In honor of the 25th anniversary of Home Alone, barricaded ourselves into an empty suburban home, set up an elaborate series of booby traps, and hunkered down to analyze what the film is really about. Here’s part one of our two-part conversation.
Belinkie: So guys, Home Alone turns 25 this year! I recently rewatched it, and it struck me as a strangely schizophrenic movie. It’s about a child who is sick of his family, and gets accidentally left behind for the holidays. For a while he’s delighted that his dreams have come true, and he revels in doing all the things his parents would never have let him do. But gradually, he comes to miss them. On Christmas Eve he makes a wish to have things go back to the way they were, and sure enough his family returns the next day. It’s a perfect little “be careful what you wish for” fairy tale.
Stokes: I think it’s more nuanced than that. Consider: the “mature” plot as you’ve described it is essentially the same plot as Where the Wild Things Are. Max doesn’t want to deal with his mom, so he goes to the land of no moms. Eventually he gets tired of that, so he comes home and hugs his mommy. (It’s a comedy: ultimately, nothing changes.) But that interval between the departure and the return is super important! Where the Wild Things Are is the name of the book for a reason. You’ve got to let the wild rumpus start. And that’s the sequence where Macaulay Culkin gets his Jack Bauer on. When you say “he revels in doing all the things his parents would never let him do,” you have it 90% right. But not all of those things are nice cute things like pretending to shave. Some of them involve hitting a grown man in the nuts with a golf club, or whatever he actually does. (Matt, you have two children. Don’t tell me you don’t know what evil lurks in the heart of man.)
A slightly more honest version of the story would have Kevin setting his booby traps for random strangers on the street, or various authority figures that he feels he’s been wronged by. (I wonder if there’s a draft of the script where he sets the booby traps for his parents, to teach them a lesson about leaving him behind.) But obviously this version could never get made, and so Kevin’s malicious id is provided with an appropriate target in the form of Joe Pesci. This makes it acceptable. (Because, sure, the little censor has run away to Paris. But the big censor is inside of us, and does not take vacations.)
But perhaps we can compromise and say that the booby traps are a synthesis of Kevin’s kid side and his newfound maturity. He has to draw upon both to win. (And then of course, he still almost loses, and he’s ultimately rescused by an adult authority figure. At the end of the day, there are limits to Kevin’s autonomy.)
Stokes: I think you are conflating “Kevin’s kid side” with “the stuff his parents don’t want him to do.” Do his parents not want him to be a child? And again, think about the iconic shaving scene. Shaving is a total adult move!
But autonomy is a good way to put it. All of the stuff he does while he’s alone — childish, responsible, cute, violent — is all autonomous in a way that kids don’t usually get to be.
Belinkie: So you think sledding down the stairs and shaving are both “wrong,” in different ways. Kevin sometimes plays at responsibility, but it’s still not the right role for him.
If that’s true, then Kevin’s “maturing” is just him indulging his freedom in a different way. The TRUE maturation is wishing to be a kid again and running into his mother’s arms.
Stokes: Yeah, or not maturing, exactly, but setting the balance right. I don’t think he’s supposed to be mature yet. I know that when my son is acting out and I get annoyed, I don’t want him to, like, go fill out my tax return. I want him to be the perfect adorable little boy that I know he really is.
Adams: So it’s important to remember: any discussion about Home Alone (1990) that doesn’t also involve Die Hard (1988) is fundamentally incomplete. Home Alone was in the hey-day of “Die Hard on a _______” movie pitches. And Home Alone fits that mold – it even takes place at Christmas! So do the goofy booby traps get in the way of the Kevin-coming-of-age-arc, or is the Kevin coming of age arc just a way of adding a veneer or development to the goofy booby traps?
Stokes: Doesn’t disprove the theory — that family dynamic is, like, the hammer that John Hughes has. Any screenwriting challenge that you toss him will presumably look like a nail.
“A kid version of die hard? What a concept! Hmm, obviously he needs to be isolated somehow — hey, I can just write that thing that I write! It totally fits.”
Heh, now I’m imagining every auteur doing their default version of Home Alone. Quentin Tarantino casts Samuel L. Jackson as Kevin. In Wes Anderson’s version the paint cans are meticulously crafted replicas of a discontinued watercolor set from 1970. M. Night Shyamalan reveals in a shocking twist that Kevin is actually a ghost haunting the house that he died in, and the burglars are actually the new owners.
Oh, whoops, “M. Night Shyamalan’s Home Alone” is actually just The Others, my bad.
(And Die Hard is not NOT one of those movies – it’s just that the zany third act takes up the entire running length of the movie, and the family friendly story arc gets squeezed into the first 15 minutes and closing credits sequence)
Stokes: Hmm. Good point. Kids movies in general sort of tend to do this, no? (And the disconnect between zany action and plot is arguably endemic to the action movie, which loops Die Hard back in.)
Belinkie: Perhaps what I’m saying is that Home Alone would seem to have a Ghost Ship problem. People watch the movie in large part to see the home invasion stuff… but that doesn’t begin until very late in the story. You could argue this is akin to Miracle, when the big game doesn’t actually happen until the very end. But in Miracle, that confrontation is on the radar from the very start. In Home Alone, the booby traps really come out of left field. (Sure, he rigs up a fake dinner party earlier, which I suppose you can argue sets up the grander schemes that will come later.)
In Part 2, Fenzel enters the Tank with a theory about sitcom logic, we finally get to Freud, and we uncover new ways that Home Alone is strangely split and yet totally cohesive.
