A Film Canon

If one of the thrusts of 80s cinema had been towards motifs of returning to an idealized, detechnologized home - taken to its logical conclusion in screenwriter John Hughes previous film, Planes, Trains And Automobiles - then Home Alone ushers in the 90s by presenting the idealized suburban family home and street as a protagonist in itself; or, alternatively, by drawing out the abstraction inherent in the typical Hollywood conjunction of house, church, general store and village green, through an exquisite, sublime syntax of neon and snow. However, whereas Planes, Train And Automobiles didn't quite achieve its intended fusion of physical comedy and contemplative melancholy, Home Alone benefits enormously from Chris Columbus' lush direction which, combined with John Williams' iconic score, manages to distill the fear-fascination with parental absence that lurks beneath most great childrens' film, and generalise it into a more collective sense of loss. It's this ability to remind adults that they're still children - and in a poignant, rather than an exploitative way - that makes Home Alone such a great family movie, and justifies its invocation of It's A Wonderful Life as part of its Christmas lineage; "You can be a little too old for a lot of things, but you're never too old to be afraid." Part of what makes Hughes and Columbus' nostalgia so pointed and ambivalent is that the house in question only becomes a protagonist by virtue of being a nascent technoscape. When Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin) is unexpectedly - and apparently magically - left alone by his extended family, it's only with an R-rated broadcast that he first feels fear, and with a Christmas broadcast that he first feels loss. Similarly, his transformation of the house into a booby-trap capable of thwarting the 'wet bandits' (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) speaks to a childhood fascination with domesticity as a destructive techno-possibility, again driven by a television broadcast, the fictional "Angels With Filthy Souls". Culkin's performance came to define a generation's identification with cinema, and his proclivity for cute aphorisms, and speaking directly to camera, has dated well, if only because it takes one of Hughes' trademarks - an ability to comically infantilise adults - and turns it on its head, transforming Kevin into a kind of stunted adult, an adult without adulthood, that offsets what could have been sadistic physical comedy, and distinguishes it from the many sequels, spin-offs and semi-imitations.