Home Alone as Unsentimental Education, Or, The Virtual Warehousing of Corruption
I Was Born, But...(Ozu, 1932)
In Yasujiro Ozu’s 1932 masterpiece, I Was Born, But..., a man moves his wife and two children to a small suburb closer to where his boss lives. After proving themselves to local bullies who persecuted them, there’s a get-together in the home of the father’s boss for their families, including the boss’s son and the boys. An amateur home movie is screened featuring the father goofing and making silly faces to please his boss. The boys are horrified at the indignity of their male role model. The father explains to them later that he has to please his boss in order to make the money to buy food for them to eat. He doesn’t realize it but his children have completely lost their respect for him. Their whole reality is turned upside down. They respond by going on a hunger strike. The father spanks the elder boy. The next day, the father leaves for work in his boss's car while the boys walk to school with their friends. But they’ll never be the same.
I’m going to explain why I would do something so obscene as to mention this extraordinary and shattering film, made by perhaps the greatest filmmaker of them all, as a jumping off point to talk about a goofy holiday item like Home Alone (1990). Obviously, any number of artistic, historical, cultural, commercial and political contexts differentiate the two. But I mention the Japanese film only to give shape to the insanity of the American film.
It’s in that instant in Ozu’s film when the boys see their father, who provides for their household and makes their lives possible, having to lower himself to curry favor with his superior. It’s a moment of horror. Because their entire idea about the world as a place of heroes and honor and role models is destroyed. At this moment, they almost instantly lose their innocence and are, as children, just barely able to comprehend the idea that they can’t get it back. It’s gone forever. They learn that success in the adult world is a measure of one’s capacity to be shamed and hurt. And that doing the hurting and the shaming is what constitutes power. The hypocrisy of having to kowtow to someone else to make a living and still call yourself a man. It’s a precious thing, that innocence. Its price - the learning of a set of implicit boundaries and limitations that one has to respect in order to survive - is too high a cost to pay for that innocence.
Ozu’s perfect work, which I can’t recommend highly enough. Spare, trenchant, equal parts humorous and devastating
Ozu didn’t believe in heroes. His work repeatedly and beautifully implies that such a beautiful and precious thing as life is too complicated and messy for such a childish concept as heroism. And that innocence was certainly not worth losing for this kind of lesson in humiliation and cynicism. It should be of no surprise that Japan in the early thirties is far enough removed from the world of Chris Columbus’s 1990 holiday romp in every conceivable way. I only mention the Ozu film because the protagonist in Home Alone loses his innocence as well. But he does so willfully and out of necessity and with style. In other words, he does so in a uniquely American way that provides a striking contrast.
The corruption of Kevin McCallister is not only seen as positive, but essential to his survival in the adult world. Innocence is a price gladly paid, even as it involves more than just disappointment at the falsehoods of the adult world but rather outright theft, lying and violence. In Home Alone, we’re put into a situation where there’s no other recourse than for its central character to become a monster.
He loves it and so do we. We’re not inspired to look at the effect of society’s little daily corruptions on young minds because the movie proposes its conservative resolution that no pacifist or non-aggressive solution to those corruptions is possible. Instead, we’re invited to thumb our noses at it along with Kevin as he’s warehoused into a dishonest, mediocre society with the rest of us, justifying every brand of Ayn Randian selfishness one can dream up.
evil in its chrysalis stage
Home Alone has the air of a delightful, raucous bit of holiday slapstick fun for the whole family, with palpable John Hughes-scripted observations about the freedom of the grown up world in all its scary realness. Before the redundant and overlong booby-trap climax (which I loved as a kid and now find to be by far the least interesting part of the movie), Kevin McCallister learns about the world and about himself. He learns to value his family, be a good citizen, and a decent member of his community. He conquers his fear of responsibility in the same way he conquers his fear of his basement furnace. Reviews of the movie at the time were mostly positive, though many shared the lament that the movie becomes less interesting and delightful as the events that transpire around Kevin become less anchored to the realities that would actually face an eight year-old in this situation.
But let’s look closer, because this is one STRANGE family movie with a very dark message:
None of the reviews picked up on what I think is THE central character development and covert theme in the movie: Throughout the course of Home Alone, Kevin McCallister gradually begins to cultivate a cynical ideology that he visits on the world and on his reality like a mad scientist’s monstrous creation come to life. The story of Home Alone is the story of Kevin's ability to triumph over his problems and his enemies specifically because of this hollowing out of his ethical and moral innocence. Ozu feared this for his characters. But Kevin’s deviousness, underhandedness and dishonestly are the keys to success. He learns how to be a proper scoundrel. Over the course of the movie, Kevin is almost totally corrupted. He learns how to lie, cheat, and steal to get what he wants and avoid trouble. He learns the value and a kind of pleasure in administering pain to others. The wildest thing is that he has the precocious emotional intelligence to realize that he loves it. It will become his way of life.
It’s difficult to see how he fits into the rather dull, square, material-driven McCallister family. Kevin is clearly an old soul. He talks like a thirties gangster (“Hang up the phone and make me why don’tcha?”). It’s established early on that he's a bit of a tinkerer and a gearhead when he’s questioned about playing with a glue gun in the garage. A cranky, wife-avoiding old recluse in the making, he responds with still more thirties criminal slang: “Did I burn down the joint?” One imagines him being disciplined in school for calling his female classmate, “Toots.” After the pizza mishap, his mother grabs him by the hand and says, “Say goodnight, Kevin.” “Goodnight, Kevin,” he answers, his Burns & Allen reference lost on his family of philistine yahoos.
Kevin is deeply attuned to his surroundings but can’t rationalize this yet. He was likely secretly begging to be left home alone. Can you blame him for after being mocked by his siblings for his deadpan logic about being urinated on by his cousin in his sleep? It’s a godsend for him to have the freedom to be left alone to quote old gangster movies that still scare the shit out of him. Or to groom himself in the bathroom mirror to Bing Crosby and get back to making ornaments in the garage out of his father’s fishhooks - the smeared “worm guts” on them clearly not bothering him. The non-working house phones and the absent neighbors are another blessing. No intrusions from the outside world will interrupt his corrupting voyage of self-discovery.
Kevin feels a strong connection to a bygone America - to what must seem like a more suitable historical age. He doesn’t share his family’s cosmopolitan values and tastes. He’s staunch and basic. He eschews sausage and olives on his pizza, preferring plain cheese. The allure of a trip to France seems lost on him. His Nouveau Riche boomer parents and their relatives fancy themselves worldly creatures of the get-up-and-go Nineties. As a vacation destination for Americans in a suburban town as homogenous as the one in this movie, France would seem like a pretty outré port of call.
But the McCallisters, likely sharing the pervading American notion of France as an emblem of sophistication, romance and elegance, seem to be desperately chasing (as their airport scramble suggests) a worldly ideal of European glamour and chic. Peter and Kate McCallister probably saw a formatted broadcast of Godard’s Breathless on TV and bought the plane tickets that week. Their overindulged suburban lives must be driving them mad. Note how delighted they are to be sipping champagne in first class with the rest of their redundant litter in coach. Of course, once they get to France they immediately behave like stereotypical Ugly Americans, shoving people in the airport aside and booting a woman off a pay phone. From the looks of things, not one of the McCallisters apparently bothered to learn French, which is bizarre since we’re told they have family there. Excuse me, France. Some Americans are having a crisis here. Ahem-hem.
No worries for Kevin. As a little old man trapped in a child’s body, he seems nonplussed by the commotion going on around him. His contented desire to be home and tend to his castle - to just be - is something he can’t put into words. He’s not curious about the world outside his own sphere. Learning how to pack a suitcase frightens him. He lives inside his own head, such that he never fully comprehends what’s happened. He actually thinks he magically wished his family away. It’s a mental and emotional world where an old black and white gangster movie (and not some gut-wrenching horror movie, which would have been a more obvious and conventional choice) is the scariest thing he can watch.
I completely “get” this shot on every level. Yeah pal, suburban middle class morality befuddles me too.
Conversely, his family are punished by having their vacation ruined. They pay the price for leaving and not having a traditional Christmas at home in the Rockwellian haven of their midwest community but instead daring to (gasp!) leave the country and go to godless France of all places - that country still bound up in the mind of many Americans with smelly cheese, piquant wine, snails for dinner, Jerry Lewis worship and irrelevant, petty World War II-derived grudges that are decades past their sell-by date. In keeping with the conservative undercurrent of the movie, the Castle Doctrine is reasserted throughout the film as being the one true way to enjoy the holiday (Christmas, that is. No other holidays or faiths are within spitting distance). The house and all the property within it are what is actually held as sacred. The one family member who does stay back saves the day. “This is my house,” says Kevin “and I have to defend it.”
cannot make this today. Or can you? And for whose America?
Fortunately for Kevin, the invading burglars are also trapped in the 1930’s. They come out of the old Hollywood tradition. They’re a classic Warner Brothers comic relief pair: the gangly, idiot manchild and the stout, hotheaded motormouth. They’re only a stone’s throw from Woody Allen’s equally anachronist versions of thugs who still say “dem” and “dese” and “dose” and “yous guys.” Hughes’ script knows all this, which is probably why Harry and Marv almost recognize the gangster movie Kevin uses to trick them - a gag reprised by Kevin in the movie but now with perfunctory firecrackers in an empty soup pot for added effect. It’s Kevin adding new dimensions and layers to his ever-slickening arsenal of con-artist grifts.
In contrast to the cranky old hermit trapped in a child’s body, Harry and Marv, along with all the other adults in the movie (with the exception of Kevin’s mother) are children clanging around in the bodies of grownups. In a way, they're also trapped in a morass of class anxiety. This class warfare is apparent in their crimes. They want what the wealthy have and they resent them for having it. Out of blind spite, Marv adds leaving plugged kitchen sinks on as a bit of additional sabotage. The flooding makes the crime political and personal. Pesci’s gaming of the community by disguising as a policeman plays into the entrenched small town ideal. He knows how to imitate a working class public servant. That he stands in the doorway largely ignored by the McCallister family - like the pizza delivery boy - underlines the insularity of the McCallister household and paints them as people largely inattentive to the working class.
One can sort of identify with Kevin’s feeling trapped by this existence. The cross-section of grown adults suffering from arrested development in Home Alone is like a rundown of negative kid archetypes; Harry and Marv are the delinquent punk brats. Buzz is the dormant sadist and future DUI female harasser. Papa Peter is the status-chasing hipster imbecile. Uncle Frank is the hateful, ill-tempered schoolyard bully. The Snow Shovel Neighbor is the sensitive, misunderstood shy kid. The down-on-his-luck Santa is the classic underachiever. John Candy (irrelevant to this story but always welcome) is the harmless class clown with a heart of gold. The actual police, retail cashiers, pizza guy and the airport ticket counter clerk are the shiftless, apathetic loser kids disinterestedly slowing down the whole world at their jobs. Kevin’s mother Kate is the only other adult in sight. Maybe they fight because of how similar they are. Her blowup at the airport is understandable in context. The only emotional grounding in the movie is rendered by her strained patience in barely concealing her rage at a world run by the mentally and emotionally deficient, which is what actual children are after all.
For a while, Kevin’s innocence is maintained in this self-discovery. At eight years old, he seems to comprehend the importance of inconsequential play in a Chaplinesque sense. The simple doing of pointless things as a means of exploring spaces, objects and self. When he slaps the aftershave on his face a second time, it’s not a sensory discovery. It’s just something he’s performing for himself, like singing into the comb. Sledding down the stairs or shooting the action figures down the laundry shoot. This is all just a developmental form of Play, one that smartphones can’t provide for us. Kevin talks to himself. In the absence of the parental figures who structure his existence, he rebuilds his reality from the ground up. He invents his own games, which rethink the territory and functions of the hideous hummel figurine/Thomas Kinkade/”God Bless This Mess”/good-china-locked-up-in-cabinet midwestern Irish Catholic mausoleum that is the McCallister home.
There is insight here. We do weird things when we’re by ourselves. We play little games with our environment. We’re funny when no one’s looking. Have you ever sung a song into a bathroom mirror using an object from the bathroom as a microphone? Like a hairbrush or heaven forfend, a toilet brush? This is the kind of open, explorative education Kevin gets that his dullard siblings will miss out on. And it’ll keep them back. American children in many circles are ruinously overscheduled. And Kevin’s sabbatical seems like a badly needed tonic.
You can’t make this movie now, in an era when young people are glued to the social and recreational experiences offered via handheld screens. Or it would produce an excruciatingly boring viewing experience. But instead, we are treated to watching a child living as if he’d absorbed the teachings of Thích Nhất Hạnh - Adaptive Improvisation. Discovering The Magic Of The Present Moment - this could be the purest expression of what it is (or should be) to be a kid. The poetry is to be found within the mundane. As incomplete and relatively pure subjects, children are in the best position to seek it.
monk, activist and Plum Village Tradition founder, Thích Nhất Hạnh
Then Hughes pulls the rug out from under us. Or rather, hits us with a suspended paint can.
Kevin’s private peace goes from being a fanciful spate of junk food and jumping on the bed to a matter of necessity and survival. Keep in mind, he still thinks he magically wished his family away. He knows to ask a retail clerk if a toothbrush is approved by the American Dental Association but he doesn’t imagine that his parents merely took an airport shuttle from their house. So he doesn’t know he has to just wait it out. He has to learn to think for himself. And this process corrupts him.
Critics complained that the movie abandoned its more relatable story ideas for broad physical comedy. But those ideas would perhaps not have been able to support the weight of the movie’s subsidiary theme - first explored in Hughes’ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and then more concretely here. Kevin’s success throughout the latter half of the movie is attributed to learning (quickly) how to game the system. That is, in order to survive, he MUST learn to mimic the ordinary dishonesty of the adult world. It’s glimpsed from a distance and then mirrored in the world of the children and their neighborhood in I Was Born, But.... In Home Alone, the unsentimental education is a clear matter of survival.
Of course, it’s not hard to do this in the world of idiots the movie depicts. In another conservative twist, institutions and their button pushers fail Kevin and the McCallister family across the board. Wage earners are incredulous blobs of redundancy. Airport counter workers are stymied, phony pukes with no empathy. The police are either doughnut-munching bureaucrats or easily swayed humps too lazy to get out of their squad cars. Who could blame Kevin for running afoul of this population? Who would hold him accountable for his violence and treachery when the apathy of the law enforcement figures are the only authoritative alternative? Ironically, Pesci’s impersonation of a cop as a way of eyeballing potential targets is the closest thing this community gets to actual protective service. He’s actually bothered to understand this community and how it works (affluent, isolated and lily white as it may be) more than the real police would ever attempt to.
the working classes understand their upper class peers more acutely than the other way around
Kevin’s corruption begins when he accidentally steals a toothbrush. He doesn’t return it and moves on from the incident quickly, eluding yet another worthless police officer. Then his timing of the fast forward and play buttons on the VCR remote is impeccable for conning the pizza guy (Side Note: This and the earlier degradation of the pizza guy in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie in the span of just a few years. Why the animosity towards pizza boys in this era?). Believe me, I’m not without a sense of humor. It’s a pretty good movie gag. But Kevin’s delight at making a teenager think he was going to die is pretty unsettling.
Then he’s delighted to make small talk with the grocery cashier, handing her a neatly clipped coupon (the old fucking man) as he lies to her through his teeth. And he NEEDS his traditional Christmas. I have to admit I’ve never been much for traditional Christmas myself. But it looks somewhat attractive, if a little overly groomed in Home Alone. Kevin seems genetically predisposed to knowing how to cut and decorate his own Christmas tree. And the way he panders to the deadbeat Santa, pretending not to know Santa isn’t real so the guy doesn't feel like a total loser. A child makes the perfect grifter. These tiny bits of corruption happen BECAUSE Kevin is alone, unsheltered by his parents. They add up. And in the world of this movie, this anti-social skill set is necessary. It has to be streamlined and warehoused virtually for later use in the corrupt adult world. These everyday pointless falsehoods of character - tragic to Ozu - are what Hughes is saying it means to an adult.
It’s this sudden world-weariness and cynicism that makes Kevin able to have that specific conversation with the creepy neighbor in the church. A suburban church on Christmas Eve that’s mostly empty because of Godless, secular heathens like the McCallister family and their desertion of American tradition. That scene is bafflingly both touching and completely unreal. I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that the pigeon lady played by Brenda Fricker in Home Alone 2 (who needed similar advice) was just the Snow Shovel neighbor from the first movie in disguise. Just too ashamed to admit in person that he needed an eight year old kid to fit the missing piece of the puzzle into his cracked psyche: “Oh, yeah! I should...like... CALL my son and try to reconcile things myself. Thanks kid!”
It’s here Kevin graduates from his self-tutelage in con-artistry to one in the administration of pain.
It’s true blue Conservatism, the kind that hearkens back to when it had the faint trace of an honorable tradition in America. There’s a rugged individualism to certain kinds of movie protagonists. More often than not, it’s predicated on distrust of institutions, however justifiable. But its virtues are very much beneath the surfaces usually covered up by things like violence, action, slapstick, musical numbers - nearly all manner of genre film convention. The hero and their tribe are the only ones who can get the job done. Self-reliance. Individualism. You’re alone with it all. You have to hurt others because you have no other recourse. So you had better enjoy your work.
Aggression and conflict are then revealed to Kevin as the other side of Play in the freedom of life on one’s own. This is the anti-social side of Neo-Conservatism. The institutions you pay taxes to are so worthless as to be irredeemable. Modern society is a cesspool. The only way to survive is to get one’s hands dirty. Hughes tells us that we are all down in the muck together. The people running our society are lazy and incompetent. So it’s up to family (Mom, the adult), Community (Snow Shovel Neighbor) and Good-Hearted Strangers (Candy) to help each other. The church may be empty but it’s always there for you. Used twice in the movie as a sanctuary, physically and then spiritually, the foregrounding of Church as a place of refuge and healing is another bold move that would complicate any kind of true remake. Religion is Cinema’s last remaining taboo. But at least the snow shovel-wielding neighbor has your back.
”Dad! Buzz! I’m honoring the traditions of religious holiday celebration native to our faith and homeland! You better come out and secularize and de-xenophobe me!”
Now a quantum leap forward past even that in Kevin’s rapid education is sauntering up to the task of hurting people. Note how he has an instinctual feel for how to hurt men physically. He knows where a man’s pain centers are located (the heart, genitals or bottom of the foot). Again, it’s a redundant and overlong sequence. By the end of the second movie, I’m all but convinced Kevin is a fully developed man. Puberty will be a mere formality. The targets of his romantic affection will be no match for him.
The most telling shot in the whole movie is of Kevin’s complete shock and awe of his newfound evil powers as the police cart Harry and Marv off to jail, all of it happening on someone else’s property. His delight and amazement at his ability to fuse lateral thinking, precision timing and homemade handiwork is the most well-conveyed element of Macaulay Culkin’s performance. Director Chris Columbus must have thought it important enough to emphasize. Kevin could grow up to be a doomsday prepper. Or the Jigsaw Killer, complete with the bogus moral slipperiness (if you can’t find the key inside your own eye socket, it’s your own fault you die as punishment for not appreciating God’s gift of life).
What would have happened if he hadn’t been left home alone and instead went with his family on their French vacation? Nothing. He’d have trouble getting away on his own with the family on top of each other and bickering the whole time (oh, the soft tyranny of large families). Then he’d have come back from a city the family regarded merely as a place where you can buy Eiffel Tower paperweight souvenirs and remained a conflicted, dependent autodidact. Precocious, naive and shiftless. Following the blasé overseas excursion and a return to a ransacked and flooded house, Kevin would likely cocoon into his family drama, growing up but lacking self-reliance. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Instead, Kevin is rewarded for his lessons in pain and deceit with the return of his family, displaying a newfound respect for him for joining the adult world of back-handed compliments and duplicitous intentions. The story of Home Alone and its old school conservative leanings almost resembles an inverted form of Taken, in which the hero as a defender of traditional community and family values, having learned the skill set for his own defense, takes his one-man-army show on the road to be visited upon The Other. In this case, evil foreigners.
Kevin will probably continue to tinker, keep to himself and pine for an era that was over before he was born. He’ll live in solitude off the grid. Land mines and barbed wire around his trailer with a Rube Goldberg door handle jury rigged to a shotgun trigger on the inside. He’ll fall behind on his alimony payments. Sporadically employed. Hating the government. Loving his ham radio. TV always switched to Turner Classic Movies. He’ll vote for Donald Trump (the ultimate prankster sadist), whom he’ll see as a kindred spirit and who’ll be there to give him directions when he drops by Trump’s Plaza Hotel on his New York adventure. A fitful guide for pointing him toward another corruptive, pain-dispensing, rapidly-jading experience.
“When a student is ready, a teacher will appear.” -Buddha
