seen the strings.”

Certain processes – like riding a bicycle or living out a marriage – take you through four stages, writes C.S. Lewis in “Talking about Bicycles.”

(1) When you’re very young, you’re uninterested in the process (call it X).

(2) You grow up a bit and become naïvely romantic about X. You discover its first exhilarations.

(3) After a while, you discover the hardship that goes along with X. You become cynical. If you continue to value X, you do so only instrumentally: you ride a bicycle or stick through marriage only to accomplish a further goal. X itself, you regard as regrettable labor.

(4) Your romantic feelings reassert themselves so that you again value X for its own sake, even if what seems worthwhile about X is never fully realized. You’re glad to have fleetingly approximated, or even to have just glimpsed, the ideals associated with X.

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A lot of movies are about one stage or another, or about the transition between two adjacent stages. The protagonists in Cameron Crowe’s movies tend to move all the way from (2) to (3) to (4).

In Say Anything, they spend the bulk of the story in (2) (the characters are teenagers in love). The brief transition to (3) is devastating. The conclusion in stage (4) is hopeful.

Elizabethtown is about a last-ditch effort to save a man from committing suicide after he’s stumbled from (2) into (3). His guardian angel spends the movie enticing him to enjoy living, as opposed to living in order to enjoy success. Through her love, the angel tries to bring the protagonist to (4).

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Jerry Maguire is about the processes of loving and building a rewarding career.

Like Elizabethtown, it’s a fairy tale without the supernatural trappings. There isn’t even a guardian angel – unless you count Ray, a cherubic little boy who can throw a baseball really, really, far.

Ray’s single mother is Dorothy (Renée Zellweger). Her face is fresh; her voice is deep. She’s been to the circus, seen the puppet show, and learned about the strings. She begins the movie in stage (3).

Dorothy and Ray live with Dorothy’s even more jaded sister. A divorced women’s support group regularly meets in their house. Such groups may be invaluable in real life, but this group is an object of gentle mockery. This story is weighted toward comedy, i.e., toward mature happiness; stage (3), the cynical stage, may evince greater maturity than stage (2), but it’s not yet as wise as stage (4).

(I analyze too much. The crucial point is that the divorced women’s group functions as a kind of naysaying chorus. This is a funny touch.)

Dorothy is an accountant in a cutthroat L.A. sporting agency. One of the agents, a hotshot named Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise), is having a crisis of conscience. He’s suddenly realized that he’s been urging his clients to maximize earnings rather than well-being. He graduates from stage (1) to stage (2): from now on, he’ll get his kicks doing what’s right, representing fewer athletes but attending more closely to their needs. Jerry writes a tract with the precious title “The Things We Think But Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business” and distributes it to his colleagues. They pretend to love it. Then they fire him from the agency. Jerry’s clients also abandon him.

But his idealism isn’t without effect. It inspires Dorothy to go with him, and, together, they form their own sporting agency.

One client stays with Jerry and Dorothy. This is NFL wide receiver Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.). Rod is personally warmhearted but professionally cynical; his team has never paid him what he deserves. As he seeks a new contract, his one directive to Jerry is: SHOW ME THE MONEY.

This is one of the movie’s great catchphrases. Here are others:

BROKE, BROKE, BROKE.

HELP ME HELP YOU.

YOU COMPLETE ME.

YOU HAD ME AT HELLO.

(How does one movie generate so many of them?)

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Another good line – not a catchphrase, exactly (though maybe it should be) – is Jerry’s confession to Rod: I SHOPLIFTED THE POOTIE. Jerry and Dorothy have become romantically involved, and each worries that s/he is taking advantage of the other (Jerry of Dorothy because she’s a single mother; Dorothy of Jerry because he’s at a professional low point). As they negotiate these doubts, their relationship moves from (2) to (3): out of idealism, into drudgery.

Meanwhile, Rod is stuck in his own stage (3). He’s a “paycheck player,” griping his way through the season, wondering why he isn’t being offered the big bucks. “That is not what inspires people,” Jerry tells him.

Will Rod rediscover his love of the game?

Will Dorothy and Jerry learn to love each other for who they are?

Of course they will. This is a comedy/fairy tale. But it’s a clever one. What makes it sweet and fun is how large all the gestures are, how each character moves along his or her journey with reckless abandon, overcoming bruises, brushing aside mistakes. (In this way, it’s rather like Moonstruck.) Dorothy, Jerry, and Rod are worth rooting for because each of them is bold. Jerry loses his job because of his vision. Dorothy leaves her job to be with Jerry because, she says, she just wants to be inspired. When Rod complains that Jerry isn’t trying hard enough to represent him, Dorothy scolds him with her deep voice, telling him that Jerry is doing all he can for Rod while he himself is BROKE, BROKE, BROKE. Jerry, in turn, begs to Rod: HELP ME HELP YOU. HELP ME HELP YOU. HELP ME HELP YOU. And Rod digs it. SHOW ME THE MONEY! he screams to Jerry.

The greatest lines, of course, are YOU COMPLETE ME and YOU HAD ME AT HELLO – lines of pure cheese. You know they’re coming. You steel yourself against them. But in the scene in which they’re uttered, they’re powerful (and very funny, since they rebuke the cynical onlookers). The characters have earned the right to say those lines. You can’t help but be moved. It’s as if the movie was designed in reverse, starting with those lines, with the rest of the story built around them to make them plausible.

The movie also depicts a talk show host who specializes in getting athletes to cry. They go onto his show resolved not to cry, but he figures out how to tug their heartstrings and they cry anyway. That’s what this movie tries to do. It works very hard. It earns our tears. It reminds us to believe in ideals. That’s why this popcorn flick is one of the best movies of 1996.

Reading-year’s end

You can now stream some of the old Asterix movies with Amazon Prime.

For example, Asterix and Cleopatra – an old staple of my family’s. It has one of my favorite scenes, “Queen Cleopatra’s Bath.”

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Karin has been looking after Samuel the last few nights so I can meet my annual reading quota.

Today I finished Doctor Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, which occupied me during many nights, five pages or so each night. It’s the best travel book I’ve read. Johnson closely observes the landscape and society of the Highlands and draws shrewd conclusions about Scottish ways of living. He makes insightful comparisons between the Highlands and other places.

His paragraphs are pithy and elegant and dense with literary nutriment.

He’s wonderfully modest. So many travel books are inward journeys; this one isn’t. Johnson is concerned with the ecosystem, with all of Britain, all of history; not with himself.

His longest discourse on himself is his closing paragraph:

Such are the things which this journey has given me an opportunity of seeing, and such are the reflections which that sight has raised. Having passed my time almost wholly in cities, I may have been surprised by modes of life and appearances of nature, that are familiar to men of wider survey and more varied conversation. Novelty and ignorance must always be reciprocal, and I cannot but be conscious that my thoughts on national manners, are the thoughts of one who has seen but little.

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I have to finish two more books:

(1) Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (a re-read);

and

(2) Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise.

I’ve been reading Strange Piece for most of the year. It has 540 large pages of small print, and it’s quite a slow burn.

In 1977, at a state park in central Oregon, a man dressed as a cowboy attacks two transient female college students. He drives over them with a pickup truck and chops them with an axe.

They survive.

The axeman is never officially identified or charged with the crime.

In the 1990s, one of the victims – Jentz, the author – repeatedly returns to the scene. She investigates informally. She learns that the locals strongly suspect one of their own as having committed the crime.

Jentz shows us her stages of grieving, of coping with trauma.

Then we learn about the community that spawned this crime.

Slowly, warily, the suspect is approached. Jentz circles around him, encountering wounded women who’ve managed to pull themselves out from the whirlwind of his person. Then she peers into the storm and glimpses the emptiness inside.

I can’t tell you more than that. I still have 150 pages to go.

100 greatest Britons

My little boy turned six months old. See him with his mother:

Ziva is in the background, at one o’clock.

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Do you watch so much British TV that, occasionally, you need to be reminded that you aren’t British?

You may be helped by this BBC poll from 2002 that identifies the “100 Greatest Britons.”

Consider: who was Isambard Kingdom Brunel?

Not only had I not heard of him, the alleged second-greatest Briton (ahead of the likes of Darwin, Newton, Shakespeare, and Elizabeth I); I’d be surprised to encounter five non-Britons who could tell me who he was.

(Reading about him, it’s obvious that he was a tremendous figure. It’s just that, on this side of the Atlantic, the Industrial Revolution looms less large in the imagination.)

I understand the high rating of Diana, Princess of Wales, even if I don’t agree with it. I even understand the inclusion of J.K. Rowling to the detriment of Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and other genre fiction writers. People get fixated upon recent figures.

It’s surprising, though, to see a 17th-century terrorist such as Guy Fawkes rated so well (30th). Not that I object. I think I understand his appeal. But it wouldn’t have occurred to me to make it a criterion for “greatness”; no, not even though I love to watch Midsomer Murders, which is close in spirit to how Guy Fawkes Night is celebrated. (And since Fawkes is included, why not Jack the Ripper?)

The list has no philosophers unless Darwin and Newton are counted as such. Hobbes? Hume? Absent. Locke? Adam Smith? They must have been reserved for the U.S. list.

Blake, not Turner, is the only painter.

No Yeats; no Joyce. Instead: Bono. Pop singers abound.

Actors abound: Richard Burton the actor makes the cut above Richard Burton the explorer. (Explorers abound, too.)

The misfortunes of Samuel

Oh, Samuel!

How sad, to drink milk every three hours rather than whenever you wish (now that your mother has returned to her job).

Your cries, your protestations, have not previously been this loud. Dear, dear Lamblet.

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This afternoon, your father put you into your crib. Oh, how insulting! And to think, he turned on the whale noises to quiet you!

Only when he moved you to his bed did you calm down!

(You could still hear the whale noises through the baby monitor.)

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All too soon, you finished napping. Your father put on a soccer game. You like to watch soccer games.

Were you mollified?

You were not.

You wriggled and wriggled, insistent on this bizarre posture for your feeding:

You threw your pacifier across the room.

Your father rearranged the furniture to find that pacifier. Did he find it? He did not.

And when your mother came home, were you overjoyed? You were not.

Good and bad things

Another blessing for the quarantined:

“90 Classic Looney Tunes Cartoons You Can Watch Right Now.”

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Alas, the economy is wrecked. Tuition-dependent higher education is wrecked, or will be. Job prospects in my field are wrecked.

I’m sad that, on Monday, Karin will return to her job. It’s been wonderful to have her at home. But I’m grateful that she’s employed for the foreseeable future.

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I’m glad I didn’t land any of those nine-month “visiting instructor” jobs I applied for last year. Not only would I’ve had to endure a disruptive spring term, but Karin and Samuel and I would’ve been forced to self-quarantine in a strange college town, in some dinky, overpriced apartment. I’m glad we live rent-free in an unmortgaged house owned by my parents. We pay property taxes and utility costs, but they’re quite bearable.

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We do have some onerous maintenance to do (in addition to what was predictable). Our front yard seems to be at the end of a wind tunnel. It captures a lot of trash, which we spent much of this warm day picking up.

We left Samuel bundled up on the porch so he could watch us. The wind still got to him, though, and he was displeased.

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On Thursday, I enjoyed a video conference with Josh, a dear school friend with whom I hadn’t talked in many years.

Last night, Martin’s parents contributed some home-cooked meals.

Today, our friend Sarah stopped by to give us some children’s books, as well as protective masks that her husband, Brandon, had bought for us at the Farmer’s Market.

April’s poem

… is “Acquainted with the Night.”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain – and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(Robert Frost)

Stir-crazy, pt. 2

Happy Easter. A strange Easter. A cartoon in my Facebook feed shows Jesus emerging from the tomb, peering out from behind the stone; a police officer threatens to ticket Him lest He spread disease. (By this point, Jesus surely is immune; but who’s to say His R0 must be zero?)

We turn, increasingly, to the Internet, and it responds with some generosity. On YouTube, we watch sermons, and FIFATV makes available classic matches. Spotify now permits the streaming of these calming albums:

• Mylo, Destroy Rock & Roll;
• Ulrich Schnauss, Far Away Trains Passing By.

(Tonight, Samuel sleeps to Marvin Gaye and the bird and the bee.)

Old churchgoing ladies have mailed cards and money to us without our asking. Other people have brought food. One brought a bag of apples – which we seldom eat; Karin sauced them. Another person lent a rake for yard work. In the back yard, where I’ve yet to even set foot, twigs accumulate from the trees, and the grass grows after rainstorms. Then the weather cools again.

Beethoven at bedtime

Our flimsiest bookcase is in the bedroom. Should Mishawaka’s earth shake at night, I’ll be pummelled by the novels of Dorothy Sayers. Some of them – The Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night – are rather large.

(Josephine Tey’s books also are on the highest shelf.)

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Less bulky but also forceful is Beethoven at Bedtime, which Karin & I play to lull Samuel to sleep. On a good night, he’ll lose consciousness by the third track, “Piano Concerto No. 5 in E Flat Major” (which I know from Picnic at Hanging Rock).

This evening, however, he protests through most of the album. Karin turns on the “mood” light. I know that trick, too, protests Samuel, and he bleats all the louder.

And then something appears hilarious to him. He laughs and laughs.

Finally, he sleeps to Joe Baker’s Sound of Summer Rain.

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I continue to apply for work (usually after Samuel has gone to sleep). My current effort is directed toward a college in Nevada. The campus has three regular faculty and twenty adjunct lecturers. Onsite teaching is done after hours in a high school building. I would be delighted to get this job.

Quarantining, pt. 3

I’m glad to report that vol. 1 of the Strangers and Brothers omnibus has been delivered. So now I have the set.

In vol. 1’s preface, C.P. Snow says that this is the series’s definitive edition: the order of the books and some of the language have been corrected. I’m pleased about this and about the lovely typesetting done in Monotype Ehrhardt.

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I must read at least six more books this month to meet my yearly quota. I’m finishing the short books I’ve already begun, like H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man.

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Infection-wise, Karin & I remain symptomless.

Samuel is much better, though he’s taken to squawking most of the day, like a pterodactyl. He hates to drink his medicine.

His urine is uninfected, the doctor says. Now we await the result of his COVID-19 test.

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A masked man delivered a pizza to our house. He noticed the t-shirt I was wearing.

“Did you go to ——— High School?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “But I did work there some years ago. And it’s where my wife attended.”

“I went there,” he told me. “Class of 1990.”

“Well, then, you’re ten years older than I am.”

“You’re thirty-eight?”

“That’s right. I wouldn’t have guessed you were so old.”

“Thank you!” he said.

“Well, you are wearing a mask.”

In this lonely time, I think people just want other people to talk to.

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One of our extroverted former pastors is using Zoom to set up 45-minute video conferences so that his friends can talk to him. Today, Karin & I had a conference with him to show him our new son.

I reminded him that he said he’d take me out for coffee once I completed the Ph.D.

Several other people have made similar promises. It gives me a perverse pleasure to remind them during this quarantining time. (Right now, of course, my claims are unenforceable.)

Quarantining – for real, this time

– has begun. Karin is joining in.

Yesterday, we took Samuel to the doctor – he was still feverish – and learned that his temperature was higher than we’d realized (our thermometers have been erratic).

He was tested for the seasonal flu. The result was negative. He also was tested for COVID-19. That result will become available after one week. He also gave a urine sample. It will be tested for associated infections, and the results will become available on Tuesday.

No matter what the tests show, we three are strictly required to stay at home for fourteen days. The doctor gave us this letter (one copy for each of us):

So: Karin will stay at home from work. She’ll also receive 80 hours of pay, thanks to a law that went into effect on April 1. (Had we taken Samuel to the doctor before April 1, Karin wouldn’t have qualified for this pay.)

Samuel has been prescribed flu medicine though he probably doesn’t have the flu. The medicine is meant to deal with other infections. And it does seem to be helping: his temperature has dropped, and he’s much happier.

If Samuel does have the COVID-19, then Karin & I almost certainly have it, too. Sunday is the last day we can expect to notice symptoms. Until recently, we noticed nothing. Today, Karin & I have sticky throats. We hope it’s just because we slept in until about eleven o’clock and our airways accumulated a bit of gunk.

Actually, now that we’re so strictly quarantined, it’d be fine if we did have the COVID-19 (provided our symptoms were no worse than this).

We watched an episode of House, M.D. The patient died, which didn’t bode well.

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Update (Saturday): Our throats have felt better since this morning. I did wake up after a wild dream about having to drain somebody else’s basement. When the water receded, I saw that the basement was full of weightlifting equipment.