It’s the 3rd Day of Christmas, and it’s been another weird one for planet Earth, so let’s eschew french hens talk about something fun, shall we?
Anybody who observes Christmas (and surely many who don’t) has their own most-hallowed holiday movies. It’s a Wonderful Life springs to mind as a strong contender. For others, Miracle on 34th Street might press those perfect holiday nostalgia buttons, or White Christmas. Maybe it’s something more playful: Merry Christmas Charlie Brown, with its indelible Vince Guaraldi score, or one of the countless Rankin/Bass stop motion specials.
I have a favorite too. For me, it’s just not Christmas until I’ve watched a little film from 1990 entitled Home Alone.
I’m not sure how old I was when I first saw Home Alone, but I know that I turned eight — the same age as Kevin McCallister, the movie’s scampish protagonist — just a few months after its release. And just like Kevin McCallister, I was a resident of the Chicagoland area. That’s essentially where the similarities ended; if youngest-of-five Kevin longed for a Christmas all by himself, only-child Marissa loved Christmas in part because it was the only time of year I was reliably united with my more sizable extended family.
You’ve probably seen Home Alone1. But whether you’ve watched the movie recently or not-at-all, perhaps you’d describe it as being about a kid gets stuck home alone and must set up an elaborate, Rube-Goldbergian trap to thwart a pair of goony robbers. And to be sure, Kevin’s Last Stand against the fiendish Wet Bandits is the big set piece that Home Alone is based around, and likely the scene that sold the film. In addition to being exciting and funny, it’s also just a touch ahead of its time, foreshadowing a kind of ‘90s Nickelodeon/McWorld/“kidz rule, parents drool” kind of vibe.
When I watched the movie this past Friday evening, I got excited when that “big scene” was about to begin. But, as in any other year, I then covered my eyes for a fair chunk of the sequence. I can’t bear to watch Harry repeatedly fall down icy stairs and land on his back. Even as a kid, I couldn’t watch Marv step barefoot on that nail. My mirror neurons are on overdrive; unless it’s in an actual cartoon, that kind of cartoon violence is literally painful to watch.
So how is it that a film whose central sequence I find largely unwatchable is also my most-cherished2 holiday movie?
It’s because I don’t think that the booby-trapped-house thing is the central scene in Home Alone. I don’t even think of Home Alone as a movie about a kid who thwarts thieves with a series of cleverly-inflicted injuries. I think of it as a movie about a kid who thinks he wished his family away, and learns that he wants them around after all.
Allow me to play screenwriting instructor for a moment: look at Kevin’s character arc. The big set piece notwithstanding, the movie is built around Kevin’s journey from helpless family-hater to empowered family-wanter. Yes, his successful thwarting of the Wet Bandits is an example of his quest to overcome him fears and be a Big Boy, but it doesn’t help push him closer to learning his ultimate lesson. The movie would end the same way even if the thieves had never stopped by on Christmas Eve. Kevin even erases any evidence of the Attack on Number 671 before his family’s return; impressively, the only mess Kevin doesn’t appear to have cleaned up is the damage to his brother Buzz’s shelves, which he did himself on his first day home alone.
So forget the big cartoon booby-trap sequence. For my money, the best scene in Home Alone comes just a few minutes sooner. It is the scene that crystallizes what Kevin wants and what he doesn’t want. It’s the scene that proves he’s found the emotional maturity he lacked when we first met him. It’s the film that asks him to face his greatest fear and make friends with it. And the movie doesn’t work without it.
Already having matured a great deal over the course of two days, Kevin stops into a nearby church, where a children’s choir is rehearsing for that night’s Christmas Eve service. Kevin’s neighbor, known to the local kids as “Old Man Marley,” approaches Kevin’s pew and asks to sit down. Kevin has screamed and run from this man every time he’s seen him (one time, he’s so scared that he accidentally shoplifts), but his fear is based only on a kind of ghost-story legend that the man is some kind of snow-shovel serial killer. Now he’s at church. And for the first time, Kevin hears him speak. It’s the first time we’ve heard him speak, too. Like Kevin, all we know about Marley is that he’s a first-rate Scary Guy. Now he’s asking to sit down.
Marley sits. Before long, they’re talking about the complexity of family relationships. Kevin learns that Marley is estranged from his son, and therefore from his granddaughter, who sings in the choir they’re listening to. Kevin pries like only a precocious 8-year-old can. He learns that Marley is afraid to call his son and mend things. He’s afraid of being rejected, once and for all. So Kevin shares a story about how he recently overcame his fear of the McCallister’s basement furnace. Each character learns from what the other has shared. Each character must see how the conversation represents an unexpected little miracle. Later that night, when things are looking grim for young Kevin, it’s his new friend Marley that whacks the villains over the head with his trusty shovel.
Now that’s some good Christmas.
Home Alone doesn’t end when the Wet Bandits are arrested and put in a squad car. The moment we’ve all been waiting for is still to come. Kevin comes downstairs3 and after only a teasing moment’s disappointment, hears the sound of keys in the front door. And there is his mother, who’s traveled through hell and back only to arrive home a few minutes before everyone else. It’s a moment that hurts a little — maybe more than usual this year, depending — but it’s a sweet kind of pain4.
It’s telling though, that even this reunion is not the final image of the film. As his family heads upstairs to unpack, Kevin is drawn almost magically to the window, where he looks across the street to see Old Man Marley reunited with his family as well.
Take out the thief-thwarting sequence and you’d have a film that’s far less fun, far less madcap, maybe far less of a blockbuster. Take out that final moment of Kevin happily witnessing his neighbor’s joy, and you’d have a film that’s just far less.
So, in addition to being about kid who learns he wants his family back, I guess I’ll own that Home Alone is a movie about facing fears by shining a light on them. But eschewing fear requires hope. In the Christian tradition, once you press beyond the narrative details of Jesus’ birth, Christmas is a celebration of the power of hope, love, and light to save humanity. Even if the whole Jesus thing doesn’t do it for you, there’s still something familiar and potent here, in this season or any other: a light that the darkness cannot overcome. That can look like hope in a confusing world. It can look like refusing to give up on humanity. Or, if that feels unreachable right now, it can look like the knowledge, somewhere deep down, that others will carry your torch for you until you can find the strength again.
It can look like a scary old man and an eight year old finding common ground, and using that common ground to save each other.
If not: super spoiler alert
and here I mean, not the “best” one, or even my “favorite one, just the one that I think of as “mine”
apparently having stayed up late cleaning up feathers and micro machines and waxing the floor, as the only sign of last night’s catastrophic mess is a stray gold tooth
As Nicole Kidman used to say, “heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”