“It was great the way her mind worked. No guilt. No doubt. No fear. None of my specialties. Just the shameless pursuit of immediate material gratification. What a capitalist.”
I’m getting the impression from watching these movies that there was an incredible tension in the 80s between the revulsion to authority and selling out and the growing cultural understanding that success equaled money. There are a ton of examples in pop culture of young people taking risks that feel adult but aren’t inherently risky. You’re in high school and your overprotective parents are leaving for the weekend? Better take off your pants, crank the bass, and dance around to Bob Seager.
Tom Cruise’s character, Joel, has been taught by his parents, teachers, and friends that one can only pursue pleasure by sacrificing success. In his dreams he fails tests or gets in trouble with his parents (a fate tantamount to “throwing his life away”) because he is pursuing women.
But those pursuits that aren’t driven by passion lead to minimal successes, modest profits, and a general mood and tenor of ambivalence. As Joel says early in the movie, “Doesn’t anyone want to accomplish anything, or do you just want to make money?”
It takes losing everything for him to realize that passion and success can be intertwined, and through doing so he achieves his dreams, literally and figuratively.
This is a classic.
Next up: All The Right Moves
Every Tom Cruise Movie 