John Cusack and Irony

Irony infects our lives, the way we speak and understand people. It places us at a remove from those we talk to, creating the assumption of a projected negative persona; it alienates us from our real selves and from others.

In Grosse Pointe Blank, Martin returns to his hometown for a high-school reunion, after he disappeared ten years ago. He finds there a certain freedom that comes from the town's seeming detachment from the real world (even though it is constantly being invaded by forces from that world, from Martin's life). Somehow he feels able to tell his old high-school friends about his job as a hired killer, with impunity. He even tells his long lost love Debi. The reactions of these people are always jokes: "Do you get dental with that?", "Do you have to do postgraduate work for that?"

These conversations reveal the inherent awkwardness of all such reunions, and the inevitable "so what do you do now?" question. When Martin's truth-telling breaks social conventions, his friends attempt to dissolve the awkwardness with humour - a classic strategy that never completely works. Awkwardness, as Adam Kotsko has it (watch out for my review soon), shows us not only how conventions can be broken or inadequate: it also shows us that we can live without such conventions, we can break them.

But it's the assumption of irony that comes back to bite Martin. People assume he's joking. So when she finds out that he was telling the truth, that he really is a contract killer, Debi is shocked. "You were joking! People joke all the time about the horrible things they do, they don't do them! It's absurd" In the film's most ironic - and tragic - line, she tells him, "You're a liar."

Irony makes liars of all of us. It is so powerful that, much of the time, we even tell the truth in an exaggerated, ironic way. People assume we're joking even when we tell them the truth, and what emerges is a social contract - a set of ironic conventions - in which we just can't tell the truth.