Silver Screen Sleuths: Home Alone (1990)

I want to get something off of my chest:

I hate fan theories.

I don’t know whether to blame Citizen Kane or Newhart or the Greater YouTube Media Commentary Environment, but I am so sick and tired of people needing something to be a dream, a fantasy, or figure out what “really” happened in a movie. Especially a movie meant for children, directed by a man named Christopher Columbus. The only fantastical thing that happened in Home Alone was not that Kevin died or Kevin made it all up or Kevin is actually a trickster god. It’s that they got Joe Pesci to not curse for an hour and forty-three minutes of screen time and, as we always point out, how a family with that many kids can afford a house that big. The biggest trick of all was Reaganomics!

I do not particularly care for this movie, even though it is the exact right age for me to be nostalgic about it. I know I *saw* it in 1990 when it came out, but my mother had a fanaticism for reminding all of her children that what we saw onscreen was not real. I was not allowed to watch Looney Tunes or other violence on TV until she was sure I was old enough to understand that if I fell off of a cliff like Wylie E. Coyote, I would die, not turn into an accordion. She was adamant that any charm or hilarity that ensued from the Stooge-like pratfalls and hijinks of Kevin, Marv, and Harry should be smothered as quickly as possible, because I was four, and I would not understand that these were stunts and not real. Perhaps this was also when I learned that Santa was a folktale.

I find a lot of older media for children to be intolerably cruel. You ever go back and watch Charlie Brown and realize that everyone was being a goddamn sociopath to poor Charlie? As we mention on our Ticklish Business episode on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (which I think is out this week?), this movie is at best mean and at worst downright eugenicist. I supposed you have to work in broad strokes for human beings who have been on the planet for less than a decade, but I am, and always will be, slightly more of, like, an Arthur or Care Bears kid than anything else.

Now, Emily: Is Home Alone even a mystery movie?

I’ve already been teased a bit by my esteemed podcast co-host that Home Alone is not a whodunit. And that is correct. BUT! I would argue that Home Alone is actually, in the vein of the greatest mystery TV show of all time, Columbo, actually a How Catch ‘Em. Operating on the belief that there is no secret, meta, or subtextual story about Kevin experiencing a Catholic purgatory in his family’s mansion after he’s been resoundingly murdered by two petty burglars who have made the hard and unexpected turn into child-murder, we know, as viewers, that this small cherubic menace is going to be confronted by two ne’er-do-wells (one who got famous by playing Mafia killers, the other, a Jewish fella best known for voicing another Kevin) and we spend the next hour or so wondering how he’s going to do it.

And that’s through rampant, unchecked, torturous violence!

I think the How Catch ‘Em is a really underutilized mystery structure. Gillian Flynn poked at it nicely in Gone Girl once she made the revelation about Amy, but I do like the original intention of showing a cat-and-mouse game of wits. I think about how to do it in text– and if anyone can suggest a “real” mystery (not a psychological thriller like Gone Girl) that uses the structure in the comments, I’d be much obliged– but the structure makes for better viewing onscreen. The tension that builds! The unsuspecting nature of our amateur sleuth! How ever shall he prevail!

The other fun part about Home Alone is how neatly it fits into cozy mystery tropes– Kevin is an overlooked (literally to the point of child abuse that would lead to a visit from CPS if the McCallisters weren’t rich and white) social outsider (all of his family members hate! him! so! much!) in a contained village (it’s Chicago, but it’s a walkable neighborhood that is a contained experience for a child without a driver’s license). There is a mistrust of cops (the only one we see for most of the film is Joe Pesci’s Harry in disguise) and a banding together of other social outsiders (old and infirmed Mr. Marley helps the young and “incapable” Kevin) to catch the people responsible for sullying the quiet of the idealized hamlet.

I think more movies than you’d consider fit the cozy mystery tropes– a big one that I think a lot of people miss is Rear Window. That’ll be an essay for the summertime, though.

I realize I am being somewhat glib about this movie; aside from the fact that Harry and Marv would be dead eight times over from the attacks they endured, I don’t really think there’s anything “bad” about Home Alone, nothing that needs parsing, or anything that requires a lot of thinkpiece-y stuff 35 years after it debuted. I think it’s a fun twist on a mystery and a caper, and it’d be great to see its concepts made for adults (which, come to think of it, is actually Die Hard). Catherine O’Hara is a truly outstanding movie mom, even if the character is kind of a jerk who never stands up for her bullied child, though her actions were not in any way out of the ordinary for a mom in 1990. John Candy exists and every time we see his face our hearts grow three sizes. John Heard… well. He’s well-cast. Daniel Stern is now a bronze sculptor and lives on a tangerine farm in Ventura and I love him. Joe Pesci is one of my favorite actors and I can and do watch him in anything. Macauly Culkin has clearly had the good therapy and I’m happy he’s come out the other side of his abusive childhood. Kieran Culkin remains adorable.

(I think that John Hughes may have been inspired by Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid a little bit, though the old noir movie cut into Home Alone isn’t real.)

Home Alone is a fun entree to our December Sleuths. The ones after this (The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and The Thin Man) are much more traditional, and I’m really excited to watch all of them again.

Tell me: what’s your favorite How Catch ‘Em?