SLOUGH, ENGLAND:

We’re in the middle of the holiday season, which means if you’re considering hopping on a plane, it’s time to let a young blonde boy take control of your home to fend off a pair of opportunistic iron-wielding burglars, poisonous ones Tarantulas and doorknobs hotter than lava. All to the background music of classic Christmas carols.

Forcing 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 mercilessly mocked. “How can one see something so unrealistic?” The Elder will ponder this (temporarily ignoring his own admiration for the revered realistic novel hero Doctor Strange).

This year I did the next best thing: I presented a truly hideous alternative to entice them into a Home Alone marathon. “Guys, fold your laundry and bring it upstairs,” I announced. Before they could disperse like murmurs, I turned on the first Home Alone for the opening scene to watch Joe Pesci’s confused fake cop (Harry) observing the total chaos reigning in the McAllister family home.

Like most children, my children approach laundry with the same caution that they would approach a surging python. As Kevin was led upstairs to an uninsulated attic by his mother because he was the only one of 15 people in the house causing trouble, three unwitting bystanders sat on the sofa with me. They later reluctantly admitted to having experienced some mild amusement, the highlight being Donald Trump’s cameo at the Plaza Hotel in the second film. While I confess to being less moved by Trump’s consummate acting skills, I’ve documented my unfiltered thoughts on revisiting this holiday classic as an adult.

Parenthood flying blind

Memes have littered the online world, offering us a picture of the McAllister family home over a caption asking what Kevin’s father Peter did to afford this gigantic palatial home. I’m assuming this slightly confused internet community hasn’t studied Kevin’s mother Kate’s freshly pressed pantsuits in depth. This is not a housewife’s uniform. Someone whose days are spent cleaning this monstrous house (which has lots of windows) doesn’t put on a pantsuit for a pizza dinner the night before the whole family’s planned trip. This is a woman whose bank account is just as robust as her husband’s – as evidenced by the speed and nonchalance with which she pulls out a fat wad of cash to the poor pizza delivery guy who’s been hanging around hoping one of these hovering adults will pay him. She also assumes that an eight-year-old can pack his own suitcase for a vacation abroad. Ergo, here’s a woman who has a lot more on her mind than the unpleasant truth that an eight-year-old is much more likely to pack bricks in his suitcase than a toothbrush. She is also the one person her son looks for when he longs for a return to normality, meaning that in addition to her job as a pantsuit, she has also mastered that job of parenting – something her husband has never been able to do of the two films was successful.

While we’re on the topic of parents, we need to address the fact that they’re raising a family of psychopaths. Her eldest son is raising a poisonous tarantula and her youngest is ready to murder some burglars. The fact that this doesn’t happen is due 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 stupidly 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 just as psychopathic as he Kevin McCallister. Roman Kevin’s victims, however, are made of far less sturdy material than Harry and Marv, and perish carelessly when they are pierced by a bow-and-arrow-style arrow when their Kevin goes on a shooting spree at his high school. (Harry and Marv laughed and laughed.) Maybe if Kate and Peter had named their son something as harmless as Greg or Charles, they might actually have had a more conventional child who would have called the police instead when those hopeful burglars showed up to try to get them Kill tarantula with an iron or buzzs.

The wet bandits

How can we talk about Home Alone without paying homage to the extraordinary resilience of Harry and Marv, who charmingly go by the name Wet Bandits? Not only do they invent a clever title for themselves, but they also suffer all sorts of abuse at the hands of this nuisance of a child. Do they ever consider throwing in the towel? Or die? Never.

“Why don’t they just give up?” my youngest asked after Marv was hit by a falling brick for the third time in the second film. The answer is that Harry and Marv seek danger and revenge like a planet seeks its orbit. Giving up is simply not on the agenda for her. These are the boys who, despite suffering repeated head injuries, managed to outwit prison officials during their first encounter with Kevin. As anyone who has seen Prison Break knows (incidentally, another offering from John Heard, who also played Kevin’s father), escaping prison is a complex task that usually requires extensive blueprints tattooed all over your body. And yet Harry and Marv manage to do it without tattoos, which is perhaps an option Prison Break’s Michael Schofield could have explored.

Later, Marv overcomes the brick situation by temporarily suffering from blurred vision and an unsteady gait that lasts exactly as long as it takes to climb a flight of stairs (subsequently he falls into the basement and somehow has the courage to get back up. His other accomplishments defy After being hit in the face with an iron, he is electrocuted to within a few centimeters and carries on unhindered (thus echoing Harry’s statement, “I don’t care if I get the chair, the I get it”) The statement of a “child” is somewhat meaningless, since Marv has proven that a high dose of electricity is unpleasant, but quite tolerable. And finally, what’s worse Than all this torture, they are attacked by the most hideous and terrifying creatures in existence: Pigeons – Aren’t two people who can overcome all this trauma the best case study of resilience? I think so.

I’ll leave you to ponder the bravery of this criminal duo while I now look for an alternative even more heinous than laundry to get my kids to fold.