Owing to its original, charming set-up of a cute kid abandoned at home during the holidays who uses his street smarts to sustain himself and outwit home invaders (and Macaulay Culkin’s iconic, impossibly cute interpretation of Norwegian Expressionist, Edvard Munch’s The Scream) Millennials hold the Christmas classic, Home Alone, near and dear to their hearts.
However, as we, as a global society, have become more astute and sensitive towards mental illness and the debilitating aftereffects of trauma, viewing Home Alone now will surely prove to be a traumatizing experience for many.
When it was first released in 1990, Home Alone, was a worldwide box office colossal hit that quickly cemented its status as a Christmas favorite everywhere from the United States to Poland. Yes, Poland. But its extremely disturbing premise seemed to have eluded everyone. Rather than realizing how unsettling the thought of an eight year old child being abandoned at home for days on end and having to defeat adult murderers all on his own is, audiences were instead distracted by the film’s incongruent Christmas feel and dazzled by the child’s ingenuity, courage and autonomy. Tricking a pizza delivery guy to deliver a pizza for free, filling his mansion with booby traps to defeat intruders and shopping for groceries all on his own – the kid is commendably remarkable.
But that doesn’t mean we should find this film entertaining.
Like many who’ve faced the brunt of 2020 and have taken solace in pop culture nostalgia to ease their pain, I decided to get into the holiday spirit watch the Christmas classic, Home Alone, for the first time in twenty years. Taking a page from the Danes, I decided to turn my nostalgic viewing into a total Hygge experience. I switched on the fairy lights, snuggled up in a cozy blanket, whipped out a cup of hot chocolate and turned on a movie that I loved growing up.
I was not ready for what transpired. Indeed, my convivial Hygge experience quickly turned into a nightmare of Wes Craven-like proportions. The film starts with the innocent child, Kevin McAllister, being emotionally abused by his morally bankrupt WASP family and things only get worse from there. The scene where the child realizes his family is not in the house turned me into a sobbing mess and don’t get me started on the scenes where he’s being hunted down by homicidal psychopaths, I kept shaking my head in disbelief and reaching for the Kleenex box.
The film’s climax though, the most unabashedly fucked up scene in the film, is when said homicidal psychopaths corner the child and taunt him about how much pleasure dismembering his body will elicit. Thankfully (and because this is marketed as a family film), a neighbor, whom the child helped in a touching scene earlier on in the film, sneaks up on the murderers and whacks them in the head with a shovel. My intense emotions at that moment crescendoed – I burst into tears and clutched the already tattered Kleenex in my hand. I turned the movie off for a few minutes to take a few deep breaths and compose myself.
I wasn’t moved by the rescue, even though it tugged hard at my heartstrings, so much as I was just relieved that the traumatized child was saved and that this godawful movie was coming to an end.
I felt drained.
I began asking myself – how did I not realize how fucked up this movie is when I was a kid (I was a kid, deep thoughts didn’t enter my head) and what kind of a monster would produce this disgusting piece of child torture porn? Then I Googled the film’s screenwriter and lo and behold it was 80s pop film macher, John Hughes (the Brat Pack creator) whom I’ve always known as an ardent Reagan Republican and everything started to make sense to me.
The film is pungent with Republican values namely individualistic self-reliance and child maltreatment. But I digress.
I also Googled whether or not anyone on the internet held my contrarian views about this supposed family film and, unsurprisingly enough, stumbled on a YouTube skit Macaulay Culkin starred in five years ago revolving around the aftermath of his Kevin McAllister character. The character, now a deeply troubled thirtysomething, still reels from the trauma he endured as a child and questions why his family abandoned him.
That didn’t surprise me. Harvard Health says:
Early childhood trauma is a risk factor for almost everything, from adult depression to PTSD and most psychiatric disorders, as well as a host of medical problems, including cardiovascular problems such as heart attack and stroke, cancer, and obesity.
My mind immediately remembers another disturbing, iconic Hollywood franchise – the Halloween films. A franchise that began with the popular 1978 slasher, Halloween, whose success spawned nine whole sequels; the most successful however both financially and critically was its 2018 iteration. I suspect that the reason being is that, unlike the other nine films, the 2018 Halloween sequel is the first to not place shock and horror front and center. The film instead focuses more on the psychological repercussions of a trauma namely the story of lead character Laurie Strode who, forty years after the terror she witnessed as a teenager, had transfigured into an emotionally unstable mother who neglects her children and is still haunted by her terrifying memories. It is the first Halloween film to not be nihilistic, to have a human element to its story and that is what I believe audiences and critics gravitated towards.
Since everything 90s is making a strong comeback these days, it would not be absurd to think that a Tinseltown idiot is going to propose, or is already in the process of making, a Home Alone sequel.
When that film inevitably comes to light, I am adamant that the now 40 year old Kevin McAllister will, like Halloween’s Laurie Strode (or Macaulay Culkin’s YouTube skit), be portrayed as a mentally perturbed person. In Kevin’s case specifically, based on the specific horrors he witnessed, he will most likely end up as a paranoid depressive with severe commitment issues.
Anything that deviates away from that narrative and the internet armchair activists would ensure that the film is cancelled. And they’d be absolutely right.
According to the National Children’s Alliance website, “An estimated 678,000 children were victims of abuse and neglect (in America) in 2018. Of those 678,000 children, an estimated 1,770 children died from abuse and neglect.”
I do not want to hear the moronic aphorism that it’s “just a movie”. There’s a line that should not be crossed, especially when it comes to children.
Had this film come out in the last five years, it would not have seen the light of day; it would have caused an uproar so loud and deafening that Hollywood would immediately cancel its release and spend millions in PR damage control.
Watch the aforementioned Macaulay Culkin’s post-Home Alone skit below:
