Liberty, Responsibility, and Kevin McCallister

    Happy New Year, everyone! I trust everyone had a wonderful holiday season and a terrific New Year celebration! I'll let you in on one of my resolutions: I resolve to try and be a better writer and to have more patience with friends and family; and to maybe not use so many contractions! Let us see how that goes, shall we? Dope...

    So, I was thinking over the holidays that being the founder of this small but august website affords me more time than most to ponder the relationship between freedom and responsibility. Are you nuts! If you weren’t retired and it wasn’t 50 below outside with piles of snow on every street corner and MORE snow on the way, you’d be finishing up 36 and whining how Sam out-drove you on all the short par-4s! Well, Sancho’s wisdom aside, freedom and responsibility are, after all, a few of the more important things I write about; and sometimes you can’t help but see the question everywhere. That was the case for me when I was recently watching the Christmas movie Home Alone. I had never seen it and have taken a lot of crap for that over the years! Kind of like the reaction I get when I tell people I've never seen Gone With The Wind or The Wizard of Oz! Anyway...  

    So as I was doing some movie binging the other day, I remembered some friends telling me how they love this film for the slapstick humor (okay—I can see that). But like most John Hughes endeavors, Home Alone also has a little more depth than it initially lets on. And let me say right off the bat, I’m a huge John Hughes fan.

    There is an inherent connection between liberty and responsibility—in important ways, liberty IS responsibility. When an outside force is not making decisions on your behalf, not telling you exactly how to respond to the world around you, those choices fall on you. And while we are accustomed, if not forced, to thinking of choice as an unadulterated good, that is rarely the case when it comes to the most important matters of life. Figuring out how to act in a hostile and uncertain world can be a considerable burden. That is why so many in the modern world turn away from liberty in favor of the easier values of security, certainty, and equality. If one is incapable of making such choices and being answerable for them, he is no longer actually free.

    This is part of the lesson that Kevin McCallister learns. As anyone not living under a rock in December knows, on the eve of his family’s trip to Paris, Kevin wishes his family would disappear, and he gets just that when they accidentally leave him at home. He then inventively and hilariously fights off two burglars, Harry and Marv, and learns to appreciate the family that he had despised.

    The film begins with a desire for liberation from perceived tyranny. Eight-year-old Kevin is pushed around by his older siblings, his extended family, and his parents. The string of insults and dismissals that fill the opening scenes is obviously meant to make us sympathize with his plight as the “little guy.” On the other hand, he also clearly acts like a “little jerk,” in Uncle Frank’s words. He gets in the way, whines about others, won’t even try to help pack for the trip, can’t control his rage, disrespects his mother, and shows no gratitude for his family taking care of everything for him.

    When he wakes up without his family, he initially basks in this newfound freedom, eating ice cream for dinner, pilfering his older brother’s things, and watching grown-up movies. But when Harry and Marv make their first appearance, he quickly learns the burden of responsibility, and as someone not habituated to facing the uncertain world, he responds in fear. Cowering underneath his parents’ bed, he is now less free than he had ever been. The dynamic is punctuated when he grows up a little, ventures outside, and declares loudly to the neighborhood that “I’m not afraid anymore!”—only to run into “Old Man Marley,” who the neighborhood kids believe to be a serial killer in hiding. He immediately runs screaming back to the security of his parents’ bed.

    Personal responsibility needn’t be purely individual responsibility. While “the system” fails, love for the neighbor does not. Well, maybe the government can help? When Kevin’s mother calls the police to go check on him, they hilariously transfer her back and forth between departments (“Hyper on Two!”), with an uninterested bureaucrat eventually reading mindlessly off his questionnaire—no doubt a set of questions backed by “best practices.” When a police officer does eventually go to the house, he is entirely negligent and walks away. A police officer also chases Kevin when he accidentally steals a toothbrush. Eventually, the police do come to haul away the “wet bandits” after being led directly to them by Kevin’s trap. But at its best, government is shown simply enforcing the law. It is not equipped to make up for our mistakes.

    Only gradually and through experience does Kevin learn how to take responsibility for himself, first with small things like laundry, grocery shopping, decorating, and getting over his fear of the basement. Those small responsibilities start to change his character so that he is more prepared for the big task of the film: defending his home. The freedom he had desired has gone from being nothing more than an idea to being a real experience that he grows into.

    Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Kevin’s mother Kate is also desperately trying to live up to her own responsibilities and make up for her failure by getting home as soon as possible. She, too, is afraid, and does everything in her power to make up for her error—even selling all she has for a plane ticket.

    Interestingly, even though the whole movie is about their personal exertions to take responsibility for themselves, Kevin and Kate both come up just short when relying on their own effort. For all his comical victories over Harry and Marv, Kevin winds up hanging on a door hook in the neighbor’s house, about to be tortured. Kate makes it back to the States, but hits another brick wall at the airport and declares herself ready to sell her soul to the Devil to get home.

    That is where love and charity enter—in the form of Good Samaritans. The first is Gus Polinski (you know, the polka king of the Midwest? The Kenosha Kickers? They had a few hits a while ago!). Gus comes out of nowhere to offer Kate a ride to Chicago, confessing along the way that he and his bandmates, too, had all fallen short on their parental responsibilities (in Gus’s case, disturbingly so!).

    The ultimate Good Samaritan, however, is none other than Old Man Marley. His role in the story shifts in the well-known church scene. Kevin has been drawn in by the song of the choir wafting out into the night as he walks by. Marley seeks him out and reveals his true character to Kevin, showing that he is not at all the brooding presence, the source of fear and dread, that Kevin thought he was. Rather, he turns out to be kind, gentle, and lowly of heart. In that church-pew conversation, Kevin confesses to Marley that he has not treated his family the way he should. He also learns to love his (literal) neighbor: as Kevin has learned responsibility for himself, he has also put himself in a position to help others, advising Marley on his own familial strife.

    In that transformative conversation, both characters offer one another some variant of “you don’t need to be afraid”—the same line Kevin had said just before running away from Marley in terror earlier. The fear that naturally arises at the prospect of facing the world dissipates in forgiveness and love for one another. Kevin never appears frightened again after this encounter, even when he is finally captured by Harry and Marv.

    So it is not a surprise that it is Marley—the man who was despised and rejected by the world, who was seen earlier with an extremely conspicuous pierced hand, to whom Kevin had confessed his sins at the church—who comes unbidden into the neighbor’s house to rescue a helpless Kevin from the clutches of the enemy. 

    Kevin’s education goes something like this. With no experience of freedom at all, he can, as children do, imagine it as the ultimate good—no limits, just everything he wants all the time. He quickly learns that freedom comes with the burden of responding to an often-hostile world with one’s own resources, and when he can’t face that responsibility, his freedom disappears. The fearful prospect of liberty thus requires an internal fortitude that can only come from experiencing it. Even then, however, Kevin is not quite able to do it on his own. Fortunately, personal responsibility need not be purely individual responsibility. While “the system” fails, love for the neighbor does not. And this love delivers to him the message that is not only the purview of the religious; but it is for everyone: “Fear not!”

    Maybe that should be our New Year’s resolution.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com