"You can never go home, Oatman. But I guess you can shop there."

One of my favorite films of all time is Grosse Pointe Blank, a movie in which the male protagonist "goes home" for his ten-year high school reunion. For those of you who haven't seen the film in a while, John Cusack's character Martin Blank returns to his affluent suburban hometown outside of Detroit. His old girlfriend still lives there, as do a number of the people who seem to have figured prominently into the social world of his high school. Of course, he hasn't seen or heard from any of them in ten years and he vanished mysteriously on prom night. Plus, Blank gets to tell everyone that he's a professional killer at the reunion. What could be better?

Of course, it's impossible to "go home" like Cusack's character does, especially if one's "hometown" is an affluent suburb. For instance, if I were to "go home" to Bethel Park, I would find only one of my friends who figured prominently into my high school social world still living there. I would find that, in some cases, even people's parents have moved away. While I would still be able to drive around using all the back roads and recognize the landmarks, the place would not be anything like the home that Martin Blank finds ten years later in Grosse Pointe because I would know hardly anyone besides my parents and my lone friend who still lives there.

But Grosse Pointe Blank at least makes a nod to this by locating the ill-fated Ultimart on the lot where Blank's childhood home once stood. And his mother has gone senile. That, at least, is something. In addition to the line that is the title of this post, there's also the scene in which Blank tells Oatman, his shrink, that he doesn't know what he has in common with "those people" anymore and that he thinks the reunion would be depressing. "They've all made themselves a part of something and they can talk about what they do," he says, "and what am I going to say? I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How have you been?" So while the film certainly acknowledges the idea of change making a homecoming impossible, that homecoming still takes place and is still meaningful because Blank does end up re-uniting with his old girlfriend and seeing some people he used to know.

Perhaps the filmmakers can get away with this precisely because of the 10-year reunion, an event that could explain the lingering presence of so many old-school "pointers." There's Paul, who still lives in town and now sells real estate, Bob, who owns a BMW dealership, Ken, who seems to be some kind of lawyer, and of course Debi, who works at a local radio station. So even the people in the reunion seem all to have stayed in town. But it's with Debi that the most convenient "going home" twist takes place. Since a fire took place in her apartment, she's now living at home with her father, in her old bedroom which looks pretty much the same as it did in high school. So Martin Blank gets to visit her there, in that museum of personal history. Then he gets to pick her up at her father's house for the reunion to make up for standing her up on prom night to join the army. And to top it all off, he gets to save her father's life in that very home. Talk about "going home" and being able to sort things out. I wonder how things might have been different if she'd still been living in her own apartment when Martin returned to town.

Still, I'm left with one thought. Of course I love Grosse Point Blank because it's so absurd and funny yet still true on some kind of base level. But where's the movie in which some guy goes home to his affluent suburban town and finds that no one he knows is there and that the place means absolutely nothing to him now? Isn't that, after all, the fate of most of those kind of places for the people who grow up there?

In the beginning, there was High Fidelity

Clearly, the logical place to start something like this is that film from the year 2000, that film entitled High Fidelity. Even if it didn’t bring about as original material the idea that what we read, listen to, and watch is important, certainly it gave a certain cinematic presence to it, or articulated it in ways the rest of us didn’t imagine. Its top-five lists and constant references to popular movies and music place it in the same genre as this potentially ill-fated blog. Without the popular culture surrounding it, the film High Fidelity couldn’t have existed in any meaningful way.

When I think actively about this movie, which I frequently do, I can’t help pondering the scene near the beginning of the film in which Rob and Dick are listening to “the new Belle & Sebastian” in the record store when Barry barges in and replaces Belle & Sebastian’s melodious melancholy with a mix tape populated by some kind of offensive 80s-sounding pop. Before Barry barges in, Dick lovingly and curiously mentions that what he and Rob are listening to is, in fact, “the new Belle & Sebastian.” I can’t help remembering at this point, from my own experience, Carolyn C’s awareness of said band in high school, and her presenting to several of us that album cover of “Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant,” on which a woman seems to interrogate some manifestation of her own reflection. At any rate, I can recall Carolyn playing this music for us, and I can recall feeling as the result of this band’s work the same sort of comforting, homelike presence which Dick and Rob clearly experience in that early morning, workaday scene of High Fidelity. But then Barry comes in with his offensive mix tape, representing the mass of mainstream culture who have no appreciation for the harmonies of something like Belle & Sebastian. During that era, in the mid to late nineties, neither Carolyn nor I could very well have gone to school and talked to anyone about Belle & Sebastian. Bethel Park and Peters Township are not communities suited to the appreciation of that sort of cultural pleasure.

But apart from the Belle & Sebastian scene, the thing I revisit most frequently in High Fidelity has to be the scene featuring Rob standing outside, nearly under the L in the Chicago rain, yelling “Charlie! You fucking bitch! Let’s work it out!” toward his ex-girlfriend’s condensation-filled window. I’ve visited JJ and Megan’s place in Chicago and gone places on the L many times, and this scene seems to encapsulate that quintessentially Chicago experience while at the same time paying respect to the hurt everyone has felt at the breakup of some significant relationship. JJ and I have, at intervals too frequent to enumerate, recited this line to one another, albeit with mostly humorous intentions. Still, it’s at least a second something that resonates with the film’s audience, and this constitutes a presence in viewers’ minds that most films can’t claim to generate.