In recent months, I’ve used this space to revisit the merits of a handful of childhood favorites. Some, like the traumatic pleasures of The NeverEnding Story, I share with millions of former kids, while others, like the Super Mario Brothers movie, might just be me. But if there’s one film that holds more or less equal prominence in the psyche of just about every American in my general demographic, it’s Home Alone. Looking back, it’s difficult to explain just how big a deal Home Alone was. I was probably a couple of years too young to see Home Alone in its theatrical run, but I was instantly aware of Macaulay Culkin’s iconic Munchian scream, and soon had my own ex-rental VHS to wear out like everyone else. (How omnipresent was Home Alone in children’s video libraries? This commercial will forever be known as “The Home Alone Pepsi Ad,” despite having nothing to do with the film itself). The movie has a number of things going for it– a lively score by John Williams; a cast nonchalantly stacked with Oscar nominees and SCTV alums; probably the last decent screenplay by John Hughes– but its appeal rests squarely on the tiny shoulders of Macaulay Carson Culkin, the once and future King of the Millennials.
A caveat before I go on: born in 1980, Culkin’s generational status is debatable*. This doesn’t negate my point; on the contrary, it’s essential to his royal status. By being just a couple of years older than his film’s target audience, Culkin showed them a role model they could quickly grow into. It’s not just that Kevin McCallister could lay ingenious/probably lethal traps for mentally challenged home invaders, or even that he could successfully deploy such PG profanity as “horse’s ass.” The thing about Kevin is that he was smart. He could imitate the speech patterns and daily routines of a sophisticated adult, even if (as we can see now rewatching it) he missed the mark just enough to be adorable. Furthermore, he knew how to stand up for what he believed in. To a kid in the early ‘90s, Kevin’s rage against his family for eating all the cheese pizza was the equivalent of Howard Beale’s on-air breakdown. Kevin was cooler than any of us would ever be, but he made it look easy enough that we all tried anyway.
To most, this is where Culkin’s legacy ends; we all grew up, and he joined the pantheon of wastoid ex-child actors. But an examination of Culkin’s post-Home arc provides a mirror of our own generational progression, amplified and distorted, but recognizable. His nebulously unsettling relationship with Michael Jackson, for starters, provided many of us with the first hint that our heroes might not be entirely what they seem, planting seeds that would only fully sprout in the past couple of months or so. What’s more, his pattern of drifting between legit indie film (remember Party Monster?) and alarming debauchery plays like like a real-life satire of our generation’s excesses. Culkin’s ur-milleniality reached its apotheosis with The Pizza Underground, his Brooklyn-based, pizza-themed Lou Reed cover band which I still have trouble believing really happened (sadly, Pussy Joel, his cat-themed Billy Joel project, has yet to materialize).
All of this is to say that Home Alone, and Culkin himself, are more deeply ingrained in our collective cultural identity than we are perhaps consciously aware. Home Alone, and the kids-with-attitude subgenre it spawned, gave us our first glimpse of rebellion, and Culkin provided us with our first role model. To some extent, many of us are still aspiring to be as cool as that eight-year-old pretending to shave– even if we’re old enough to order our own pizzas.
Finally, an aside, which I couldn’t find a way to organically include in the article: I’ve never seen Home Alone 3, and looked up a plot synopsis to see if it had any canonical relation to the first two. I’m still not clear on that, but I did find this gem: “Alex Pruitt, a young boy of nine living in Chicago, fends off thieves who seek a top-secret chip in his toy car to support a North Korean terrorist organization’s next deed.” I have no idea how to process this information.
* – Before you send me the link, know that I have zero interest in think pieces about “Generation Y” or “Xennials” or whatever people my age call themselves when they don’t want to be associated with Youtube personalities. Generational monikers are inherently broad generalizations which lump together millions of vastly disparate individuals, and I’ve got better things to worry about than fashioning an identity around the fact that I played The Oregon Trail sometimes. While we’re at it, I also have very little patience for the term “think piece.” Furthermore, get off my lawn.
Home Alone
1990
dir. Chris Columbus
103 min.
Screens Thursday, 12/14, 7:00pm @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Part of the Ongoing Series: Rewind!
