Ethics of Grosse Pointe Blank
The film Grosse Pointe Blank, written by Tom Jankiewicz, features Martin Blank, a freelance assassin who is starting to become restless with his life. When he is informed of his ten year high school reunion, he returns to his home town to do a job that also happens to be there. He visits Debi, a woman that he has loved since he stood her up on prom night to enlist in the Army. At the reunion, Martin is jumped by a rival assassin, but comes out the victor in their tussle. Debi discovers Martin with the dead body and cannot accept his occupation, even after Martin tries in vain to justify his actions. Discouraged, he opens his assignment in Grosse Pointe and is shocked to see that his target is Debi’s father. With a newfound respect for life, he saves her father from Grocer, who had decided to get the hit himself, and proposes to her. Martin succeeds, and the ending scene shows Debi and him speeding out of town. Grosse Pointe Blank is a movie full of examples of relativistic and consequentialistic ethics. There are examples of cultural relativism, subjectivism, egoism, and utilitarianism that play off of each other throughout the movie.
Cultural relativism is the view that moral beliefs and practices vary with and depend on the human needs and social conditions of particular cultures, so that no moral beliefs can be universally true (Holmes, 19). In other words, cultural relativism is exactly how it sounds. Morality is relative to your culture. In Grosse Point Blank, Martin says a line that is a great example of cultural relativism. In the scene after Martin kills the man at the reunion, he attempts to talk to Debi, who is horrified. He attempts to justify his actions by saying, “If I’m at your door, chances are you did something to bring me there. I mean, everybody’s doing it! It’s like the natural order!” The first phrase of this quote is very hard to classify (it is like situationism without the Christian love), but the second part of that quote fits rather well under the definition of cultural relativism. The argument “Everybody’s doing it!” is one that implies that Martin thinks his killing is right because other people within (and outside of) his culture do it also.
Another example of cultural relativism comes almost directly after the first quote, where Debi says, “How come you never learned that it was wrong, that there are certain things that you don’t do, you do not do in civilized society?” Martin responds, “What civilization are we talking about?” His response is one that implies that he is thinking there are cultures that accept killing. It would be too much of a stretch to assume that Martin’s ethics are based on cultural relativity, as he is merely making a desperate argument from that perspective to keep Debi from leaving him.
Subjectivism is the view that ethics are individually determined by personal feeling or commitment. In other words, morality is based on what one feels is right. A case of relativism within Grosse Pointe Blank is in the scene where Marcella tells Martin of a possible job on a Greenpeace boat. This would be subjectivism because Martin feels that it is wrong. He doesn’t have any further rationalization for it, other than his “scruples”. One would assume that he considers it wrong to kill anyone at Greenpeace because they are an organization known for trying to make the planet a better place and doing good things. One might even say that the way he reacted to her suggestion had a hint of emotivism in it (“No way!”), but that is a discussion for another time.
Another example of relativism is in one of Martin’s key quotes. During the hotel confrontation scene mentioned in the last paragraph, Debi accuses Martin of being a psychopath after Martin says that one grows to like killing after a while. His response is this: “No no no, a psychopath kills for no reason. I kill for money, it’s a job!” Martin feels that the killing he does is moral relative to the killing that a psychopath would. He knows that he is not mentally unstable, so his justification of murder is that he actually has a reason for it. Martin also feels that it is right because unlike a psychopath, his murder actually has a benefit. This point is also why this scene can be argued as egoism on Martin’s part.
Egoism is a consequentialist ethical view that says one should act in a way that promotes the best long-term self-interest. According to egoism, what is right is what is good for oneself. The scene at the end of the last paragraph could be argued as egoism because Martin’s killing is his job. It sustained him and his lifestyle, therefore it was the best for his long-term self-interest, and that made it right in his eyes. It could be argued that Martin is and always will be an egoist because even after he gets a “newfound respect for life”, he is only not killing because it is in his best long-term self-interest to be with Debi. He does not want to be alone for the rest of his life, so he is essentially ‘quitting his job’ so that he doesn’t have to be alone.
Another example of egoism is when Martin goes to see Dr. Oatman, his psychiatrist who refuses to be his doctor. Dr. Oatman thinks that it is unethical to work with Martin because Dr. Oatman is afraid of him, which he says is ‘emotional involvement.’ Dr. Oatman does not want Martin as a patient because Martin could be a potential threat to his life. Therefore, it is in Dr. Oatman’s best long-term self-interest to stay emotionally detached and physically distant from a professional killer.
One more case of egoism is in the same scene, where Dr. Oatman tells Martin he should go to his high school reunion. Dr. Oatman says, “Don’t kill anybody for a few days, see what it feels like.” Dr. Oatman’s motivation was just to keep Martin from killing, which would be good for himself. Dr. Oatman did not know what the outcome would be. He just wanted reassurance that he would not be murdered, but it ended up being good for Martin, and consequently, many other people as well, so it could be argued that Dr. Oatman’s statement was one of utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism is the ethical view that what is moral is what benefits the greatest amount of people. To reiterate the last point made, Dr. Oatman told Martin to not kill for a few days in hopes that he would stop killing completely, which would be in everyone’s best interest. Martin could stop feeling restless, Dr. Oatman could stop being afraid, people would not die, Martin and Debi could be together, etc.
Another small bit of utilitarianism is found in the plan of Grocer’s assassin union. He says, “Work less, make more.” This is a classic example of how utilitarianism is prominent in business settings, especially in today’s society. For whatever reason, whether it be that it does not personally benefit Martin, or that he just does not like Grocer, Martin turns the idea down.
One last example of this ethical view is Martin’s justification for killing. The phrase “If I’m at your door, chances are you did something to bring me there” is utilitarian in nature because it benefits everybody to get rid of the people that make the world a bad place. This is the same rationale behind the work that Martin did for the CIA after they found out about his “moral flexibility”. It is okay to kill people as long as they are ‘bad’ people, since it is best for all people involved.
Consequentialism and relativism play off of each other a lot in Grosse Pointe Blank. Relativism is used very often in the movie to justify characters and their actions, since what they do may not be considered moral by everyone around them. Consequentialism is used because the outcomes are really important in the plot of the story. What happens when Martin gives up killing is obviously crucial to the story. The main character seems to act upon consequentialism with relativistic reasoning for it. For example, as mentioned earlier, Martin kills because it is in his own self-interest (egoism), but when asked to explain why, he says it is because he has grown to like it and that ‘everybody is doing it’ (relativism). Many people are very relativistic in their ethics, so it makes sense that the consequentialists of the world would need to come up with relativistic reasoning (whether it be the actual truth behind the action or not) for the relativists to understand. In Martin’s case, his egoism is not only what kept him killing after he stopped working the CIA, but it is also what brought him out of that lifestyle.
While consequentialism and relativism are often combined in an individual’s ethical system, they often clash, as we see with the confrontation between Debi and Martin at the hotel. Debi feels that it is wrong to kill people (her reaction could be argued as emotivism), while Martin has all kinds of reasoning for his actions. We also see these different ethical views come head-to-head during Dr. Oatman and Martin’s session. Dr. Oatman takes a consequentialist point of view, so if Martin did not decide to go to the high school reunion and stop killing, which was what Dr. Oatman thought was the right thing to do, there would have been a clash between the two men.
In conclusion, someone with a predominately consequentialist ethical system could say that Martin made the right decisions because the outcome of the movie was a happy one. Of course, that is totally ignoring the fact that it was rather unlikely that the filmmakers would end this particular comedy with a bad ending, but for ethics’ sake, the outcome is important. Grosse Pointe Blank offers a wide variety of complex characters and examples of ethical decision-making. The movie shows us how consequentialism and relativism play off of each other and also how they do not work together. It shows the viewers an exaggerated version of the kind of ethical decisions that people make on a daily basis.