The Disappearance of Home

During the middle weeks of August 1997, I lived well. My friends had copious amounts of fun simply by sitting around someone's house and, in the parlance of those times, "enjoying each other's company." This might have involved capture the flag in Carolyn's back yard, listening to Joe narrate the muted Discovery Channel documentary on the wildebeest, or even deciding to go out and get the "weggie patch pizza" at Applebee's. And I had Janelle, that girl I loved madly and could just look at for hours without ever becoming bored. So things were pretty good in those last days of my seventeenth year, but then everything essentially vanished. It's that period of change that I'm interested in right now, that period which takes place many times over the course of an average American's life. Everyone moves, meets different people, loses touch with some, acquires entirely new sensibilities with which to relate to the world, and can never go back on any of these changes. In Anywhere But Here, Natalie Portman does a tremendous job of capturing that period in her role as Ann August. Although many people don't like that film because of the liberties it takes with the adaptation of Mona Simpson's fabulous novel, I think it's a pretty decent movie.

Ann's mother Adele (Susan Sarandon) decides that the two of them need to move to California to escape the "nothing town" of Bay City, Wisconsin. Of course, the irony is that Bay City, in an early flashback where Adele buys the Mercedes to take to California, is portrayed as something of a lush, green dreamland while Adele and Ann drive through dry, uninhabited scrubland in Utah. In Bay City, the original owner walks out of his cozy-looking home and over his soft lawn with a beer in his hand to show the car to Adele and Ann. A sprinkler is audible in the background. One thinks, during that flashback, of the so-called "American Dream," and Natalie Portman does dejection extraordinarily well to convey how upset she is over her mother's constant ramblings about leaving town. In Utah, Ann says to Adele, "This is like being kidnapped; you don't understand that, do you?" She's left her entire life behind in Bay City. She has friends, family, and familiar surroundings there, but is forced to leave.

I suppose, in retrospect, that I wasn't forced to leave Bethel Park or the Pittsburgh area as Ann was forced to leave Bay City, but I chose to go to school nearly 2100 miles from home in part because I wanted to save the image I had of that place and that time. I knew that if I stuck around, others would move away, and everything would change around me and leave me behind. By leaving for Missoula, an entirely new place in which I knew no one, I could maintain that home in my head. That's the quintessential part of the period of change I'm talking about: preservation of the image of home. While that image was inevitably depressing in my new location because of its inaccessibility, I felt as though I'd die without it. Similarly, Ann tries to maintain the image in her head on numerous occasions in Anywhere But Here, and is quite upset at her failure.

In the California diner where Adele fortuitously meets her real estate agent friend, Ann calls her grandmother's house in Bay City, but Adele interrupts her before anyone picks up. Ann leaves the diner for the impersonal, uncaring street outside and can't prevent herself from crying. Later in the film, she makes an illicit phone call to her cousin from a house she visits with her mother as a potential homebuyer. These types of incidents lead to an increasingly successful image of home in Ann's head, though inevitably that fight for preservation is a no-win kind of deal. Those incidents do remind me of the ridiculous phone bills I ran up calling Janelle in her Michigan Tech dorm room and the crazy amount of time I spent emailing everyone else, but like the movie suggests, no one can ever really "go home" after this kind of period of change.

Ann's cousin Benny dies late in the film, so Ann and Adele head back to Bay City for the funeral. In those scenes, the houses in Bay City don't look cozy; they look cramped and dull. The lighting isn't as bright, and it's raining. Ann's extended family is fighting. Nothing is the same. Similarly, when I go back to the South Hills these days, the place just doesn't look like it used to. Now, instead of the sprinklers and the nice-looking lawns, I notice all the Republican campaign signs in the yards, the gratuitous SUVs in every driveway, and the complete lack of sidewalks so that no one can safely walk anywhere. And just like Benny vanishes from Ann's Bay City, if you Google Janelle, you won't find anything, and no one I know has heard from her in years.

Uma Thurman in an ice fishing hut...what could be better?

If I'm going to talk about "going home" movies, or high school reunion movies, it's clear that I cannot neglect Beautiful Girls. Of course, the "going home" that takes place for Timothy Hutton's character is almost wholly different from what Martin Blank experiences in Grosse Pointe Blank. In Beautiful Girls, Willie (Hutton's character), goes home to a small town that seems to be populated almost entirely by his old friends from high school. He has remarkably interesting conversations with these people about all sorts of bigtime topics, and there are still old conflicts playing out that date from the high school days. And, as a huge bonus, this teenage girl named Marty (played by Natalie Portman) now lives in town and an old friend's cousin Andera (played by Uma Thurman) is visiting. So not only is Willie's old world still intact and populated by these interesting people from the good old days who still seem to have endless things to talk about together, there's the novelty of two new and equally interesting people. This sort of thing might seem a bit unrealistic to me because my hometown is completely devoid of such things, but perhaps it still exists in small towns like the one in Beautiful Girls. To me, the world of this film is at once quite depressing yet wonderfully comforting and appealing.

The depressing part, I think, starts with what Willie's childhood home has become. His father seems practically comatose (see the scene in which he asks Willie to watch some golf with him), and his brother is caught up in some sort of vulgar, adolescent funk. As Marty says, Willie's brother is missing "that thing that having a mom gives you." Clearly, this isn't much of a home to come back to. And then, there's the twofold reason for Willie's visit home. His career as a pianist in New York City isn't going well enough, and he's been offered a sales position. So he's come home to ponder "what he's going to do for the rest of his life" as well as whether or not he's going to marry this girl he's been seeing seriously in the City. I suppose that this mid-life crisis-like situation is rather depressing as well, but at least Willie has this fully-realized world of the past to revisit in order to decide what to do.

And what a great world it seems to be. I wish I could go back to Bethel Park and have such great conversations with interesting people I used to know from high school. One of the particular conversations from Beautiful Girls that sticks out in my head is the one between Willie and Paul (played by Michael Rapaport) during which Paul goes off on his monologue about supermodels. He says that they're bottled promise, promise of a new day, promise of a better time, etc. Of course, this comes off in the film sounding creepy and pathetic, but I seem to remember something about this from my college and high school days. In my bedroom or dormroom, I always had a picture or two of Natalie Portman up on my walls. I'd look at it for something like inspiration. She's so damn cute in some of those pictures, and then she's remarkably talented and intelligent as evidenced by her body of film work and her matriculation at Harvard. At the risk of sounding awfully tacky and sentimental, those little pictures of her got me through some tough study days and rough times. Am I the only one who's ever actually practiced this sort of quintessentially American thing? Did any of you do something similar? So anyway, for me, Natalie Portman served something like the same function that Paul's supermodels served for him in Beautiful Girls. Is that creepy?

And also, what about the little ice fishing date Willie has with Andera? They have this great conversation about how the grass is always greener on the other side relationshipwise, and I can't help thinking that it's true on some level. Familiarity seems to breed discontent for so many, such that after a person is in a stable relationship for a long time, he or she begins to get bored or "look around" as they say. But there's always someone else looking at that significant other of which person A is bored, thinking, "wow," and wishing he or she were in the so-called boring situation. But probably having that nice, crisp little conversation with Uma Thurman in an ice fishing hut would keep any "bored" man sane and happy.

"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?