Life is Explosive: The Symbolism Behind the Grenade in Trust

For me, one of the most confusing aspects of Trust last Friday was what the grenade that Matthew kept by him at all times. So, in this blog post, I intend to give some definition to it.

First, when Matthew explains why he has the grenade in the first place to Maria, he says he has it "just in case". From here, as well as the movie's climax, it is implied that he keeps the grenade just incase life becomes meaningless to him, causing him to effectively commit suicide. However, due to the nature of the grenade, the explosion could just as easily kill or hurt other people just as easily as it could kill Matthew, leading me to believe that the purpose of the grenade, as Matthew describes it, isn't to kill him: Matthew keeps the grenade to prevent others from following the same path that he did. Theoretically, Matthew could drive people away from a certain building or area by using his grenade - stories of a grenade going off in a place like a factory or house would easily drive people away from that area out of sheer paranoia.

From here, I began to notice a trend between the places where Matthew takes out the grenade and comes close to pulling its pin (or actually pulls it at the end of the film): they are all places where Matthew feels vulnerable and unsatisfied with himself. In both his and Maria's houses, Matthew seems to feel unwelcome and frowned upon by the parents of each household(his father and Maria's mother)  due to the way they treat him (with his father abusing him and Maria's mother treating him like a pest).  On numerous occasions, Matthew undermines the authority of the computer factor he is employed at, implying that he feels that the job wasting his potential and the potential of others, leading him to feel useless and monotonous.

All of these themes are confirmed when Matthew pulls the pin at the end of the film, only for the grenade to have a delayed explosion. In my opinion, this delay, which seems to dictate if the grenade is to explode or not, is supposed to be representative of Matthew's opinion of the meaning of life, with the grenade exploding if he can't find meaning in life and the inverse happening if he can. However, even when he is with Maria, the grenade still explodes, showing that Matthew still doesn't know the true meaning of his life. However, the grenade's delay seems to show that Maria triggered something in Matthew that gave him some semblance of a reason to live. Despite this, Matthew's future is left questionable at the end of the film, with him going to jail. Nevertheless, the grenade's delay still gives hope that Matthew will find meaning in his life, just not with Maria.