This work parodies a famous scene from the 1983 film Risky Business, in which Tom Cruise plays the only son of an upper-middle-class American couple named Joel Goodson, who dances in a shirt and underwear when alone at home. Pfeiffer’s work recreates the film’s living room set with an actor resembling Cruise performing a distorted version of the iconic scene with the character having continuous convulsions. It references American poet William Carlos Williams’ 1923 line “The pure products of America go crazy” from his poetry collection Spring and All, iconographically depicting contemporary desires symbolized by the American middle class.
