He Completes She

With all the laughable antics of Cuba Gooding Jr. and dramatic close-ups of Tom Cruise, it is easy to forget that at the heart of the movie Jerry Maguire is a story of a budding romance between two people. Tom Cruise’s hot-shot career-focused sports agent Jerry is contrasted by Renée Zellweger’s sweet, passionate and nervous Dorothy Boyd, which plays off of Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s notion that the “sex comedy” highlights that “all men and all women [are] perpetually in conflict because nature had set them up – or society had inspired them – with different goals” (38). Accordingly, it is easy to see that throughout most of the film, Jerry’s focus revolves around money, management and saving his career. On the other hand Dorothy, who in lapse of her senses had left her job to follow Jerry, is always worried about providing for her son Ray and having a secure livelihood – for example, when she leaves the company with him, her first question is on health care coverage. The two show a clear difference in their worldly concerns and life goals.

However, in the end the film seems to suggest that by love can be achieved by having the two sexes realizing they need each other – or more specifically, having one particular sex confess that they need the other. This notion is slightly warped in the film from the conventional sexual roles because it is distinctively the male who must admit he needs the female. Dorothy leaves Jerry when she feels he is being emotionally distant in their marriage, and so he carries on with his job. The last scene of the movie has Jerry returning to her, professing that their little company had a big night, but that it didn’t feel “complete” because she wasn’t there. And of course, the infamous line “you complete me” speaks to this idea that without her, he is nothing. He has realized that the career, the fame, the money are insignificant to being happy with her. However, she tells him to shut up and that he “had [her] at hello”, which suggests that she already knows she needs him. She doesn’t need to state that he completes her, because that notion is already internalized by both of them. So it is the man’s journey that is the focal point of the film.  Even the film’s poster highlights this idea: “Everybody loved him… Everybody disappeared. The journey is everything.” No immediate reference is given to her or how a woman will play into his “journey”. In fact, if the tagline is to be believed, and “everybody disappeared”, then how should we feel about the fact that while watching the movie, it is clear that she sticks by him, for the most part, throughout the entire course of events, and doesn’t ever truly disappear? Her character arc seems inconsequential to his, as if it is more noteworthy for the man to realize the errors of his way, find love and have these things called emotions than it would be for the female.

 This plays fantastically well with Simone de Beauvoir’s remark in The Second Sex about the line in Rapport d’Uriel that “man can think of himself without woman…[but] She cannot think of herself without man” (3). Later in her essay, de Beauvoir says that woman “is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another” (5). I posit that the film takes this perspective, but twists it to show it from the man’s point of view. Before Jerry returns to Dorothy, he has found success and happiness in his career, and yet his character arc leaves him with the feeling that this experience is not whole. What is missing is her, the female in the equation, the counterpart to his being. He may not fully see things from her perspective – for after all, even “the most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman’s concrete situation” (de Beauvoir 9) – but at least by the end, he has realized he does need her to make him a complete man. The film ends with the two of them happy, having found a balance in their lives.



Word Count: 693

Works Cited

de Beauvoir, Simone. Introduction: Woman as Other. The Second Sex. 1949. Printed Excerpt.

McDonald, Tamar Jeffers. Chapter 3: The Sex Comedy. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (Short Cuts). USA: Columbia University Press, 2007. Printed Excerpt.