Watching Home Alone With Macaulay Culkin
The first thing I am nostalgic for at “A Nostalgic Night With Macaulay Culkin,” a show touring the Northeast this holiday season featuring a screening of Home Alone followed by a live Q&A with Culkin himself, is life before security theater. I’m at the doors of the Toyota Oakdale Theater in Wallingford, Connecticut, where everyone must have their bag checked and pass through a metal detector. I am immediately sent back to my car for having a bag one centimeter too large. To park in a lot anywhere near the venue, you have to pay an additional $30 “premier parking fee” (this event is first and foremost a shakedown), and I have not paid, so I am parked a quarter of a mile away.
After running back and forth, I finally show the ticket taker my ticket, and she looks at me in surprise. “Just the one?” Yes, I tell her. Like Kevin McCallister, I am alone. Once I’m inside, I observe that no one else is solo at this event. I observe that going solo to this event is, in fact, incredibly weird. I am getting looks. This is an event for families and rowdy groups of friends. Bros, oddly. Lots of bros. I expected the crowd to be made up of mostly millennials (highly susceptible to ’90s nostalgia). But actually, it’s a mix. There are some millennials, with and without kids, but older people too. Many of them wear ugly sweaters with light-up components or Santa hats. At the end of the event, after you’ve paid $40 to upwards of $150 for orchestra seats, you can pay an additional $250 for a meet and greet and photo op with Culkin, and I assume this is why people have dressed this way.
I talk to a few of them, and they’re from New York and Connecticut. Stratford, Fairfield, Cromwell, Westchester County. Christmas is ten days away, and this is something festive to do. Many audience members have heard about the event from Instagram. A goth couple who traveled all the way from Long Island tell me they are big Culkin fans. They mention Bunny Ears, the name of both his humor website and his podcast. Another group from Westchester, maybe in their 40s, has made posters. One poster has the battle plan Kevin draws up before he booby-traps the house, and the other lists the prayer he says over his mac and cheese on Christmas Eve. I don’t know what they’re going to do with the posters. Hold them up when Culkin comes out?
I overhear a lot of people talking about “him.” They love him. He’s a sweet guy. One woman says, “I’ve only seen him in one movie where he was an adult,” and I swivel to see if they are talking about the 2003 cult classic Party Monster, in which Culkin plays legendary club kid and murderer Michael Alig. But no. They are talking about a 2019 movie called Changeland. Though I listen for it all night, no one mentions Party Monster at the nostalgic Macaulay Culkin Christmas event.
Most of the adults are drinking, so I decide to get a drink too. Screens above the bar advertise a cocktail called the Ugly Sweater Party ($22 — this is a shakedown), which comes with a souvenir cocktail shaker. But when I order one, the bartender tells me, “We don’t have those tonight.” She looks at me like I’m the pervert who invented this $22 drink. I order a Modelo instead.
The lights flicker, and the crowd surges toward the theater. The house is mostly full, with only a few empty seats here and there. It takes a while for the audience to filter in, and the music swells. I’m next to a group of bros as the opening credits roll. One of them exclaims, “The score is unmistakable,” and another says, “John Williams, dude.”
Directed by Chris Columbus, with a brilliant Rube Goldberg of a script by John Hughes, Home Alone was the second-highest-grossing film the year it came out and No. 1 at the box office for 12 consecutive weeks. To this day, it is, if not the holiday movie, at least in the top ten, up there with It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, and The Grinch. My children watch it every year, quoting its catchphrase: “Keep the change, you filthy animal.”
Home Alone is so famous that it probably needs no description, but here you go anyway: Maybe the best-known home-invasion film, it follows plucky, 8-year-old Kevin McCallister, whose parents accidentally leave him behind in the Chicago suburbs during a family vacation to Paris. It’s a few days before Christmas, and Kevin’s neighborhood is being cased by the Wet Bandits (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern), a pair of inept burglars who zero in on the McCallister house — enormous and fabulously decorated for Christmas — as their big score.
As the thieves scheme, Kevin’s mom (Catherine O’Hara) races home from France, talking her way onto flights and finally hitching a ride with a polka band in the back of a rented truck. It all crescendos on Christmas Eve, with the burglars attempting to break in to the McCallister house, an eventuality Kevin has prepared for with elaborate, sadistic booby traps.
The movie’s politics are best left unexamined. They belong to a different era, when the inequalities of this country were perhaps not yet so vast. Two years ago, the New York Times calculated that the McCallister parents would have to make $305,000 in 1990 (about $736,230 today) to afford the sprawling house in the neighborhood so affluent that everyone leaves for Christmas. “The McCallisters are the 1 Percent,” it wrote gravely.
But any unpalatable class issues at the center of the movie are smoothed over by the outrageous star power of Culkin, who is so charismatic as Kevin that the performance has followed him ever since. Culkin is the movie. The actor Jon Lovitz was apparently offered Joe Pesci’s role but turned it down because he “didn’t want to play second fiddle to a kid.” This was a career mistake for sure, but you can sort of see his point. Everyone plays second fiddle to Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.
I saw the movie in theaters when it originally came out, but I was 5 and don’t remember much. I do know tonight is different, though. The smell of weed wafts toward me. The audience is up and down, getting more drinks. Everyone has tacitly agreed that talking is acceptable. People quote along with the most famous lines. “Buzz your girlfriend, woof,” and so on. Kieran Culkin as the bed-wetter cousin brings the house down. A kid to my left sings along with “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” Two Gen-Zers behind me keep up a running commentary, crying out in dismay every time Kevin lies on a bed with his shoes on.
The hilarity peaks with the final booby-trap sequence. People laugh at the Wet Bandits slipping on ice, the Wet Bandits being branded by a smoldering doorknob, the Wet Bandits having their hair burned off, getting hit in the face with paint cans, stepping on a nail, swinging from a rope into a brick wall.
“They would be dead,” announces the guy next to me. And it’s true. Even one fall down the McCallisters’ icy steps might kill an adult. But this isn’t realism, it’s the Road Runner versus Wile E. Coyote. Pummeled for a consecutive 15 or 20 minutes, the thieves don’t even bleed. The crowd applauds uproariously when Kevin’s elderly neighbor shows up at the end to hit them in the head with a shovel. His mother returns on Christmas Day and gets slightly less applause.
Macaulay Culkin, in 2024, is 44 years old, compact, fast-talking, dressed in a dark sweater. “I thought he’d be taller,” an audience member remarks, the old cliché about the famous. The event has oversold his role in the evening’s program. A different guy tells me he thought it would be more of a “Mystery Science Theater vibe,” with Culkin’s commentary throughout. But no, it’s just a standard Q&A with a moderator, who asks questions about Culkin’s co-stars (they were nice), how the movie came to be (Hughes wrote it specifically for Culkin after he saw him peer through a mail slot in Uncle Buck), and projects he has coming out (he’s in the next season of Fallout).
Culkin answers gamely; he’s relaxed. But everything he says has a tinge of melancholy. He calls the movie “a curse and a blessing” but says he’s come to appreciate it more now that he has kids he can share it with. He tells an anecdote about watching his stunt double, a child-size adult of indeterminate age, having to fall off Buzz’s bookshelf over and over until he got it right. He notes that the McCallister house sometimes comes up for sale and he’s considered buying and Airbnb-ing it, but it seems like “a lot of work.” An audience member asks him which other cast member from the movie he’d want to switch roles with, and Culkin says the neighbor kid who is mistaken for Kevin as the family leaves for the airport “because that kid got to go home early.”
You can feel his weariness with the child-star thing. The entertainment industry has extracted so much from him. Every time he imitates an adult, or someone who was an adult when he was a child, he uses the same gravelly, tough-guy voice. Eventually, the Gen-Zers behind me complain, “He only does two voices, his own and that gravelly one.” As if he should be more entertaining, have more funny voices cued up.
I find myself wondering what he was paid to be here. I don’t blame him for taking the gig — everyone likes some extra scratch at the holidays, and the company that puts on the event also hosts evenings with Rainn Wilson, Helen Hunt, and Chevy Chase, so it’s not like it’s low rent. But I hope it was worth it. By the end of the run, he will do a total of 14 shows, which began at the end of November. Two weeks on the road at Christmastime, playing such glamorous locales as Medford, Massachusetts.
Even his bits betray a little darkness. When Home Alone 2 wrapped, Joe Pesci had a bottle of good wine in his trailer (“a nice Chianti or something”) and invited 10-year-old Culkin back for a glass. But Culkin didn’t go. “I didn’t want wine,” he says. “I wanted to go to school.”
Still, he doesn’t deliver these anecdotes with acrimony. He’s funny. At one point, there is an unexpected thud from backstage, and he ad-libs, “A trap I set. Someone just got hit in the head with a sandbag.”
“We love you, Kevin!” a fan calls from the expensive seats.
He says, matter-of-factly, “My name is Macaulay.”
They don’t make movies like Home Alone anymore. The corporate calculus doesn’t work out. They certainly don’t make original family comedies executed at the same level — the tight script, the meticulous production design, the impeccable direction.
This year’s new holiday offerings include the $250 million Dwayne Johnson flop Red One and Dear Santa, a piece of straight–to–Paramount Plus garbage about a kid who accidentally writes to Satan instead of Santa. I watched the latter with my children and, despite the presence of Jack Black, it is so lazy, tepid, and unfunny that even my 9-year-old, usually happy to be watching anything, remarked, “That was a terrible movie.”
Maybe culture was always as vacant as it is now. Maybe it has always felt like an era of decay, the end of things. But this year, with CGI dominating and streamers flooded with low-quality dross, it does seem like an inflection point. I’m not about to hand-draw a poster of Kevin McCallister’s battle plan, but I do find myself sympathetic to the impulse. Better to look back and feel something than to look around and feel nothing. Even if the past inevitably can’t live up to our memories of it. Even if Macaulay Culkin is just an adult now, too tired to run an Airbnb.
In the final part of the evening, there is an interactive game. Culkin throws a tennis ball to kids in the audience, who then join him onstage to answer trivia questions. The prizes are witty: a toothbrush certified by the American Dental Association, a Matchbox car like the ones the Wet Bandits slip on, an eight-by-ten glossy of Joe Pesci autographed by Macaulay Culkin. The kids do not seem particularly starstruck by Culkin or enthused about these prizes. And why would they be? It’s not so easy to connect the person on the stage to the kid in the movie. Anyway, the movie belongs more to their parents than it does to them.
At the end of the evening, the moderator thanks the crowd for coming and everyone begins to file out. Culkin, forever dutifully fulfilling his contract, concludes by saying, “Merry Christmas, you filthy animals.” But the audience is already leaving, sliding into parkas, chatting among themselves. No one really seems to hear him.