Tuesday, October 31, 2017
What if the Grenade Had Not Gone Off?
The movie "Trust", by Hal Harley, often shows Matthew, one of the protagonists contemplating suicide. Matthew's weapon of choice is a grenade brought back from the Vietnam war by his abusive father. Throughout the story there is this assumption that the grenade is fully functional and that functionality is actually vital to the story. After watching the grenade fail to explode immediately once Matthew pulls the pin I could not stop wondering how different the film would have been had the grenade not been functional.
This idea took me to two different views of the film. One in which the audience knows the entire time that the grenade does not work, and one in which the audience finds out at the same time as Matthew that the grenade doesn't work in the final scenes of the film. For clarification, the grenade does in fact work and ends up causing Matthew to be arrested for detonating it in his former workplace, a computer factory.
In my first alternate movie reality I imagined the movie as a comedy in which all of the long scenes where Matthew holds the grenade as some sort of cop out or escape from society as almost comedic. It would show his futility against the system that America has created and would completely change the dynamic of the story.
More importantly though I imagined the second scenario. One where I had no idea what would happen when Matthew finally pulled the pin at the computer factory. What would happen as literally nothing happened and he was faced with the reality that his life was changed forever and for such a aimless cause. Then I realized that it already was. The factory may have exploded but years from then, few people would even think of Matthews crazy act of rebellion against the system. Matthew would effectively prove that society doesn't care if your an individual. Matthew might be placed in a prison but the vast majority of society will forget about him, and business will still be conducted and people will still shy away from their individuality. I liked the movie a lot and I also enjoyed the real ending but thinking about the alternate one diminished all that I thought Matthew had accomplished.
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I really was curious as to where you were going with this post, and once you shared your second scenario I couldn't agree more. I think that if this was the case, the movie would be a complete depiction of The Stranger. The only thing that was revealed to Matthew with the explosion of the grenade was that he had feelings for the girl, and that he actually cared. If he knew the grenade was fake, perhaps the characters would have changed their view on life. But now that Matthew is going to prison, he will continue to see society as he did before.
ReplyDeleteI think the grenade going off is interesting, though. Like, the first layer to it is representative of the fact that actions have consequences, potentially dangerous consequences, but even those typically have no global effect. Like, on a small scale, Matthew goes to prison and the factory is damaged. But what else? Even things we view as worst-case scenarios usually have very short-reaching and meaningless implications.
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