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the Dialectical Imagination of "Home Alone" Capitalism is a process and totality, albeit a self-alienated one. Constituted by divisions, these divisions abolish themselves by becoming aware of themselves, not in a purely ideal but in a material way. It is fitting that a movie with the wonderfully contradictory title of "Home Alone" - is not a home precisely the site of community? - provides such an excellently dialectical grasp of the developmental history of capitalism, from its birth to destruction. The most elementary metaphysical mistake one could make would be to identify specific characters with specific classes, and to reify their struggles as the class struggle. The film, however, is too clever for that. Rather, the goings-on in the McAllister house(hold) correspond to the totality of capitalism as such. The roles played by various characters are constantly morphing, just as concepts, nations, and technological processes are constantly changing the roles they play under capitalism, all the way from its inception to glorious overthrow. Pre-capitalist society is, by contrast, not a totality. This is precisely the set of social relations embodied by the McAllister household prior to their holiday departure. Universal man does not (conceptually) exist; rather, he* exists within a hierarchical (but immanent) community in which politics is prior to economics and in which classes and juridical rights exist in an ill-defined patchwork. The distribution of pizza occurs on an unequal basis, but not the unequal basis of capitalism, universal commodity exchange, but according to political considerations. Man's consciousness is dominated by fetishistic fears (the tarantula, the urban-legendary murderer) cynically foisted by certain social groups upon others. (One might criticize Home Alone for lazily characterizing the priests of yesteryear as jeering Svangalis uninterested in their doctrine except as a means of spooking the impressionable, but this is to make the error of prioritizing the consciousness of intents over the consciousness that constitutes real social relations.) The extended family or clan is the basic mediatory mechanism. While of course the emergence of capitalism was a long and complex affair - Home Alone appears to take no position on the Dobb-Sweezy debate - at the level of Badiou's Event we can say that the French Revolution swept away all "estates" and political formations of pre-capitalist society, allowing for the existence of atomized Universal Man. Thus the trip to France sweeps away all the McAllisters save for young Kevin. He, like the emerging bourgeois-proletarian relation, is pre-capitalist society's objet petit a, not properly fitting into the patchwork order of feudal, antiquarian, Oriental, &c. society ("We forgot about Kevin!") Simultaneously this reduction of the McAllisters from many to one represents the transition from communitarian to individualist consciousness, the real transition of society from "tapestry" to totality, and transition from a static developmental form (the family, which simply reproduces itself endlessly) to a dynamic one (an individual adolescent, who through increased self-awareness - ultimately a product of his changing material basis - abolishes himself to produce an adult.) However, as we have established, capitalism is a contradictory totality rather than a resolved one; indeed, this is the poorly-concealed secret of its dynamism. Or, in cineastic terms, one simply cannot move the plot forward without conflict! Thus additional characters (previously introduced, but not yet interacting with the totality) are introduced. However, these characters are not "part of the household;" they are non-identical with Kevin in ideology if not fact because capitalist consciousness seeks to disavow everything essential to itself but not prototypical - the state, crime, work, &c. - everything but the abstract individual. Thus now most primarily representing the bourgeoisie - the class which appears at this point to be the motor of history - Kevin re-enacts the development of human self-imagining under capitalism. In the absence of parental figures (God) he abandons traditional moral restraints to engage in an orgy of consumption. Characteristically, these amazing feats of material enjoyment seem to be "sorcerously summoned" from nowhere, and his only interaction with any workers is with the delivery people - mirroring the inability of liberal ideology to conceptualize production as apart form exchange. He becomes aware that he is growing and developing, and even celebrates this - mischievously lathering his face - only for it to turn to horror; he imagines he is not yet ready, even while understanding it to be inevitable. And he confronts the fetishistic fears which have been carried over from the past. While the bourgeoisie appears to be in the driver's seat, the other classes directly experience this as well, projecting themselves onto the bourgeois subject, just as proletarian audiences are likely to identify with the plucky rich white child Kevin. It is also characteristic of capitalism that exploitation and conflict over the social product assumes a relatively "open" form, rather than the concealed conflict taking place under feudalism or antiquity. While not neglecting the other aspects of our social system, Home Alone is correct to place this as the central aspect of its developmental dynamic. In its depiction of an increasingly weaponized home, Home Alone is a powerful refutation of revisionist "Marxists" who seek to locate capital-slaying systemic contradictions in circulation rather than the class struggle. This emphasis is materialist, but not in a vulgar sense: Kevin employs the forces of Spectacle and mass media (a fake party, projecting his individualist consumption onto an illusory community of consumption; a gangster film) as weapons in the material struggle, as indeed they are. The tarantula - the old relic which Kevin has superseded - is used to get the bandits to attack each other, just as the ruling classes use religion and race to divide the workers. But the struggle is also materialist in a more direct sense, and increasingly threatens to destroy the house itself, just as nuclear weapons, during the Cold War (then a much more vivid memory), threatened to destroy our planet. Once again, Kevin does not represent just the capitalists here; his are also the hands that craft the increasingly sophisticated (and destructive) devices, as the working class creates with their own brains and hands all of the above. (As in the movie Independence Day, the two sides in the apparent conflict do not represent two distinct sides in actual reality; rather, the "protagonist" group represents each side in its own self-conception - in that film, the "aliens" representing that imperialists and oppressed nations are primarily seen by each other as foreigners; in Home Alone, that bourgeois and proletariat see each other mainly as thieves.) This is crucial. As voices as diverse as E.P. Thompson and Georg Luckacs ave emphasized that class consciousness is the product of class struggle and the constitution of the working class as an agent - i.e., its necessary historical role - thus does "universal man" become aware of his role as a worker. The separation of Kevin from Old Man Marley represents the ideological form of the alienation of labor - that is to say, man's alienation from his nature as producer - and in realizing what they have in common, Kevin represents man's adoption of class consciousness. Specifically, what they have in common is a desire for reunion with their families - that is, the political demand for a collectivist polity. It is with its characteristically subtle sense of humor that, having represented religion as a repugnant spider, Home Alone drapes the realization of militant class consciousness in maudlin religiosity. A double inversion is achieved by the choice of holiday - as on Christmas ideal reality (the Word) became immanent in material reality (Christ), in knowing himself man translates material reality (his nature as producer) into ideal reality (class consciousness.) Thus the class conflict comes to its climax when Marley's incorporation becomes total, and he uses his shovel at the doorstep to the McAllister house. With these contradictions resolved, man can enter into communism. The McAllisters return - atomized man becomes again a community - but Kevin is truly cherished for who his is, rather than merely forgotten as the youngest child - this is a community which has abandoned the hierarchical assumptions of pre-capitalism. Rather than a set of politically constituted "estates," the multiplicity at the house now represents universal man in community with himself - free to herd cattle in the morning and criticize in the evening, as it were. The distributivist pizza economy and consumerist ice cream economy are superseded by the ethic of "to each..." embodied by gift-giving. The movie's closing line ends with a humorous celebration of the profound changes man and his environment will have to undergo under communism: "Kevin, what did you do to my room?!?" *I hope my peers will excuse the deplorable sexism here, used throughout; I employ the male pronoun only to reproduce the symbolic order of the film itself. It is a shame, if an entirely predictable one, that when seeking a symbolic representation of Universal Humanity in development that Hollywood selects the pale, male, "pedophile cute" Krul, but this only reproduces the self-conception of universal humanity under capitalism, which takes up the majority of the film.
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Jan 20, 2011 09:12
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 06:36 |
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