Adult with ‘Home Alone’

SLOUGH, ENGLAND:

We’re well and truly into the Christmas season, which means if you’re thinking about getting on a plane, it’s time to put a young blond boy in charge of your home to fend off a couple of opportunistic burglars using swinging irons, poisonous tarantulas and doorknobs hotter than lava. All set to the background of classic Christmas carols.

Force it on the new generation

For years I have urged my dear children to do their childhood duty of watching the first two Home Alone movies with me, an instruction they have either dutifully ignored or mocked mercilessly. “How can you see something so unrealistic?” the elder will consider, (temporarily ignoring his own admiration for the venerable realist fictional hero, Doctor Strange).

This year, I did the next best thing: I presented a truly cruel alternative to tricking them into a Home Alone marathon. “Boys, fold all your laundry and take it upstairs,” I announced. Before they could spread like bullets, I turned on the first Home Alone for the opening scene to study Joe Pesci’s confused fake cop (Harry) looking at the total chaos running amok in the McAllister family home.

Like most kids, my kids approach laundry with the same caution they would afford a squirming python. Thus, by the time Kevin was marched upstairs by his mother to an uninsulated attic for being the only one of 15 people in the house causing trouble, I had three unwitting audience members on the couch with me. They later grudgingly admitted to mild amusement, the highlight being Donald Trump’s Plaza Hotel cameo in the second film. While I admit to being less than impressed by Trump’s consummate acting skills, I have documented my unfiltered thoughts on revisiting this holiday classic as an adult.

Flying blind parenting

Memes have polluted the online world, where we are offered a picture of the McAllister family home over a caption asking what Kevin’s father, Peter, did to afford this giant palace of a house. I’m assuming this slightly confused internet community didn’t study Kevin’s mom Kate’s crisp ironed pantsuits in any depth. This is not the uniform of a stay-at-home mom. Someone whose days are consumed with cleaning the monstrous house (which has many windows) doesn’t dress in a pantsuit for a pizza dinner the night before the whole family leaves. This is a woman whose bank account is as robust as her husband’s—as evidenced by the speed and casualness with which she whips out a fat wad of cash to the poor pizza boy hanging around hoping that one of these floating adults will pay him. She also assumes that an eight-year-old can pack her own suitcase for an international holiday. Ergo, here’s a woman who has a lot more on her mind than the uncomfortable truth that an eight-year-old is far more likely to pack bricks in her suitcase than a toothbrush. She’s also the only person her son feels sorry for when he yearns for a return to normality, which means that in addition to her pantsuit job, she’s landed this parenting gig—something her husband failed to do in either film.

Since we are about parents, we have to deal with the fact that they are raising a family of psychopaths. Their eldest son raises a poisonous tarantula and their youngest is willing to murder a couple of burglars. The fact that it doesn’t actually work out is all down to Harry and Marv’s amazing mental and physical resilience, which we’ll get to in a moment.

I blame the name. There is something inherently wrong with the name Kevin, and those who foolishly ignore this hypothesis are invited to conduct a character study of the novel We Need To Talk About Kevin, which is about a different Kevin, but one who is just as much of a psychopath as Kevin McCallister. However, Roman Kevin’s victims are made of far less sturdy stuff than Harry and Marv, and perish carelessly when pierced with an arrow (as in a bow and arrow) when their Kevin goes on a killing spree at his high school. (Harry and Marv would just laugh and laugh.) Maybe if Kate and Peter had named their son something innocuous like Greg or Charles, they might actually have had a more conventional child who would have called the police when these would-be burglars shook up , instead of trying to kill them with an iron or Buzz’s tarantula.

The wet bandits

How can we discuss Home Alone without paying tribute to the extraordinary resilience of Harry and Marv, who parade themselves charmingly under the name of the Wet Bandits? Not only do they invent a devious title for themselves, they suffer all sorts of abuse from this child pest. Do they ever consider throwing in the towel? Or dying? Never.

“Why don’t they just give up?” my youngest asked after Marv was hit by a plummeting brick for the third time in the second movie. The answer is that Harry and Marv seek danger and revenge as a planet seeks in orbit. Giving up is simply not on their agenda. These are the guys who managed to outsmart prison guards despite repeated head injuries during their first encounter with Kevin. As anyone who’s seen Prison Break knows (another John Heard offering, by the way, who also played Kevin’s father), escaping prison is a complex task that usually requires elaborate drawings tattooed all over one’s body. And yet Harry and Marv make it without any tattoos, which is perhaps an option Michael Schofield from Prison Break could have explored.

Marv later overcomes the brick situation by suffering temporary blurred vision and an unsteady gait that lasts exactly the time it takes to walk a flight of stairs (after which he crashes into the basement and somehow has the courage to get back up. His other performance defies). through after being hit in the face with an iron, he is electrocuted to within an inch of his life and continues unhindered (rendering Harry’s “I don’t care if I get the chair, I’ll have the child” declaration somewhat pointless, (since Marv has proven that a high dose of electricity is uncomfortable, but certainly survivable.) Harry later burns his hair off and pulls off a handstand that Olympic gymnasts dream of by dunk your head in a nearby toilet. Together, Harry and Marv are nearly drowned in cans of varnish than all this torture together, they are attacked by the most disgusting, most terrifying creatures that exist: pigeons Now you tell me – are two people who can overcome all this trauma, not the finest case studies in resilience? I think so.

I’ll leave you alone to ponder the bravery of this criminal duo while I now search for an alternative even more hideous than laundry to persuade my children to fold it.