Home Alone, or The Gospel According to Wile E. Coyote

A Christmas Tale that Leaves a Mark

If all goes well, this piece should find you on Christmas Eve. I’ll be spending the day in the forge, doing my last minute Christmas present making.

And, as I repurpose bits of junk into hooks, jewelry, knives, and tools using a few simple hand tools, I know (from long experience) that I will, at least for a brief moment, think of some of my childhood heroes who did the same thing, fictional though they were. Characters like Henry Reed, the boys from Rocketship Galileo, Wile E. Coyote, and—especially at this time of year—Kevin McAllister, that lucky boy whose terrible family, one fateful Christmas, accidentally left him Home Alone.

A Time for Giving (Your Family the Finger)

Aside from being the first draft of the Harry Potter films,¹ Home Alone was a little unassuming effort based on a John Hughes script that Hughes (of Ferris Bueller fame), himself was otherwise committed as a director. He instead assumed producer’s duties and hired Chris Columbus to direct. In 1990, the low-budget whimsical holiday feature sailed its way into blockbuster-hood and into the holiday viewing rituals of the American public.

The film opens on a palatial home in a highly assuming Chicago suburb, and we are introduced to the McAllisters—a fractious, stressed out extended family bustling through a frantic evening before a massive fifteen-person flight to Paris. A pizza delivery boy and a cop stand in the foyer, seeking an audience with homeowner Peter McAllister (the former to get paid, the latter to discuss holiday anti-burglary security measures). Peter’s youngest son Kevin, out of his depth in the excitement, finds his normal youngest-child manipulation trump card—being a whiny pain in the ass—isn’t working. Over the course of the evening, the abuse he’s subjected to escalates from the irritating and insulting to the sadistic. After retaliating against his older brother and causing a dinner-ruining milk spill that sends his airline ticket accidentally to the trash, Kevin finds himself shunned by the clan. Exiled to the attic, he prays to Santa, wishing his entire family never existed.

Over night, a freak storm—apparently facilitated by the visage of Santa on the McAllister’s front-door wreath—knocks out the power and the phones to the entire neighborhood. The alarm clocks in the house, naturally, all fail to ring on time (remember, this is 1990—nobody had cell phones, and the cell phones that did exist didn’t have alarm clocks on them. If you wanted to wake up at a certain time, you used something you plugged into the wall).²

In the morning, the harried family piles late into the Airport Shuttle buses, mistaking their head count due to the highly contrived and comically unlucky presence of a neighbor kid about Kevin’s size and age.

The family rushes to the airport, barely making it aboard the flight—however, since there are an equal number of passengers as there are boarding passes, nobody notices that they’re one person short. The airplane departs for Paris.

Back home, Kevin wakes up to an empty house. Seeing that the cars are still in the driveway, and that nobody seems interested in preventing himself from intruding in his sibling’s rooms, he concludes, with perfect eight-year-old logic, that Santa has granted his wish:

His horrible family has vanished from the face of the Earth, and good riddance.

He celebrates by tempting fate—eating popcorn while jumping on his parents’ bed, stealing his brother’s BB gun and executing a few sports action figures by firing squad, tobogganing out the front door, and watching forbidden movies while eating massive ice cream sundaes.

Meanwhile, back on the plane, Kevin’s mother has a growing sense of unease. Something was left undone back at home, but she can’t remember what it was—until, in a flash of highly theatrical maternal panic, she realizes that her youngest son was left behind.

Kevin’s first night is interrupted by a pair of burglars attempting to gain entry to the house. It seems that the cop who’d visited the house in the first scene was really a burglar casing the joint. Kevin repels them by turning on all the lights, convincing them that the place is still occupied. They retreat, but Kevin doesn’t know this, as he’s retreated to his parents’ room to hide under the bed.

After giving himself a pep talk, Kevin bravely sallies forth to the outside, shouting at the night that he’s no longer afraid and that nobody’s gonna scare him—a resolution that lasts almost ten seconds, until his neighbor Old Man Marley shows up and gives him an imperious look. Marley is a grizzled figure that the children in the neighborhood are convinced is a serial killer. Kevin responds rationally, screaming in terror and retreating again to his parents’ room, this time to hide under the duvet (which is an upgrade from under-the-bed, at least in terms of altitude).

In Paris, Kevin’s parents are not idle. After a fruitless call to the local police department wherein Kevin’s mother secures a promise that they will do a wellness check on Kevin (a check which occurs while Kevin is hiding under the bed), the bulk of his family retires to their destination in Paris until they can catch a return flight on Christmas. His mother resolves to stay in the airport to see if an earlier seat will open up, and proceeds to accost anyone who will listen, attempting to buy a seat out from under an otherwise happy traveler.

Kevin’s second day alone sees him determined to be the man of the house. He goes to buy himself a toothbrush to replace the one that disappeared with his luggage, but again is approached by Old Man Marley. Fleeing the shop in terror with the toothbrush in hand, he finds himself pursued by the cops as a shoplifter. As he walks home, dejected at his newfound criminal status, he has a run-in with the Wet Bandits (the burglars who had approached his house the night before). Kevin recognizes the leader of the twosome, Harry, as the cop who’d spoke to his father and beats a hasty retreat, but Harry realizes he’s been made. The pair pursue Kevin to a local church, but both are freaked out by the idea of setting foot on holy ground.

Kevin, realizing that the pair must be the burglars, decides to prepare a more elaborate ruse to scare them off. By the time they come back that night, he’s rigged model trains, turntables, and mannequins to simulate a hopping party at the McAllister residence. Harry and his buddy, Marv, seeing the party, decide to try again the following night.

Once they’re safely gone, Kevin orders himself a pizza, then uses a clip from a gangster film to scare the hell out of the delivery driver just for shits and giggles. Later on—after his mother has succeeded in bribing her way onto a transatlantic flight—Kevin kisses his family’s portrait good night and apologizes for wishing them away.

The following day, Kevin settles into his domestic routine: going grocery shopping, doing the laundry, and cleaning up the mess he’s made the previous couple days. While he’s doing the after-lunch dishes, Marv approaches the house again. Kevin quickly turns the gangster movie on, turning the volume up before a grisly murder scene, and using firecrackers to reinforce the sound of the machine gun. Marv runs off in a panic, but Harry decides they’d better keep a watch on the house in case they get arrested—they could use their info on a local murder as part of a plea bargain.

However, instead of a gangster, they see Kevin go into the back yard, cut down an evergreen, and haul it back inside to set it up as a Christmas tree. Harry spies him decorating the tree without any family present, and concludes he’s home alone. Kevin eavesdrops on Harry and Marv arguing about what to do, and overhears their plan to return that night to take the house once and for all.

Kevin resolves to defend his home.

He goes to church for some pre-battle reassurance, and there he’s approached again by Old Man Marley, who asks to sit down. The two discuss their family problems. Kevin confesses his remorse over being an insufferable pain in the ass. Marley reveals that he’s suffering from family disconnection of his own, the result of a years-ago row with his son that resulted in the two of them cutting off contact with one another. Kevin, who believes he’s already lost his own family forever, urges Marley to risk further rejection by reaching out to try to heal the breach with his son.

The two part as friends.

As Kevin leaves the church, the clock strikes seven, and he runs home to prepare his defenses before the planned nine o’clock incursion of the Wet Bandits.

Meanwhile, Kevin’s mother has made it as far as Scranton, PA, but can’t seem to catch a break to get herself the last few hundred miles home—until, that is, a friendly band of polka players offer her an overnight ride in a rented moving van, which she gladly accepts.

After a stirring build montage back at the McAllister home, the appointed hour arrives. With a sense of cunning doubtless garnered from watching too many Chuck Jones cartoons, Kevin baits the Wet Bandits through a series of death-inducing obstacles and traps (confirming the film’s cartoon-physics in the bargain), ultimately luring them to the home of a neighbor where he’s hoping to get them to run into the cops.

Marv and Harry, however, get the drop on him, and as they’re about to torture him to death in retaliation for all the injuries he’s just inflicted on them, Kevin is saved by the timely intervention of Old Man Marley and his snow shovel.

Marley carries Kevin home, and the cops arrest Harry and Marv.

The following morning is Christmas, and Kevin wakes up to an empty (and curiously clean) house. Despondent that Santa has not judged him “nice” enough to get his wish of his family’s return, he slumps his shoulders and resigns himself to life as a single child.

His mother, however, pulls up out front in the rented van. She sees Kevin, apologizes to him, and the two embrace. Just as she’s explaining that the rest of the family couldn’t make it, they all burst through the front door, having just arrived on that Christmas flight from Paris that she was too impatient to wait for.

With Kevin’s family reunited and—at least for the moment—happy to be together, Kevin wanders over to the window, where he spots Old Man Marley embracing his granddaughter and his long-lost son. It seems, perhaps, that this Christmas will be a merry one, after all.

A Very Catholic Christmas

The McAllister family, being proper upper-class suburban Chicagoland residents, are Catholic in the classic well-to-do American sense: they attend church, don’t practice birth control, believe strongly in family even though they don’t like it very much, and religion doesn’t seem to otherwise factor much in their lives. There are no visible religious artifacts in the house, they don’t talk about Christmas in terms of the Christian nativity story, and they otherwise seem more-or-less fully secular.

The film about them, however, is anything but. Beneath its raucous, slapstick craziness lies a surprising meditation on the meaning of Christmas—not just from a Christian point of view, but from a deeply Catholic one. The symbolism is not entirely cohesive—the film is not an evangelism tract—and it might not even be entirely intentional. Nonetheless it is there, and the deftness with which it is handled is the reason why this little gem of a movie has risen to the level of American holiday canon rather than fading into obscurity as do the vast majority of movies (be they Christmas movies or otherwise).

To start with the obvious, Kevin and Harry both play distinctly biblical roles in the story. Like the Catholic Satan, Harry appears in the first scene of the film as an agent of goodness who is concerned with keeping order, promising (not untruthfully) to watch over the neighborhood that its rightful owners abandon in favor of their latest temptation. He is wily, well spoken, and uncomfortable on holy ground.

Kevin, on the other hand, is the (relative) innocent who is rejected by his home community. He is comfortable fitting in with a nativity scene in the sequence where he hides from Harry and Marv at the church. He finds himself miraculously delivered into a situation where he must exhibit sterling character and wisdom in order to protect his home from the demonic forces invading the neighborhood. He also goes into the temple and delivers the wise words of God (forgiveness, repentance, and being set free by the truth) to the learned elder he finds there.³

But if we peek a layer deeper still, we find a sophisticated theological argument in the conversation between Kevin and Old Man Marley. Marley, you see, is shown as a wrathful figure. His angry visage terrifies the children in his neighborhood, and his anger at his family has led to a rift between them that it seems nothing in the universe can cross. Kevin, in his Christ-like role, tells Marley that there is no healing without risk, and that he might as well make a show of sacrifice—even if his family rejects him, he at least will no longer live with the pain of uncertainty. Beneath Marley’s wrathful surface lurks the broken heart of an unrequited lover who is fierce and fickle because of his devotion—the very picture that the Old Testament paints of Yahweh, especially in the books of the Minor Prophets (such as Hosea).

Further, when viewed through this lens, we see a re-telling of the story of the nativity that reads almost identically to that laid out by Catholic literary scholar Jack Miles in his fantastic book Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God⁴:

For God so repented of his failures with regards to his chosen family (Israel) that he sent himself-as-his-son down to walk among them and open himself to further betrayal and humiliation to seal the breach between them, so that through restored relationship both God and Man might be healed. When his son is hung up on a tree (or a door, in Kevin’s case) and subjected to mockery and torture by the agents of Satan, God then delivered him and brought him back into heaven, and through his experience as and with his Son he is restored himself to right relationship to his People.

I said earlier that it’s impossible to know how much of the Catholic symbolism in this film is intentional; I could also add that it’s impossible to know whether that which is intentional isn’t more than just good set dressing and integrity of craft on the part of the filmmakers, but there is something about this scene that I can’t shake:

As the conversation between Kevin and Marley draws to a close, the choir in the church finishes a lovely rendition of O, Holy Night and transitions almost seamlessly into Carol of the Bells. It’s a good dramatic choice, as it provides the musical basis for the transition from quiet contemplation to Kevin’s Wile E. Coyote build sequence, but it’s a choice that also has an eerie theological echo—one that I am certain that John Williams, at least, understood.

A Musical Revelation

Carol of the Bells is a syncopated riff on an old Catholic tune—one of the oldest surviving Catholic tunes, in fact.

It’s called the Deus Irae, a traditional funeral chant which roughly translates to Day of Wrath. It’s an apocalyptic melody that you know well, as it’s featured prominently in almost every John Williams score over the past fifty years,⁵ as well as in the score for Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, and, most nakedly, The Shining.⁶

The Dies Irae is a Gregorian chant that carries with it immense emotional power (which is why it shows up so frequently in films), but if you know the lyrics, the power in this context is more striking still. It is a meditation on the apocalypse—the longed-for end of days when God will pour out his wrath on all of creation and, in so doing, reconcile all of creation to himself^.

The Day of Wrath, that dreadful day
Shall Heaven and Earth in ashes lay
As David and the Sybill say
What horror invades the mind.

When the approaching Judge shall find
And sift the deeds of all mankind
The mighty trumpet’s wondrous tone
And summon all before the Throne.

…Several intervening verses here…

In that day that wakes the dead
Calling all with solemn blast
To be judged for all their past
Lord have mercy, Jesus blessed
Grant them all your light and rest

This is the song beneath the lyrics we hear in the film, bringing our attention to the sweet silver bells that all seem to say “throw cares away.”

For who can have a care when the day of judgment is here? Especially since, if that judgement be terrible, it also is promised to be merciful, restoring right order to a broken universe. This is the song-beneath-the-song that rings out loud with pealing bells and trumpets as Kevin first convinces the wrathful, wounded, terrible specter of Marley to risk his heart to extend mercy, and then rushes off himself to risk his life to dispense justice.

The Star Atop the Tree

The Catholic Christmas (which is literally celebrated at Christ’s Mass—hence the term) is a somber sort of Christmas. Like all things Catholic, it’s done as grand opera with baroque style—deep quiet, brilliant highs, somber lows. Tragedy and hope, darkness and light, sin and suffering and joy all weaving together like a symphony.

In its music, its symbolism, its themes, and especially in its insane plot and out-of-this-world antics, Home Alone captures the essence of the emotional depth and breadth that the 19th century Catholic immigrants brought to the American Christmas celebration.

More than just an earnest reading of the Gospel nativity story (like you get in the Protestant tradition and A Charlie Brown Christmas), different than the European pagan solstice celebrations and bacchanals, worlds apart from the American ideals of community and individual struggle codified into Christmas by Jewish immigrants (as we see in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, White Christmas, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas), without the flimsy sentimentality of the the Victorian English sensibilities of Dickens, and yet somehow compatible with all of these to the point of serving as a binder that defines the feel of the American Christmas season.

So if you’re home alone this holiday season, or especially if you’re not, consider paying a visit to this Catholic version of the holidays for a healthy dose of hilarity, murderous slapstick, and unexpected depth.

Merry Christmas to all—especially you Catholics, who brought so much beauty to the rest of us here.

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1. Don’t look at me like that. John Williams basically ripped off his Home Alone score for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and director Chris Columbus brought his Home Alone production team to the Harry Potter franchise.

2. Unless you were one of those pretentious dorks who insisted on using his expensive leather-clad battery-powered travel alarm clock at his bedside so he could show it off to friends. Not that I knew anyone like that.

3. John 7:14-24

4. Which was a sequel to Miles’s equally masterful work God: A Biography. Both books explore what Catholic theologians might learn about the personal nature of Yahweh by studying the Bible as if it were a cohesive novel in which God is the central character. Miles’s two volumes weren’t published until several years after Home Alone, so they could not have been an influence on the film, but the ideas explored within them have been knocking around in Catholic circles for several centuries and would have been familiar to a man like John Hughes, who, despite not making public statements about whether or not he was religious, consistently produced films that reflect a distinctly Catholic frame of mind.

5. See, for example, this mashup of Carol of the Bells and The Imperial March—a trick which can only work because both are versions of the Irae:

6. See this YouTube video for a criminally brief explanation of the musical heritage of the Irae: