#tbt: Five Lessons Grosse Pointe Blank Will Teach You About Attending Your Ten Year Reunion

Grosse-Pointe-Blank-1997-movie-poster

Tony Soprano was a professional killer, but he was also just a man with anxiety issues, and who dealt with said issues by visiting weekly with a therapist. Since Tony was a mobster first and a person second, the therapy sessions on The Sopranos were just a device—what we really wanted was to see the inner-workings of a killer, so having him, say, write in a diary would have been just as effective. Conversely, Martin Blank is a man with anxiety issues, who also just happens to be a professional killer. In Grosse Pointe Blank, the therapy is essential, and it’s the professional killing that’s the device, because really Martin’s issues are pretty universal—at least to a certain late-20’s/early-30’s crowd. His profession provides some really great, really dark humor (not to mention the best slapstick ending since the Marx Brothers), but look past the bullets and the bodies being shoved in furnaces and you’ll find a portrait of a person trying to come to terms with life, whose youth is slipping away, who’s unhappy with his choices, whose once-temporary career is hardening into permanence, who’s trying to balance his work with his principles, who can’t stop thinking about one relationship from forever ago, and who has a complicated relationship with the place he grew up. In other words, a typical American on the brink of his high school reunion.

1. Don’t Talk About Your Job

“I got invited to my high school reunion,” Martin says to his shrink. “I don’t really want to go. I don’t have anything in common with those people anymore. They all have husbands and wives and children and houses and dogs, and, you know, they’ve all made themselves a part of something and they can talk about what they do. What am I gonna say? ‘I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How’ve you been?’” While I haven’t killed anyone with kitchenware, I had the same sentiment last year when I got invited to my own reunion. And again, it isn’t difficult to see why the trials and errors of a hit man—or at least this hit man—are so easy to relate to. That’s what’s smart about Grosse Pointe Blank. Because its protagonist is a killer, he’s unwilling to talk about what he does for a living and how isolated he feels from everyone else, but the film also sees that being an accountant or librarian yields the same uneasy, disconnected feeling. Martin’s good at his job but he can barely remember how he got into it in the first place (“I was loaned out to a CIA-sponsored program, and we sort of found each other…” he explains), and his feelings about the profession itself are about the most accurate way I can think of to describe most of my friends’ feelings about their jobs: “You do it because you were trained to do it, you were encouraged to do it, and after a while, you get to like it.” Not to mention he spends most of the film justifying (as we all do) why he’s doing it in the first place. After all, is saying, “If I show up at your door, chances are you did something to bring me there” that different from saying, “This isn’t really my ‘job,’ I’m just doing this to pay the bills”?

2. Things Are Going to Look Different at Home

Martin’s trip home, too, reminds me of the funhouse-mirror effect I get whenever I visit the place where I grew up. Ten-year reunions are an especially acute torture through the existential time-machine, since you’re just leaving your twenties when you attend, but you’re making a trip back to the place you lived when you were entering them. You end up looking at yourself through the prism of that tumultuous decade of college-sex-love-careers-adulthood, back at the self who didn’t have to deal with any of that stuff because you were just a kid. The film also knows this unfortunate fact, and peppers Martin’s tour through his disintegrated youth with striking details: his childhood home has been replaced by a mini-mart, his former English teacher is still working at the school, his Alzheimer’s-ridden mother can’t remember who he even is, and all of his former high school friends have gotten mundane jobs around town. His former best friend (played by Jeremy Piven), even though he’s a successful realtor now, still pines for the girl he once asked to the prom, and another friend laments (at the reunion itself), “Did you see that all the people on the honor roll are wearing special honor roll ribbons? Like anyone gives a shit that they were on the honor roll ten fuckin’ years ago…”

3. You’re Never Going to be a Teenager. Ever Again.

All the characters are facing a tough tug-of-war between romanticizing the past and resenting it, mainly because they’re too terrified to look at their futures. None of them are all that different from Martin (that’s the joke of the film), but more importantly, he’s not all that different from them (that’s the poignancy). Even Debbie (Minnie Driver), Martin’s former high school sweetheart, hasn’t been able to get over him after all this time, and still works as a local-radio DJ. “If you love something, set it free,” she tells her audience. “If it comes back to you, it’s…broken.” And everyone here seems pretty frightened of attending they’re reunion because they don’t want to be seen as exactly that—broken adults who can’t let go of the past and are still in utero as a result.

4. …But Maybe That’s a Good Thing

But the film does offer a piece of hope, hence the title of this article, in that Martin runs into the one person he actually enjoyed from high school, and was curious to see (and it’s relevant to note that this part was actually based on Cusack’s own, real-life, reunion). She’s an old friend, and she’s brought her baby, and Martin, after having spoken to an hour’s worth of people who can’t stand what’s become of their lives, says, “So what’s it like having kids? Not what it’s cracked up to be, right?” And she smiles knowingly at him and says, “No, it’s way better.” He gingerly holds the baby by the armpits as Bowie & Queen’s “Under Pressure” swells in the background, and he gains an understanding of the idea that, maybe getting older isn’t so bad. That’s the one lesson the film wants you to learn for your own reunion.

5. And Remember…

That, and don’t put your yearbook picture on your nametag.

Ted McLoof

About Ted McLoof

Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.

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