The Wonders Of House Arrest
Home incarceration is usually no laughing matter. It is a legal measure whereby a person is confined to his or her residence, with severe limitations in place on travel and sometimes even on contact by phone or other means.
Yet home incarceration is considered fairly humane, and is typically adopted where outright imprisonment appears inappropriately excessive relative to the crime even while a simple fine would be stupdendously lenient. Such confinement is also employed in cases where the convicted person’s health is at issue, often regardless of the gravity of the crime committed.
Given all that, what might a movie named “House Arrest” possibly include?
It’s a comedy, infact, but with a serious concept at its heart. This 1996 effort concerns a group of high school students who lock their mother and father in the basement to force the adults to resolve their problems! Sounds a bit silly, but the tactic does often work – about as much as when it does not.
Grover and Stacy are siblings who decide that their parents are behaving rather childishly in deciding to divorce after eighteen years of marriage, so they refuse to let them out of the basement until they have sorted out their issues. The siblings unwittingly start a local trend, inspiring their friends to do the same thing with their mother and father! It all reminds one of the Camp David peace accords that took place during the Presidency of Bill Clinton.
In that case, the Palestinian and Israeli sides were literally locked into a negotiating room by the President’s advisors out of frustration that nothing of substance had been discussed. Though both sides agreed fairly enthusiastically to the peace talks at first, once underway a deep reluctance pervaded the proceedings.
It is tempting to imagine that one can lock away implacable foes into a room as one could oneself when cramming for a school exam, but such a tactic best works when both sides truly harbor some affection and sympathy for the other – in which situation there would likely be little reason to lock up anyone in the first place!