Merry Christmas, Ya Filthy Angelenos

A. J. Urquidi battles winter temperatures, Trump cameos, and banh mi wait times to reevaluate the first two “Home Alone” movies at an L.A. outdoor screening.

By A. J. UrquidiDecember 11, 2024

YULETIDE CINEMALAND—HOME ALONE DOUBLE FEATURE, Heritage Square Museum, Los Angeles, December 7, 2024.

Eerily clean mansions laced with lights, emptied of their owners. Breath-clouds icing over in December air. Children screaming, frantic, darting past hoodlums in coats who slip through doors into bourgeois foyers. No need to imagine snowy driveways in need of shoveling—it’s Los Angeles, after all—but a gruff Santy Claus slinking off to smoke made it hard to separate celluloid from reality at the Heritage Square Museum on Saturday night, where Christopher Columbus and John Hughes’s Home Alone films were projected on inflatable screens beside collected historic homes.

Home Alone (1990) and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992) were released during George H. W. Bush’s presidency, quickly becoming festive classics. In my irreligious nuclear household observing a vanilla post-Fordist Consumeristmas, my beloved botched-burglary saga was frequently sidelined by Dad’s vote for Die Hard (1988), Mom’s push for Elf (2003), and my brother’s reclamation of Gremlins (1984) to occupy the family movie slot on Christmas Eve. This year, I was determined to make the Macaulay Culkin double feature happen, even if it demanded an overhaul of the viewing context. Fortunately, Yuletide Cinemaland, Street Food Cinema’s winter series, turned that dream into a success.

Well, mostly a success. I missed the middle 45 minutes of 103-minute HA1 waiting for a tofu banh mi. The dining zone was separated from the main festivities—just like how the business district of Winnetka, Illinois, is sequestered from the films’ expensive estates by Metra tracks, which daily deliver trainloads of prospective home invaders north from Chicago, at least in the minds of residents who have blurred their photogenic homes from Street View. There’s a neighborhood called Winnetka in the San Fernando Valley, coincidentally; that’s trivia I unearthed while waiting for banh mi, with my incredible Gooey Center roll growing cold. Tragically, I watched no one call my order number as Chef stowed a lusciously filled baguette on a rack where it sat visibly untouched for 20 more minutes. Meanwhile, an unceasing chain of Wagyu fries entered the hands of pajama-clad teens who had ordered only a few seconds ago. I kept my concerns to myself as I was denied #CertifiedJohnCandyMoments, which unfolded mutedly on the other side of the rustic transplanted Methodist church, opened up for mulled wine and concessions. Unsurprisingly, that was my sandwich all along. It was only then, finally claiming it, that I perceived the absurd contours of fate, that same agent of cruelty which forced the negligent McCallister family to forgo a preflight head count of their travel group—for two consecutive years of Christmas trips! 😱

The films released during my infancy, so I approached them with fresh eyes, admittedly more poststructuralism-pilled than in earlier viewings. Besides their fourth wall–flouting cartoonery, I noticed some sketchy things about both films’ worldview. The prosperous McCallister family is too moneyed to babysit their several offspring, and yet, abusive siblings and rotten uncle notwithstanding, we are conditioned to sympathize with their plight from the get-go. I was instead rooting for Buster Keatonesque burglars Marv and Harry—like, would these jet-setting affluenza-stricken households even notice a few necklaces missing upon returning from Ibiza?

And how can Papa McCallister afford a neocolonial mansion, 15-plus family members’ travel expenses, and the bottomless funds Kevin (Culkin) appropriates for wild NYC spending? (Limos with cheese pizza: the original avocado toast.) I assume Dad’s a defense contractor, or maybe Big Pharma, judging by how callously he and his wife treat their baseline duties of keeping small children alive and present at bustling O’Hare. Without experiencing robbery, these people might never build enough character to outgrow their Reaganite sociopathy.

It’s clear how a decade of wealth worship/fear of the underclass culminated in this franchise, particularly HA2. Grotesque Midtown mendicants and midnight sex workers remind viewers of the racist, classist paranoia dominating suburban psychogeography during, for example, the Central Park Five media circus. The Five’s would-be executioner, future felon Donald Trump, has a cameo in the Plaza Hotel lobby, hulkingly filling the frame in a trench coat like Frankenstein’s mobster; the L.A. audience greeted his entrance with despondent boos. It’s hard to watch well-intentioned Kevin give nothing but half of a sentimental ornament to his unhoused pigeon-lady accomplice on Christmas morning while his kin look down on her from a two-story hotel penthouse. Also notable is the presence of only three(ish) nonwhite characters with one-line roles across two films set in the Chicago (31.7 percent non-Hispanic white in 2010) and New York (33.3 percent, 2010) metro areas; the onscreen milieu did not reflect the diverse Angelenos in attendance, many of whom can’t relate to the McCallisters’ financially unrestricted lifestyle.

As the credits rolled and the over-capacity crowd funneled toward the exit, I was left shaken by a scene that once seemed comedy gold—featuring Tim Curry, Rob Schneider, and hotel staff unknowingly conversing with Kevin’s gangster movie around the corner. It reads like a tragedy of errors in 2024. As the TV Tommy gun opens fire at full volume, the employees drop to the ground in the hallway, warning neighbors of “an insane guest with a gun.” There’s no punch line; after days of betraying their trust as an unaccompanied minor illegally registering himself a hotel room, refusing to tip the concierge, and committing credit card fraud, young Kevin, with the sadistic hamming of a 4chan troll, relishes in the terror of service workers believing they’re under imminent threat of death. I thought back to when I entered this outdoor museum—with no metal detectors and a massive crowd to disappear into, an active shooter was always a material possibility throughout the evening. We’d have been safer if we’d stayed home, alone.

¤

Photo by Anannya Mukherjee.

LARB Short Takes live event reviews are published in partnership with the nonprofit Online Journalism Project and the Independent Review Crew.