There is much to say about Home Alone, the 1990 Christmastime comedy written by John Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus. After getting upset at his family for constantly dismissing him, indignant eight-year-old Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin) goes to bed one December night wishing his family would vanish. When he wakes up the next morning, he finds that they have. (Really, they have accidentally left him behind when heading to the airport to catch their flight to Paris, where they plan to spend the holidays. But he doesn’t know that.) Kevin ecstatically celebrates having house all to himself, as his fantasies of zero-supervision come to life. But the movie takes a more threatening turn when two thieves begin preparations to rob his home—and so a circumstance which starts out as a child’s greatest dream seems to turn into a child’s worst nightmare.
When you’re a kid, there are few things more genuinely terrifying than invaders entering your home, especially without parents there to protect you. Notably, though, this tonal oscillation between freedom and peril doesn’t feel so extreme in Home Alone, mostly because of the surreal resolve and wiliness of the kid protagonist. Our Kevin, alienated from his family already, is revealed to us as a kind of lone wolf, and this experience reveals his nearly supernatural, innate capabilities for self-defense and self-preservation.
His guarding of the house moves from clever obfuscations to the implementation of a spectacular cat-and-mouse game designed to torment and humiliate the two thieves as much as possible as they try to force their way in. He catches them in a series of elaborate, ingenious, and very painful Rube-Goldberg torture devices. The thieves, Harry and Marv (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern), are only more fueled to try to catch Kevin, with each obstacle thrown at them, with each maiming they face.
Our Kevin, alienated from his family already, is revealed to us as a kind of lone wolf, and this experience reveals his nearly supernatural, innate capabilities for self-defense and self-preservation.If you’ve never seen Home Alone, what I’ve described just now might seem to conjure a horror movie than a family-friendly holiday flick. It’s not. Home Alone possesses the same slapsticky buoyancy and physical elasticity of Looney Toons; no matter how many anvils are dropped on the aggressors, they’ll still spring back up a few moments later and resume the pursuit at hand. Underscoring this vibe is that Daniel Stern has the high-pitched scream of Daffy Duck and Joe Pesci makes angry, incoherent mutterings that have drawn comparisons to Yosemite Sam.
I must admit, few films make me laugh harder (after repeat viewings, no less) than Home Alone. (I don’t know what it is about me, but when someone in a movie slips on a banana peel, I lose it.) I love Home Alone. I love its gags. I love its performances. It is so well-written, with the right balance of memorable throwaway comic lines and clever dialogue. It has a lovely, triumphant score by John Williams. I watch it every year. (Though, it must be said, my love for this film also has to do with a fabulous cameo from John Candy as the Polka King of the Midwest.)
But even I can’t deny that Kevin does possess a certain smugness, up against the harried and increasingly-enraged bandits—resembling the self-satisfaction of Bugs Bunny more than the blithe, innocent darting of the Road Runner. The difference between Bugs and the bird is that Bugs lays traps for the idiots chasing him, while the Road Runner allows Wile. E. Coyote to get caught in his own—there is an obvious, aggressive arrogance associated with the former.
Similarly, there’s no doubt that Kevin is (to use Bugs’s choice word) a ‘stinker’—bratty to his family and arrogant to the bandits, and this on the whole makes him a bit harder to like. It also fully changes the tone of the whole film, for some, including my best friend Michael, who has said that Kevin’s need to show up these bumbling adults in such extreme ways (his traps light them on fire, drive nails through their feet, smash their faces with swinging cans of paint, and brand their hands, for example) feels a tad sociopathic. As such, there’s a popularly-circulated fan theory positing that Home Alone is the origin story of the Saw movies, and that Kevin McAllister is actually going to grow up into the cruel serial killer Jigsaw.
Indeed, Kevin seems to relish tricking and injuring the thieves (who have styled themselves “the Wet Bandits,” because Marv likes to flood the houses they’ve robbed, as a kind of calling card). The film justifies his torment of them enough because they are ultimately willing to kill him—so, yeah, bad dudes. But the film also spends a long time characterizing Kevin as being phenomenally precocious, a kid so clever and capable that adults can’t handle him. He is mean, yes, but he is also constantly underestimated and belittled by everyone, and frequently-bullied by his four older siblings and his mean uncle.
There is pity in this. As much as he is represented to us as being a kind of wunderkind, he is also still a child; he is lonely, he is discouraged, and he longs to have his abilities recognized and respected. Horror movies teach us that the desire for one’s genius to be recognized (especially coupled with rejections from society), is a slippery slope into madness and violence. But the intensity with which Kevin comes at these thieves when they set foot on his family’s yard also offers a unique reading on adulthood, one which is defined by anger, revenge, and—above all—the myths of self-defense and the protection of property.
For the most part, adults in Home Alone are bad—or at least, they’re lacking. Kate and Peter McAllister (Catherine O’Hara and John Heard) ultimately leave their son behind and head to France, and don’t realize that they’ve left him back in the suburbs until they’re flying over the Atlantic Ocean. They don’t defend him when their eldest son Buzz (Devin Ratray) bullies him, or when his nasty Uncle Frank loudly calls him a “jerk” in front of all fourteen family members. (It’s a needlessly hostile family. Everyone seems to be at each other’s throats.) When Kevin accidentally steals a toothbrush from a local general store, the proprietors sic a cop on him. The incompetent neighborhood police that the frantic McAllister parents send to check on Kevin don’t care that he’s potentially in danger. And Kevin spends the entire film being terrified of his silent neighbor, Old Man Morely (Roberts Blossom), who (according to the trouble-making Buzz) once murdered people with his snow shovel.
The Wet Bandits, ultimately, decide to proceed with their robbery of the McAllister house after they confirm that Kevin is indeed home alone. “I think we’re getting scammed by a Kindy-gardner” Harry slyly tells Marv. Indeed, Kevin has managed to trick them four—FOUR—times into thinking that the house is occupied, thus scaring them away temporarily. The first time they creep around outside, Kevin sees them as exaggerated shadows through the sheer curtain (looking like the exact kind of specters that would terrify an unattended kid), and he runs through the house, flicking on all the lights. The second time Harry and Marv drive by, Kevin has ingeniously faked a holiday party inside, blasting Christmas music and setting up an enormous display of moving, human-like puppets (dress forms on spinning turntables, cardboard cutouts taped to moving train sets), so that the bandits will see their shadows through the windows and be scared away. (Fighting scary shadows with scare-inducing shadows is how Kevin asserts he is on the same level as these adults.)
The third time, when Marv comes sneaking around the yard, Kevin plays an old gangster movie by the side door, making Marv think other criminals are already inside, beating the Wet Bandits to the job. The fourth time, the time they realize that Kevin is all alone, they spy through an open window that Kevin is alone inside, and he pretends to be talking to his dad, but ultimately, the bandits don’t buy this one. Knowing now that they are only up against a child, they’re confident that they can trick/scare/intimidate him into getting what they want.
So, on their fifth attempt, Kevin fights back, showing them what he’s made of. And he has a lot of anger fueling this encounter. Rather like Jaws‘s grizzled sea captain Quint hates sharks, Kevin hates adults. He loathes them. When he first realizes that his family is gone, he constructs a new identity for himself as the “man of the house,” a figure who gets to use the space however he wants. He watches movies he’s not allowed to watch, eats a giant bowl of ice cream for dinner because no one can forbid him from eating it. Apostrophizing, he mockingly calls out to them as he’s doing all of this: “you better come out and stop me!” He rides a sled down the stairs, through the open front door, which he would normally never be allowed to do. After all these shenanigans, though, he decides he needs to act like a grown-up, and he begins performing tasks he sees adults doing: shopping, cleaning, doing laundry, putting on aftershave. He even chops down his own little tree to decorate. Here, he seems to confirm a suspicion that adult life is easy, and that he can do it better, as a second-grader.
In the scenes when he’s not outwitting bandits, watching Kevin playact adulthood is where the film can also be its most fun. This element is construed for us as “cute”—grown-up life, but in miniature. But just as this might somewhat diminish Kevin in the eyes of the viewer (reinforcing his childhood primarily because he tries to abandon it), it elevates Kevin in his own worldview. He foils suspicious adults (like the grocery store checkout employee who asks where his parents are) by asking them, in return, what on earth a child would be doing wandering around by himself, pretending to be an adult? But really, this is Kevin pretending to be a child, to get what he wants.
The bandits, rather than scare him, are a kind of last straw, and he channels all his rage into a series of sadistic monkeyshines.The film’s third act, in which the bandits decide to enter the house at all costs, can be seen as a cathartic crescendo of Kevin’s simmering rage at those older than him who have attempted to infantilize him. The bandits, rather than scare him, are a kind of last straw, and he channels all his rage into a series of sadistic monkeyshines. To Kevin, Harry and Marv symbolize all the adults who dismiss children, and Kevin can’t take this any longer. He needs to shoot them down, and sometimes do this literally—he has a BB gun that he carries around during this sequence. For this attitude, I think that out of all the characters Kevin might resemble, it’s not Jigsaw but Holden Caulfield.
A darker Home Alone version might also make Kevin resemble six-year-old Anthony Fremont, the central character in the scariest-ever episode of The Twilight Zone, “It’s a Good Life” (based on the short story of the same name by Jerome Bixby). In this episode, little Anthony is revealed to have limitless telekinetic powers, ones that allow him to create whatever he wants with his mind as well as read the minds and motivations of others. Because he has so much power, and conversely, is so emotionally immature (he is six!) he becomes a monstrous tyrant, holding his entire town hostage so they give him whatever he wants. No one can stop him. “It’s a Good Life” represents so effectively how scary it is for creatures as emotionally-unintelligent as children to control how the world works.
Home Alone attempts to give Kevin wisdom and empathy enough so that he is not revealed as this same kind of pint-sized, demented, psychopathic puppeteer, and this is where the film relies on both the underlying sinister capabilities of the hitherto-goofy bandits, plus its lenient, even cartoonish-laws of physics, plus Kevin’s eventual realization that he doesn’t want to actually be in this position at all. Before he defends his home against the bandits, he makes his most childlike gesture so far, visiting a Santa Claus impersonator and asking him to bring his family back. He tells Santa that he is sorry for that he is done to his family to make them go away. He realizes that what he once wanted was really just immature and petty, and this confession marks the first moment in which he acts his age, but also the first moment in which he truly acts maturely.
To eliminate the threat of any real danger (to anyone), this final sequence of Home Alone seems intended to produce a similar kind of catharsis for the audience as it does for Kevin—the physical gags, and the brilliantly funny performances of Stern and Pesci as their characters fall victim to Kevin’s pranks, are laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a release that, after a feature film full of worrying about a child, we can laugh at exactly how safe he is. We’re meant to marvel at the strategy and ingenuity of his booby-traps. They are, granted, incredibly impressive.
But notably, Kevin doesn’t also understand the humanistic implication of the way he chooses to handle things. (A good example of this is how the villain of the 2016 Christmastime horror movie Better Watch Out is actually an evil child who has styled himself after Kevin McAllister and who does kill someone with the swinging paint can gag that Kevin famously deploys.) It’s only by the miracle of the film’s effective-rubberization of its bandits’ bodies that Kevin isn’t killing these trespassers. Kevin doesn’t know that the thieves will be able to fall a thousand times without actually dying.
Essentially, Home Alone‘s final sequence is not the first time Kevin has acted on contempt and messed with those who do not belong in his space; he terrifies a cheerful, teenage pizza delivery guy into thinking that he’s going to be shot, and tips him a few measly cents for the trouble. Kevin uses the same video trick that he uses on the Wet Bandits on this innocent guy, collapsing a service worker and two thieves in the same manner. “Keep the change, you filthy animal,” the mobster in the movie says, and Kevin ventriloquizes along with that as the delivery guy runs away.
These are a few of the ways that Kevin’s performance of adulthood traffics along with an insidious ideological position of elitism. That Kevin has filled his house with snares, and marches about them carrying a BB gun on his back, expands on his previous definition of adulthood as acquiring items and performing labor associated with keeping the house. The other part of adulthood that Kevin interprets is not just acquiring and servicing property, but defending it. “This is my house, I have to defend it,” he announces when the bandits final arrive on Christmas Eve night. (He even adds, in a way that seems to quell his natural childlike qualities, “don’t get scared now.” He looks at the camera, and in this moment it’s a bit unclear if he’s telling himself to grow up, or if he’s assuring the audience that he has things under control.)
Kevin’s notions of what it means to be a grown up are thoroughly subject to a capitalistic framework, one which defines success through the acquisition and hoarding of resources.Here, Home Alone represents how the fetishization of property leads to harm, in his participation in the problematic “Stand Your Ground” kind of ideology that those watching the news in 2020 see enacted time and time again, to horrible consequences. Kevin’s interpretation of adulthood, which prizes possessions above family, might be the product of the life he’s lived, with his wealthy, patronizing family in an enormous brick mansion in the affluent suburb of Winnetka, Illinois.
Kevin’s notions of what it means to be a grown up are thoroughly subject to a capitalistic framework, one which defines success through the acquisition and hoarding of resources. Protecting the house so vehemently against the bandits, not long thereafter, might also be seen as a gesture towards his family—protecting their memory and serving their home by protecting it against robbers. This is a rather materialistic way to interpret love, if it is what’s at work, here, and it also contradicts the very holiday that provides its backdrop. If Kevin is learning that the most important thing is actually family, and not presents or the other materialistic trappings of Christmas, his doesn’t embody this knowledge fully, yet.
Even aside from his obsession with “protecting property,” I really can’t help but think that Karl Marx, who theorized that people experience “estrangement” from their own human nature as the result of society’s insistence on class-stratification (which values some above others), would have a lot to say about a rich kid torturing two working-class petty criminals in Home Alone, but whatever.
The turning point in the movie is when Kevin actually meets Old Man Morely—in a church, on Christmas Eve, listening to a choir of children sing. The smartest thing about Home Alone is that it is set at Christmas, a holiday predicated on honoring a child, venerating the humility and natural goodness of children. Moreover, here, in this illuminating place, Morely, revealed to be a kindly man who is in church to watch his little granddaughter sing, talks to Kevin honestly, candidly, without talking down to him. Kevin is glad for the opportunity to be listened to, to be taken seriously.
And later, Moreley ends up saving his life. Because the Wet Bandits do actually outsmart Kevin eventually, and they grab him, and they announce that they’re going to torture and kill him. Morely, brandishing his snow shovel, sneaks up behind them and knocks them out. He picks Kevin up and carries him over their bodies. “Let’s get you home,” he tells Kevin gently, as Kevin gapes in awe at what he has just seen. Here, Kevin is treated like a child, and he accepts it. He realizes he’s out of his depth, and that his pretending otherwise might have caused his own death (he is so unable to extricate himself on his own terms that he veritably needs a deus ex machina). He stops, finally, attempting to don adulthood. And then, the next morning, on Christmas, his family is returned to him, so he can accept being a child, for real.
All that’s left of his rip-roaring Yuletide encounters with the Bandits is Harry’s gold tooth, which has gotten knocked out and which Kevin’s dad finds on the floor after the McAllister clan returns on Christmas day. It’s not going to be worth much to Kevin, but it is a souvenir from his encounter, his night of almost getting killed after trying to, um, kill intruders (?). With his family all around him, marveling at how he managed to go shopping for essentials while living by himself, the story of how Kevin really spent the previous few days seems too far-fetched and possibly even imaginary to even tell. Now that family has been reunited, the triumph of protecting property seems to mean very little. In other words, as Kevin’s favorite movie mobster might say, “keep the change, you filthy animal.”
