Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)

directed by George Armitage

Mike Scalise

The Grosse Pointe Blank scene I still think about most follows one of the scenes I love the least. It’s right after the gunfight in an Ultimart convenience store between Martin Blank (hitman facing a quarterlife crisis), and one of the film’s many antagonists, Felix La Pubelle (hitman happy with his career choices, presumably). La Pubelle has tracked Blank to his affluent hometown of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, on orders to snuff him out for mistakenly killing a client’s dog during a job a few months back. Blank’s back home for the first time in a decade to kill a person too, but also, on the request of his very reluctant therapist, to attend Pointe High’s ten-year reunion for the Class of 1986. Upon arrival, Blank becomes too deafened by existential static to commit to either thing, and in a tailspin he retreats to the Ultimart, which he’s just learned rose up in place of his demolished childhood home thanks to a real estate deal his old stoner buddy Paul Spericki brokered in an attempt to “get off the sidelines” and “join the working week.” La Pubelle follows, and as the young Ultimart store clerk mows down demons in the arcade version of Doom II, Motorhead pours through his headphones, keeping him unaware of the actual gunfire unfolding around him between our two hitmen, shredding every Slim Jim in the store until La Pubelle tosses a brick of C-4 in the customers-only microwave and vanishes, leaving the Ultimart to face certain detonation.

Grosse Point Blank bets its success on the premise that the working week that we leave the sidelines to join keeps us so numb to the vast reaches of global power that we can’t comprehend the deadliest enforcers of that power, even when they return home to us, wearing a black-on-black suit. In almost every scene, that bet pays off. As Blank encounters person after person from his abandoned past, his candor (“I’m a professional killer”) is swallowed by the noise of small talk (“do you have to do post-graduate work for that?”). Blank’s assistant, Marcella, spends half of a scene tearing into an ammunition seller about a missing order of 9-millimeter subsonic, then spends the other half the scene tearing into a friend about the dangers of a boring soup. The promotional pen gifted to Blank by an old classmate-turned-lawyer (“for top shelf clients”) becomes the weapon he uses, minutes later, to kill off poor Felix La Pubelle. The deadpan of Grosse Pointe Blank is more than just a delivery style. It’s a worldview. It asks two different-seeming versions of America to share one space, then commits to wringing all it can from the droll spell cast by the unlikely collaboration.

But the Ultimart showdown is one of a few scenes where the spell doesn’t quite work. The conceit stretches too far. The metaphor is too labored. The staging is too clever. But it’s a productive failure, if only because of what comes next, after Blank and the clerk escape the explosion, both of them lying on the grass outside the Ultimart, watching it burn.

“What’d you do that for?” the clerk says.

“It’s not me,” Blank tells him, which we’ve heard before. “You alright?”

The clerk shoves him.

“No! I’m not alright!” he says. “I’m hurt. I’m pissed. Gotta find a new job!”

I’ve repeated that last line to people for so long, and when I rewatch Grosse Pointe Blank, which I do often, it’s the line I wait to hear. It’s taken me over two decades, but I think I finally understand why.

*

I was eighteen when Grosse Pointe Blank was released, the same age as Martin Blank when he sat in a rented tuxedo on prom night, so frightened by his moral shortcomings that he left that very night to join the military. When I saw it in a theater, I was a newly graduated member of the McKeesport High School Class of 1996, frightened by my own shortcomings, utterly unsure of how to take my life’s next step: college. My mother had never attended. My father failed out before finishing his first year. Unlike the students of Grosse Pointe, the success stories from my western Pennsylvania mill town were role players on NFL rosters or rappers who managed a one-hit wonder. If people went on to college they rarely went far, or stayed long. My imagination was so muffled that I could only manage to see college as a destination, not a gateway. Any future proved impossible to picture. It kept me up nights, alone, raiding my parents’ liquor cabinet, petrified to tears by a world I had zero ways of knowing, and what that new world might make of me.

So while Martin Blank found a CIA-sponsored program for people with a “moral flexibility,” I found the deadpan of Grosse Pointe Blank. I’d already learned, in my teens, to cauterize my erratic temper and unwelcome sensitivities with self-deprecating jokes. How difficult could it be to indulge the worldview that any future was a profoundly silly thing to want? How could the blunt force of college, or anything after, annihilate me if I’d already rendered a final judgement on every possible aspect of it?

And yet: being deadpan required incredible amounts of work. It meant studying the power makeup around me, embedding within it, then subverting it—usually for an audience of folks who built that power, or deeply benefited from it. Attend the keg parties but only as the type who doesn’t do keg parties. Take the shitty internship at the corporate exploiter, but talk constantly at work about the short story you’re writing about a guy who takes a shitty internship at a corporate exploiter. “I want to start a movement against movements,” I joked to friends, and I remember being so proud of the pantomime that I could have convictions, if I chose to. It’s not me, every one of my actions said, without once attempting to pinpoint or understand who I was or worse, who I could become.

The revelation that an aesthetic choice made in a 1997 action comedy failed to scale up to a useful life strategy will surprise zero people. I stumbled through college as I feared I would, same through early adulthood. A deadpan outlook helped me socially for a time, sure, and sometimes professionally too. But subversion depends on shared familiarity. An intimacy with routine. Deadpan is not a critique of the norm but the norm’s counterweight, and it thrives in the shadow of privilege. It’s only when one gains access to everything that they can render it all absurd, even if they hail from a dead mill town. And as I’ve aged, the idea of a shared norm has become such an unlikely reality, especially in the world of writers, which beckons those, like me, who grapple with lifelong tensions of self that are widespread and wholly unique. It became clear that maintaining a posture of detachment meant, quite simply, that I wasn’t being present for the people who mattered most to me. “I can never tell if you are joking or being serious,” I heard often enough as I neared middle age. I started to wonder if I was even capable of the latter.

*

My viewings of Grosse Pointe Blank these days are far more empathetic. In 1997 its characters were adults from my near-distant future. Now, they’re young people from my near-distant past, playing through a gauntlet of anxieties I’ve somehow waded through (or waited out), which of course renders them a little silly and dated and overblown now. But I have a deeper appreciation for one character: the Ultimart clerk. In a movie so impressively hermetic in tone and execution, he stands alone, untouched by any of it, his presence almost a critique of the film itself. He’s the only character who fails to fall under Martin Blank’s miserable spell, meeting it instead with honesty and directness. He is without posture. His big line—I’m hurt. I’m pissed. Gotta find a new job—is a rare declaration of firm awareness, somehow, of the world he lives in and what he needs from it, as the clerk chooses to walk away from the deadpan hitman and his deadpan movie, wearing a T-shirt with a map of America sketched on it, labeled YOU ARE HERE.

Mike Scalise is the author of the memoir The Brand New Catastrophe (Sarabande).