Michael Berdan ‘22
Staff Editor
The other night, I watched the John Hughes-penned classic, Baby’s Day Out (1994). While Hughes is more fondly remembered for his 80s teen romcoms (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), I turned to Baby’s Day Out for some braindead slapstick after a particularly draining day in quarantine, hoping only that I’d get to hear my son laugh.
In a similar vein to Home Alone (also written by Hughes), Baby’s Day Out involves a seemingly vulnerable child gaining the upper hand on some bumbling criminals (Joe Mangegna, Joe Pantoliano, Brian Haley). One-year-old Baby Bink is kidnapped by the three criminals and held for a $5 million ransom. But Bink quickly slips through their grasp, crawling across rooftops and through department stores, riding buses, and scaling a skyscraper under construction, all while our villains are beaten, smacked, run over, burned, drenched in concrete and slime, and dropped several stories into conveniently-placed dumpsters (which, of course, break a fall from any height).
But among these gags, there is a lesson to be learned. Our not-so-hapless hero, Baby Bink, manages to evade the detection of just about everyone throughout the film. He crawls through a crowded department store and slides gleefully across the floor when pushed by the rotating door. He even yanks a dangling cord, pulling the mic out of the hand of a TV reporter who is LIVE ON AIR, REPORTING ON HIS DISAPPEARANCE. The camera dips down, showing Baby Bink live on TV, but Bink’s mom, who is watching the broadcast at home, was distracted at that precise moment. No one notices, and Bink continues down the downtown Chicago sidewalk, pursued by the criminal trio.
The people don’t maliciously ignore him. They aren’t presented as missing him because they’re overly wrapped up in something bad or selfish; they are simply living their lives. Some even do catch a glimpse—one construction worker, for example, sees Baby Bink’s back half-crawling around the corner—saying, “Was that… a baby?” before shaking his head and going on with his day.
What do we just barely miss? What passes behind us or underfoot, undetected? Of what do we catch a glimpse and say, “Was that…?” before going on with our day?
Perhaps it’s the fact that thousands of asylum applicants have been dumped back over the border into Mexico after reaching the United States, in violation of international law, without being given a proper hearing. Maybe it’s the fact that black American women are 2.5 times more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts. You’ve likely heard of these things; maybe they ring a bell, but we don’t really see them. We miss smaller things, like a harsh comment we make to a friend, which stings us as we deliver it, but which we don’t retract and for which we don’t apologize. Maybe it’s time we waste.
Sometimes we miss good things, too. We catch a glimpse but the good things don’t really “land.” Perhaps you’ve heard that each day, roughly 170,000 people rise out of extreme poverty, and 325,000 people get access to electricity for the first time. We miss smaller things: Last night, when a friend suggested I buy a video game to play together, and I responded that it was out of my budget, she offered to buy it for me. I was grateful, but it wasn’t until writing this now that I realized what that really meant—what was expressed in that offer.
What would it mean to notice more of the things that sneak by us?
It may be unreasonable to suggest we all do more, just as we’re grappling with what could develop into the greatest global calamity since World War II. I also see the irony of making this point in the context of an overlong article reviewing an indefensibly dumb movie that I did, indeed, spend ninety-nine minutes watching. But let me suggest, in closing, that now is exactly the time when we should be noticing our world, and all that surrounds us, even if we start small. Now, when we are detached from school and friends to an extent and things are developing a little more slowly in our personal lives. Perhaps now we can notice that this virus, which seems to be destined to arrive imminently on our own doorsteps, started as a disease considered both foreign and overblown. We can notice more when someone says they’re “good” with a hesitation, and engage on another level of sincerity. We can notice when our chosen vocation supports systems or entities that do violence. We can notice the goodness of those nurses and doctors working long, understaffed, underequipped hours. We can catch something that might have slipped by, care about it, and do the right thing with it.
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mwb4pk@virginia.edu