The Reunion Film Cycle
Four American films made between the mid-to-late 1990s used high school reunions as plot devices for exploring Generation X's experience’s of young adulthood.
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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal development.
Content warnings: Trauma; Violence; Murder; Mental illness; Child sexualisation.
Spoiler alert: This is an analysis of the films Beautiful Girls, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Grosse Pointe Blank, and Since You’ve Been Gone and their themes, and as such reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.
Between 1996 and 1998, four films were released that centred on tenth-anniversary high-school reunions: Beautiful Girls, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Grosse Pointe Blank, and Since You’ve Been Gone. Depictions of high school reunions on film and television, across a range of genres, were not new, but had previously focused mainly on the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation of Americans.
Though generically varied, the school reunion mini-cycle of the mid-to-late 1990s was focused on Generation Xers, and their experiences of their first decade of adulthood. These films offered a vision of traumatic 1980s adolescences and stymied 1990s young adulthoods, but also offered therapeutic narratives centred on re-visitation and resolution. They used reunions and flashbacks as narrative devices, drew upon cultural reference points, and represented geographies of return.
Generation X and the postmodern lifecycle
There are several contexts within which this cycle of films needs to be understood. Firstly, there was the congealing of Generation X as an identity for a cohort of Americans born in the late 1960s and 1970s. Studies during the 1990s highlighted their political apathy and economically vulnerability, as well as their strong sense of solidarity with people of their own age, and hostility towards the preceding generation.1 They cohered, I would argue, to what the Australian sociologist Harry Blatterer described as a postmodernisation of the lifecycle, in which linear linear life-courses were disrupted, amid the erosion of the economic and cultural bases that underpinned adulthood in the Western world after the Second World War.2
Cinema played an important role in the development of a public identity for this group. The film industry responded to teenagers’ increasing importance as an audience group during the 1980s by producing new cycles of teen films. These sympathetically celebrated the values of their teenage protagonists as they were pitted against hostile adults and their institutions, and rejected growing up and the compromises it entailed.3
Secondly, there is the ubiquity of high school reunion as events and of their media representations in the US. These are occasions in which participants construct and present autobiographical narratives, in which they connect past and present experiences, and their self-image with the judgement of their peers. They also frequently involve returns to attendees’ places of origin, which they had often left in search of greater personal freedoms and economic opportunity.4
Thirdly, there is the growth of therapeutic and counselling services during the second half of the twentieth century. British sociologist Mike Featherstone characterised this trend as part of the broader postmodern expansion of the field of legitimate cultural production, and accompanying aestheticisation of life itself.5 More generally, it facilitated wider familiarity with the process described by Sigmund Freud as repeating, remembering and working through past traumatic experiences.6
Finally, there was the increasing presence of the past in popular culture, whether in a genuinely nostalgic or more ironically retro mode, as the twentieth century drew to a close. There were a multitude of converging political, social, and cultural reasons for this, which the three phenomena described form part of. There was also a technological dimension too, with the the proliferation of televisions, camcorders, videos, blank tapes, and compact discs, all of which offered consumers greater opportunity, choice, and agency in capturing, embedding, and recalling their pasts.7
Beautiful Girls
Released in 1996, the Hollywood film Beautiful Girls centred on the return of piano player Willie (Timothy Hutton) to his hometown for his tenth-anniversary high school reunion, at a point when he is at a crossroads in his career and in his personal life, being unsure as to whether to marry his long-term girlfriend Tracey (Annabeth Gish).
He finds one of his old schoolfriends, Mo (Noah Emmerich), happy in his life, being married with two children. Two others, Tommy (Matt Dillon) and Paul (Michael Rapaport), together running a snow-shovelling business (with a third former schoolfriend, easy-going Kev (Max Perlich)), are discontented. Tommy, a former high school football star, is bitter about how his life had turned out since graduation. He is continuing an affair with married former high school girlfriend Darian (Lauren Holly), to the dismay of his current girlfriend, Sharon (Mira Sorvino). Paul, meanwhile, lives with Tommy, having become estranged from long-term girlfriend Jan (Martha Plimpton). It is hinted that Jan wants to have children, whereas Paul is in no rush to. Willie meanwhile also strikes up an unlikely friendship with his father’s 13-year-old neighbour, Marty (Natalie Portman), with whom he becomes increasingly infatuated.
The night of the reunion provides a pivotal moment when Tommy, who has decided not to attend, is instead badly beaten up by Darian’s husband Steve (Sam Rothbard) and his friends. The incident not only prompts Tommy to reflect upon his disappointments and to reconcile with Sharon, but also for Paul to successfully propose to Jan, and Willie to recommit to both his career and to Tracey.
Grosse Pointe Blank
Released in 1997, Grosse Pointe Blank centres on Martin Blank (John Cusack), a professional assassin suffering with disillusionment and still harbouring feelings for Debi (Minnie Driver), whom he had stood up on prom night a decade previously. Martin reluctantly decides to attend his ten-year school reunion, having also been contracted to carry out a hit in his former hometown. He is followed there by two rival hitmen, Grocer (Dan Ackroyd), who was also in contention for the contract, and Felix LaPoubelle (Benny Urquidez), who harbours a grudge against Martin.
Having returned, Martin puts off carrying out the assassination, instead seeking out Debi, now working as a local radio DJ. She firstly grills him live on air as to why he stood her up and then never got back in contact, but then slowly allows him to rekindle their romance, unaware of Martin’s current profession. Martin also remakes acquaintance with Paul (Jeremy Piven), an old schoolfriend.
Martin and Debi attend their reunion together, but while separated from Debi there Martin is attacked by Felix, who he kills after a violent struggle. Debi is horrified when she finds Martin with Felix’s bloody corpse, and flees. Paul then helps Martin dispose of the body. Debi subsequently confronts Martin, whose efforts to rationalise his career choice to her fail.
Martin decides to carry out his final contract and then disband his business, only to realise that the hit is on Debi’s father, Bart (Mitchell Ryan), and that the Grocer intends to beat him to it. Martin rushes to Debi’s family home and rescues them from Grocer, who he kills along with his team of mercenaries in a brutal shootout. He then finally proposes to a startled Debi. The film ends with Martin and Debi driving out of town together.
Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion
In Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, released two weeks after Grosse Pointe Blank, the two title characters are former schoolfriends now in their late twenties and living together. Romy (Mira Sorvino) works as a receptionist at a Jaguar dealership, while Michele (Lisa Kudrow) is unemployed.
When Romy learns from a chance encounter with former classmate Heather (Janeane Garofalo) that their old school is holding a tenth anniversary reunion, she and Michele reflect together on their high school days. This includes their bullying at the hands of cheerleader Christy (Julia Campbell) and her friends, culminating in Romy’s humiliation on prom night by Christy and her boyfriend Billy (Vincent Ventresca). Romy was infatuated with Billy, who mockingly agreed to dance with her at the prom, but instead rode off with Christy on his motorcycle.
Romy and Michele decide to return to their hometown for the reunion, but Romy is embarrassed that their current lives are not that impressive. They decide to try and pass themselves off as successful businesswomen who were responsible for inventing the post-it note. The two friends fall out, however, while travelling to the reunion, after Romy disparages Michele’s intelligence, and Michele Romy’s looks.
They apparently attend the reunion separately, with Michele successfully convincing everyone that it was she alone who invented the post-it. She is reunited at the reunion with Sandy (Alan Cummings), who had had a crush on her at school, and is now a rich inventor. The two later marry, but Michele and Romy remain estranged, even passing up the opportunity to reconcile when Romy is on her deathbed seventy years later. This sequence of events is all subsequently revealed to be a dream Michele has had, after falling asleep in the car.
Romy finds out at the actual reunion that Christy has married Billy, who she says works in real estate, and is pregnant with his child. Romy tells a sceptical Christy and her friends about her invention of the post-it note, only for Heather to turn up and reveal the story to be untrue. Christy then deliberately humiliates Romy by broadcasting the story to the wider reunion. Michele and Romy set aside their differences and together resolved to just be themselves that night.
At that point, Sandy arrives in a helicopter. He and Michele kiss, and then they and Romy, with the entire reunion watching, carrying out an interpretive dance routine to Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time after Time’. Romy then takes revenge for her prom night embarrassment. Billy, who it emerges is a drunkard who works as a labourer for his father, and to whom Christy is unfaithful, asks Romy if she wants to get a room with him. She tells him to book the room and that she will join him, but then instead leaves with Michele in Sandy’s helicopter. The film ends with Romy and Michele running their own boutique, which they have bought with money lent to them by Sandy.
Since You’ve Been Gone
Directed by Kudrow’s Friends castmate David Schwimmer, Since You’ve Been Gone was initially intended for release by Miramax, but ultimately screened on ABC in 1998. It is an ensemble comedy centring on a group of old schoolmates attending their ten-year high school reunion. They include:
Kevin (Philip Rayburn), a paediatrician, who is attending with his wife Molly (Joy Gregory). Kevin is still haunted by the embarrassment of having been beaten up by fellow student Pat (Tom Hodges) at their graduation; he is also increasingly cynical about life and disillusioned with his marriage.
Kevin’s best friend Zane (Joey Slotnick), a gay musician whose most famous song had become a hit for someone else.
Clay (Thom Cox), an angry depressive, and his unassuming best friend Alan (Duncan Shepard), who lives with him and is unemployed.
Holly (Heidi Stillman), a plane crash survivor turned motivational speaker, and her best friend Electra (Laura Eason), a qualified lawyer reduced to working as a bookshop assistant, and desperately seeking love.
Maria (Teri Hatcher), who has returned after moving away to work in Europe, and is lonely behind her affected sophistication.
Grace (Laura Flynn Boyle), a misanthrope with a taste for unpleasant practical jokes, which she proceeds to play on her former schoolmates throughout the night.
Robert (David Schwimmer), who has organised and comperes the event, but is disliked by his former schoolmates, whom he treats obnoxiously.
Over the course of the night, Kevin insults his former classmates about their respective career choices, eventually prompting Pat, now a homeopath, to again strike him. Kevin subsequently reconsiders his cynicism and reconciles with Molly. Zane is required to perform an acoustic version of his best-known record, after Grace deliberately causes a power outage that stops the band from playing, enabling him to quietly take ownership of his success.
Clay also finally finds a degree of happiness with the equally caustic Grace. The two make love, before taking revenge on Robert for his treatment of his former classmates, kidnapping him and leaving him tied up. Alan falls in love with Holly, and impresses one former schoolmate, Jordan (Harry Lennix), into offering him a job. Electra had hoped to find romance with Zane, and is disappointed to find out he is gay, but is at the end asked out by Jordan. Maria unsuccessfully pursues a fling with a barman, but instead finds solace from her loneliness in her rekindled friendship with Holly and Electra.
Reunions as therapy
These plots engaged with Generation Xers’ concerns around job satisfaction and career progression. They also portrayed a conflict between the quest for love and family life on the one hand, and a desire to enjoy the continued freedoms of youth on the other. Many characters in them were implicitly or explicitly identified with certain high school types, their adult selves characterised in relation to these previous roles. Clay in Since You’ve Been Gone, for example, was the former high school rebel whose nihilism was now fully pathologised as mental illness.
Characters in these films are depicted as having at some level been traumatised either during or since their high school days, and therefore bound to repeat certain self-destructive behaviours. In Beautiful Girls, for example, Paul’s bedroom walls are lined with posters of skimpily dressed women – a physical embodiment of his own failure to grow up. When Willie challenges him on this, Paul’s defence encapsulates his preference for youthful idealism and fixation on an unrealised superior future over the hard, present-day compromises of adulthood.
Beautiful Girls allows its male characters to sample the best of both, in ways that at least partly legitimise their misogynistic and objectifying tendencies. They engage for most of the film in juvenile, masculine behaviour, sanctioned by the film’s setting in the same space that they had grown up in. This includes Willie falling platonically in love with Marty, which he confesses to his friend Mo as reflecting his desire not to grow up.8 Ultimately, though, they are put right through their recommitment to heteronormative relationships with their long-suffering, but ultimately patient and tolerant, partners.
High school reunions thus serve as therapeutic interventions for these characters. They facilitate reflection upon what has gone wrong in their lives and offer opportunities to gain closure on or avenge past injustices. These had often occurred during previous rites of passage, such as prom night. Once they have gone through this process, they can progress towards a normative adulthood by grasping career opportunities and finding romantic fulfilment. At the same time, they nonetheless also reaffirm their own generational identity, and continued youth, through the persistence or re-establishment of adolescent friendships.
However, the familiarity of this narrative structure rendered it ripe for parody. Grosse Pointe Blank repeatedly mocks the stereotype of the damaged Generation Xer in need of therapeutic intervention. Martin is perpetually but meaninglessly self-analysing, at one point effectively leading the session he is having with his reluctant and terrified therapist, Dr Oatman (Alan Arkin). The film also belittles the conventions of the high school reunion film by splicing them with a particularly convoluted version of those of the crime film genre.
Romy and Michele…, meanwhile, sends up the trope of advancement towards romantic and vocational fulfilment through the ludicrous intervention of Sandy, which is itself a knowing reference to an earlier film set around a high school reunion, Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). Romy and Michele… ultimately instead reasserts the primacy of friendship and endorses a version of young adulthood that does not need to progress onto anything more meaningful, but instead ought to be enjoyed as and of itself.
The reunion as plot device
The reunion as a ritual was also valuable to filmmakers not only for its recognisability, but also because of its relative succinctness. Films could focus entirely on the reunion itself, as with Since You’ve Been Gone, or provide the denouement to a few days’ build up, as with Romy and Michele… and Grosse Pointe Blank, or take up virtually no screen time at all, with the focus instead being on the several days before and after, as with Beautiful Girls.
Yet precisely because they all represented a comparatively short period relative to running time, these films contained the space to span back ten years and forward into an uncertain future. Beautiful Girls and Since You’ve Been Gone used this space to develop at a relatively slow pace the backstories of and relationships between their ensemble casts. Grosse Pointe Blank instead used it for its intricate experimentation with generic conventions and for its characters’ verbosity.
Romy and Michele… meanwhile, adopted a more temporally non-sequential approach. It firstly had its two protagonists looking through their old yearbook, with individual pictures triggering accordingly snapshot-like flashbacks, to develop their and other characters’ back stories. Later, the audience is unwittingly led into a false flashforward through Michele’s dream, as mentioned above. The preposterous sequence of events she imagined does, however, in some ways foreshadow how the actual reunion plays out.
These episodes disrupt our sense of chronological progression, and our willingness to suspend our disbelief and accept the narrative presented to us in good faith. The film thus encourages viewers to treat cynically its apparent resolution of its characters’ dilemmas. The rejection of the possibility of uninterrupted advancement both through the film’s running time and through the human lifecycle are intrinsically connected.
Returns in time and place
These films made liberal use of popular cultural references to the 1980s (and to a lesser extent the 1970s), including music, television programmes, films, and fashions. In Grosse Pointe Blank, Debi marks the reunion with an ‘All Eighties Vinyl Weekend’ – and the film’s soundtrack more generally comprised alternative, often British music from the mid-1980s, like that used in teen films from the period such as The Breakfast Club (1985) and Pretty in Pink (1986).
These allusions validated the cultural capital and generational identity of their intended audience. They also reduced the past to a series of signifiers to be regarded ironically from the 1990s present – as with Romy and Michele’s comic dance to the earnestly romantic ‘Time after Time’. Of the films mentioned, it was by far the soberest, Beautiful Girls, that made the least use of retro popular cultural reference points. This focused on presenting genuinely emotionally wounded twentysomethings and their melancholy over the irreversible personal loss of their own youth, rather than more generic period simulacra that could be re-manifested at the push of a button.
Apart from Since You’ve Been Gone, set in downtown Boston, the other films in this mini-cycle depicted characters who had, upon entering adulthood, moved from suburbs or small towns to major cities: Willie in Beautiful Girls, who left the fictional Massachusetts working-class town of Ridge Knights, for New York City; Martin in Grosse Pointe Blank, who grew up in the affluent Michigan suburb after which the film was punningly named, and who it is hinted is now based in California; and Romy and Michelle, who left Tucson, Arizona, for Los Angeles.
Suburban and small-town America are depicted as embodying the values of the 1970s and 1980s, of the Baby Boomers, but behind their promise of nuclear family-centred domestic bliss lies personal traumas, broken homes, persisting hierarchies, and frustrated ambitions. New York and Los Angeles, by contrast, encapsulated the mood and values of the 1990s: marked by uncertainty and even moral ambiguity, but also holding out the hope of freedom and fulfilment.
Again, this dichotomy was to varying degrees parodied and subverted. Whereas Beautiful Girls is solemn in presenting Willie’s family unit as having been debilitated by the prior loss of his mother, Grosse Pointe Blank more comically has Martin return to find his childhood home has been converted into a supermarket. Similarly, Romy and Michele’s pretensions of having made it simply by moving to LA are undercut by the reality of their employment situations.
Reflecting on the reunion mini-cycle
During the 1990s, therefore, high school reunions offered a widely recognised plot device, during which stock could be taken of characters’ advancement through the lifecycle within the scope of film or a single episode of a television series. Such films also mined the experiences and values of Generation X. They affirmed their rejection of suburban domesticity, while recognising their rumination over past ordeals and concern over their present circumstances. They also promised the exorcism of personal demons and reassurance over their direction of travel.
Yet by the time Grosse Pointe Blank and Romy and Michele… had been made, the reunion narrative was clearly viewed as ripe for nuanced lampooning, along with the 1980s and its cultural markers more broadly. This was in keeping with a postmodern rejection of chronological progress, especially when it came to the human life-course.
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See Stephen C. Craig and Stephen Earl Bennett (eds.), After the Boom: The Politics of Generation X (Lanham, MD, and London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
Harry Blatterer, ‘The Changing Semantics of Youth and Adulthood’, Cultural Sociology, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2010), pp. 63–79.
See Thomas M. Leitch, ‘The World According to Teenpix’, Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1992), pp. 43–47; Timothy Shary, Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002).
See Keiko Ikeda, A Room Full of Mirrors: High School Reunions in Middle America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Robert Zussman, ‘High School Reunions and the Management of Identity’, Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 19, No. 3 (1996), pp. 225–239; Christine von Reichert, John B. Cromartie, and Ryan O. Arthun, ‘Reasons for Returning and Not Returning to Rural U.S. Communities’, The Professional Geographer, Vol. 66, No. 1 (2014), pp. 58–72.
Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 2nd edn. (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore: Sage, 2007), p. 35.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works, trans. under the general editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), pp. 147–156.
See Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber and Faber, 2011); Elodie Roy, Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015); Will Straw, ‘Embedded Memories’, in Charles R. Acland (ed.), Residual Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 3–15.
Portman was indeed 13 during the time of the film’s principal filming over the spring of 1995. She had previously played a girl with an ambiguous relationship with the eponymous principal character in the 1994 film Léon: The Professional, during the filming of which she had only just turned 12. She subsequently dropped out of playing Juliet in the 1996 film Romeo + Juliet and rejected the title role in the 1997 film adaptation of Lolita. Portman subsequently expressed her discomfort at how heavily sexualised she had been as a child actor.
See: ‘Beautiful Girls (1996): Filming and Production’; ‘Simon Hattenstone, ‘All Things to All Men’, The Guardian (20 Apr. 2007); Leon: The Professional (1994): Filming and Production’; ‘Natalie Portman’; James Ryan, ‘Up and Coming: Natalie Portman’, New York Times (25 Feb. 1996).
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