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Home Alone, Inheritance, and the "Just World" Fallacy Home Alone is, naturally enough, a representation of class struggle. It plays straight the unfounded paranoias of the bourgeoisie surrounding the lumpenproletariat and their supposed design against the bourgeois family structure, ultimately defending the capitalist conception of inheritance by positing that technological innovation is a heritable trait along the white, bourgeois, male line. Kevin McCallister, the young heir to a family wealthy enough to travel between continents as a matter of course, is accidentally left alone in his suburban home and finds himself besieged by the so-called “Wet Bandits,” desperate members of the US underclass who have been forced by oppressive circumstances into a life of burglary. Kevin’s goal becomes the defense of private property “rights” against these so-called villains; not his own, since as a child he has none, but those of his parents. This exemplifies a bourgeois legal structure in which children, reduced to serfs under the oppressive hold of the American family unit, are nonetheless expected to defend bourgeois freedoms they themselves are denied. The young man quickly resorts to the oldest weapon of the bourgeois against the proletariat: technological innovation. Ultimately, the loss of jobs caused by technological advances was no doubt responsible for the lumpenproletariat status of Harry and Marv in the first place, but here the bourgeois virtue of “innovation,” as embodied in the idealized form of a precocious blond child, is used to deprive the Wet Bandits of their freedom a second time and literally to incarcerate them. The concept of inheritance is also central. By defending his parents’ property rights, Kevin “grows up” – making the switch from the communal precepts of early-childhood life to the assumption of his status as heir to the family’s accumulated wealth. By creating a false moment where the bourgeois child “earns” his inheritance by demonstrating that he has already inherited a knack for innovation and the inclination to defend the bourgeois way of life, the movie reinforces nonsensical conceptions of genetic superiority and the pro-capitalist but fallacious “just world” construction. This moment, or rite of passage, occurs when Kevin is victorious in the bourgeois-lumpen class antagonism, and succeeds in not only enacting vigilante-style physical harm on the bandits, but effects their arrest as well, signaling Kevin’s acceptance of his place within the hierarchy of the pre-existing disciplinary state. The contradictions of liberalism are here apparent – no liberal really wants government to disappear entirely, because liberalism disintegrates without a government and police force to protect private property rights. Vigilante justice followed by state-inflicted justice, as depicted in the film, thus creates the illusion of total self-reliance, masking the much more insidious reality that the state’s relation to libertarianism is that of a sine qua non. Kevin, nevertheless, having demonstrated this supposed individualized innovativeness, has demonstrated, in true neo-Calvinist fashion, that his privilege is well-earned by his very nature. The bandits, meanwhile, suffer in jail, an equally well-earned punishment for the demonstrably inferior quality of their characters. This Calvinist conception of a “just world,” similar to the Western perversion of the idea of karma, is little more than the self-rationalization of an oppressive class structure that first forces the proletariat and lumpenproletariat to enter into the perpetual class struggle, then, perversely, disciplines them for their participation.
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Jan 18, 2011 01:21
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 12:35 |
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McCaine posted:crumble gets to pick though i feel like people would have put in so much more effort if the prize were bringing back the obamartyrs
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Jan 18, 2011 04:52
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