What the "News" That Moira Rose and Kevin's Mom in Home Alone Are Played by the Same Actress Says About Us
What is the connection between these two different characters? The answer might surprise you!
In a development that’s stupid and embarrassing even by the exceedingly lenient standards of the Internet, the online world was recently rocked by the explosive revelation that several decades before she created an icon for the ages in eccentric thespian Moira Rose for Schitt’s Creek Catherine O’Hara played an entirely different character with a different name and occupation and everything, namely Kevin’s Mom in Home Alone.
This led to articles with titles like “Yes, Moira From Schitt’s Creek and the Home Alone Mom Are Played by the Same Person” and ‘Schitt’s Creek’ Fans Are Freaking Out That Moira Rose Was In ‘Home Alone."
Could this possibly be true? Could a single actress play two well-known roles? How is that even possible? Some form of magic or trickery? Does Catherine O’Hara have a clone or an identical twin sister we don’t know about? Or is she some manner of witch?
I suspect that this “news” had two distinct audiences. The first, and I’d like to imagine, much larger audience consisted of people who know goddamn well that Catherine O’Hara played Moira Rose and Kevin’s Mom and plenty of other amazing, unforgettable roles in television and film because she is a goddamn legend and it’s fucking insane and inexplicable that everyone doesn’t know that and consequently rolled their eyes and hate-read the kind of pieces that thrive on antagonism-based readership. The second, and, I hope much smaller audience, consists of goobers who DON’T know this widely available, widely known bit of info and are inexplicably gobsmacked that the same person could play two different roles over the course of a career.
Why was this news? Or rather, why was this “news?” The answer says a lot about the internet and how it shapes and molds and warps people’s behavior.
The internet has the power to be the greatest tool for education the world has ever known. Hell, Twitter could/should be an incredible tool for learning and enrichment. We should be able to learn all sorts of things by following all sorts of fascinating and knowledgable and crazily eclectic people on Twitter, opening up new worlds in the process. Instead we follow a narrow assortment of like-minded souls, and also attractive celebrities, and use social media to distract us from our hellish existences with a never-ending stream of mindless stimuli that demands nothing of us or our attention span and delivers nothing in return.
Like every powerful technology before it, the internet and social media had limitless power for good but mostly shrunk our already microscopic attention spans and gave us new, better ways to experience pornography.
Instead of expanding our world, the internet and social media reduced and flattened it. That’s the point of trending topics: to see what everybody else is talking about and join in. That’s also the purpose of hashtags: to show the world that we’re just like everybody else and are using the same lingo in the same way like a #boss or a #sheep.
Pop culture media is the same way. If you want to pitch something successfully it better be a red-hot take about something huge and new that everyone’s already talking about, or an anniversary piece on a beloved perennial.
With that in mind, Catherine O’Hara’s incredible, multi-faceted, decades-long career as literally one of our greatest comic actresses, with an amazing legacy that includes two of the best-loved TV shows of all time (Schitt’s Creek and SCTV) and some of the most revered and iconic film comedies ever (After Hours, Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas, all her collaborations with Christopher Guest) gets flattened and reduced to her two best-known roles: in the red-hot show that everybody loves and is aggressively mourning (Schitt's Creek) and in one of those YUGE Christmas perennials that just so happens to be having a thinkpiece-friendly 35th anniversary: Home Alone.
That, friends, is how a comedy legend’s legacy gets weirdly reduced to two roles and how the internet makes us all stupider and less informed, with a smaller, rather than radically expanded frame of reference.
It’s a goddamn shame but we can’t do anything about it! We’ll just get dumber and dumber and dumber until we’re no longer even human yet somehow using Twitter more than ever.
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