RELATIONAL INTIMACY IN JERRY MCGUIRE

Conflict and Communication in "Jerry McGuire"

This paper examines some of the key emotional issues that are raised by the plot and characters in the movie "Jerry Macguire", looking especially at the concept of relational intimacy. This paper argues that, like many artifacts of popular culture, this movie presents a perspective on love and intimacy that is not only pragmatically difficult if not absolutely impossible to achieve but that is also (if it were to be achieved) emotionally harmful because it depicts relationships and intimacy as something that are required to complete a person rather than something that a complete person may work to acquire.

Love would be difficult enough if we didn't have to battle against cultural stereotypes of what love should (but cannot) be. The 1996 movie "Jerry Macguire", starring Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr. and RenTe Zellweger, provides an excellent example of the ways in which popular culture helps to create and to reinforce notions of love that are not only realistically impractical but are also - for as long as one can carry them out - most likely to be emotionally harmful.

In order to understand why this is so, a brief synopsis of the movie is in order. The Jerry Macguire of the title (played by Cruise) is - at the beginning of the movie - a figure presented to us as someone to be envied. He is per