Home Alone Is Basically a Truffaut Movie, Fight Me

I want to be transparent about this: I’m writing this essay specifically to annoy my dad. 

A couple of months ago, I rewatched Home Alone because, while I am Jewish, it has become my Christmas ritual to do so. I remarked to my father over the dinner table that this last time, I had entertained the funny, even silly, thought that Home Alone is a lot like The 400 Blows. 

His face became a lemon and he told me that I needed to watch The 400 Blows again. Keep in mind, my dad has not seen Home Alone since, like, 1992, whereas I’ve seen The 400 Blows more than once this century.

My dad is an extremely smart, educated, opinionated, and accomplished man. Some of you, if you’re a particular flavor of nerd, might have even heard of him. And one thing that I give him unequivocal props for is my cultural education (my mom, too–don’t get it twisted: my mom is equally smart, equally accomplished, but this isn’t an essay trying to irritate her, she’ll get her own someday). 

Mostly, I mean movies.

Books were huge in my house, but nobody had to convince me or my sister of their greatness. We read early, we read often, and we read whatever the hell we wanted. We were also reading so-called “real books”–not even always The Babysitter’s Club (although a lot of BSC)! I was mainlining Jane Austen at 10. He didn’t feel the need to worry about it, I guess.

Movies though? Movies he focused on. And not movies in “let’s do a fun day/night at the movies! Explosions, jokes, talking cartoon animals! Fun for the whole family!” kind of way. “Good” movies. “Real movies.”

I think we traumatized the parents with repeated rentals of Annie. He couldn’t take it.

In second grade, we were given a weeklong Marx Brothers festival in the living room. In third grade, it was Hitchcock. In fourth, it was Woody Allen (relax please, this was the 90s, I agree with you, focus up), and Mel Brooks. And then every single year after it, including this year, on Father’s Day and my dad’s birthday, we ate sushi and he chose a movie that me and Sophie “really should see.” (Sidebar: he’s running out of movies. We’re about to turn 39. We watched Ishtar last time.)

But the real piece de resistance was in high school, I think the summer after 10th grade. We were living in New York. My dad told us that he would pay for us to go see any movie we wanted that summer…as long as it was playing at Film Forum, the Anjelika, Sunshine, or IFC Center. For those who don’t live in NYC, some clarification: those movie theaters do not, have not, will not ever play, a Marvel movie. They play old movies, arthouse, documentaries, and foreign films.

He doesn’t remember this by the way, but he concedes that it sounds like him. 

Now, I loved and still do love a lot of the movies he showed me. Hitchcock is still one of my all-time favorite filmmakers and has been a huge influence on me. The first book I ever published, The Accidental Bad Girl, is based on North by Northwest. I learned a lot from these movies. I’m grateful I saw these movies. I enjoyed a lot of them. (Dad, if you’re reading this: emphatically not the Danish one, you know the one I mean, and I will never forget.)

But also by high school, I was already very, very tired of being told what I was allowed to like. What art I was allowed to find meaning in; what art counted.

In my senior year of high school, I took an English elective that should have been easy. It was called Writing About Film, it was for seniors, and I should have had it in the bag. But I didn’t even phone it in. I really tried.

I put my heart and soul into an essay passionately advocating for the academic and artistic validity of teen movies. The essay had examples. It drew connections. It made cogent points that I’ve since made on auditorium stages at well-attended conferences. It took as its primary texts Drive Me Crazy, My Boyfriend’s Back, and Valley Girl. It was perfection. 

I got a D. This was personal–the teacher hated me, and made that clear in a few other stories I don’t have time for here. But her cover, that particular time, was that I hadn’t “taken the assignment seriously;” that teen movies were beneath the dignity of the elective. I had always wanted to be a writer, but this is around when I decided, “Fuck you, I’m going to write YA.”

Which brings us back around to Home Alone.

I am someone who experiences neurological paralysis when asked to name my favorite anything, including books, but for a long, long time, I had no problem at all with this one: Home Alone, I decided at age five, was a solidly unimpeachable selection for My Favorite Movie™. I had it memorized. Literally memorized. I can recite that film word for word. But for many, many years, I didn’t watch it.

At 30, I watched it again. And I’ve watched it again at least once a year, every year since, because that movie is a goddamn achievement. And not just because any movie in which Catherine O’Hara, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, and John motherfucking Candy are giving it their absolute all is worth a visit; not just because Macauley Culkin is a clear star. It’s because, that thing you remember about the movie? The brutal torture traps scene? That’s really not the movie. That’s about 30 minutes in the back third.

The rest of that movie follows a misunderstood, self-reliant, rebellious young boy as he is abandoned by those who are supposed to care for him as he encounters a wide and dangerous world on his illicit lonesome. You watch as a canny kid catches, and learns to exploit–for the sake of his survival–every failure of the bourgeois world he is meant to conform to: his parents, his elders, the police, supermarkets (ie. the adult world of commerce), and even church. Kevin, when we meet him, is scared to go in the basement or the attic. He’s not even confident enough in his independence to believe he can pack a suitcase, although his natural inventiveness is telegraphed from the beginning, when his dad yells at him for using the hot glue gun to turn fish hooks into ornaments. When he finally gets a taste of freedom, he gorges himself on ice cream and watches scary movies, terrifying himself into hiding under his parents’ bed.

By the end, he has come to embrace his darkness–but he also hides it. He doesn’t tell his family what he’s endured when they return. He lights the Christmas tree, hangs the stockings, and waits for his family, not knowing if they will ever return. If that’s not staring into the ocean at the end of The 400 Blows, I don’t know what is.

And, look: don’t tell me the ending of The 400 Blows is somehow more legit because it feels more ambiguous. Home Alone is ultimately wayyyyyyyy more ambiguous about the fate of the character, and his trajectory in life. After The 400 Blows, there are four sequels telling us what happens to Antoine Doinel over the course of twenty years!–and only two of them are watchable, and one of those is a short.

Whereas Home Alone exists out of time as an iconic story of abandonment and misanthropy, gleeful rage and revenge. The fact that it is about a child deepens its poignancy, it doesn’t lessen it. It is anthemic, to a whole generation.

Like, you know, the French New Wave.

My point is, that just because you don’t automatically have an entry point into the media, or the media only appeals to people whose intellectual bent doesn’t match your own, that does not make your shit good and my shit ephemeral. I’ve seen The 400 Blows–more than once. More than twice. More than three times. It has not stayed with me, it has not thrummed in my veins, it has not shown me a mirror. Maybe that’s a deficit or character flaw on my part, but it’s the truth.

I have to have seen Home Alone at least 30 times. It shows me a mirror every single time. 

Although I admit the sequel is just a retread trying to play the hits. It shows you nothing. You know. Like Bed & Board.

By Truffaut.