A Very Merry Home Invasion to You

From an autistic nightmare, to the autistic fantasy of being left Home Alone for Christmas!

Before Goodfellas, before Casino, Raging Bull or My Cousin Vinny, Joe Pesci was, for me, the iconic, gold-toothed, villain from Home Alone. The “smart” half of the Wet Bandit duo, Harry and his buddy Marv (Daniel Stern) embark on a burgling spree in a well-heeled Chicago suburb while all the residents are away for the holidays. The spree, however, comes to a dramatic halt when they discover not all the houses are empty.

I was six when Home Alone premiered in the cinema and though I have no recollection of it, I no doubt saw it for the first time on VHS at some stage the following year. Home Alone and it’s sequel Lost in New York were two of the movies that defined my childhood. My brothers and I adored Kevin, his snappy one-liners, his penchant for mischief and his creativity in fending off the burglars. My parents hated him for all the same reasons.

Home Alone is a 1990 hit movie written by John Hughes and directed by Chris Columbus. Eight-year-old boy Kevin McCallister (Macaualay Culkin) is left at home alone while the rest of his family travel to France for Christmas. While Kevin’s mother (Catherine O’Hara) makes a desperate attempt to return to her son in time for Christmas, Kevin adapts to life on his own and must fend off the Wet Bandits (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) who are determined to rob his house.

In fact, I can probably credit Home Alone with my very real childhood fear of burglars. I would stay awake on the nights I was left to babysit my younger brothers, planning all our possible modes of defence and escape roots in the event of a home invasion. I was never convinced frozen water on the steps nor a blow torch trap over the door would work. To begin with, it rarely got cold enough to freeze in Ireland and we didn’t own a blow torch. But the idea that an eight-year-old could outsmart the likes of the Wet Bandits was comforting even if my plans mostly involved hiding in the attic.

For better or worse, Home Alone burned itself into the deepest recesses of my undiagnosed autistic subconscious. The first short story I ever wrote essentially replicates the plot of the movie, with some supernatural activity and without the happy ending. It has, needless to say, been rejected upwards of 50 times.

Careful what you wish for…

Home Alone opens in the middle of an autistic nightmare: Kevin’s extended family is camped out at his house the night before they fly to Paris for the holidays. There are children running around and screaming everywhere. Elders, cousins and siblings alike refuse to help Kevin pack and constantly remind him how much of a pain in the ass he is. When his older brother Buzz pushes him too far, eating the last of the plain pizza, Kevin pent-up frustrations explode. He rams Buzz in the stomach, creating a domino effect of chaos throughout the kitchen. Kevin is dragged out of the kitchen, without dinner, and sent to bed early in the attic. Just before he heads upstairs he and his mother have a terrible argument and he wishes to never see any of them again.

Kevin wakes up the next morning into an autistic fantasy: the house is silent and empty, clean and tidy. He can run around in his pajamas all day, eat what he wants when he wants, watch R rated movies on VHS, sleep when he wants and there is no one to boss him around or tell him off.

But the novelty of this freedom begins to wane when Kevin finds himself thrown into another nightmare: he has to defend the family home from burglars who are determined, no matter what the cost, to strip it bare.

Problem child…

The opening sequence of Home Alone, Kevin’s run-ins with various family members, the overwhelming noise and chaos, feels like a near perfect replica of my childhood and adolescent cycles of meltdowns and expulsions. In fact, many fellow autistics find the holiday season - the forced and prolonged social interactions, breaks with routine and sensory overwhelm - to be an extremely stressful, rather than enjoyable, time of year. Social media has been full of ‘surviving the holidays’ commentary over the last few weeks as autistics swap advice like making space for alone time, establishing healthy boundaries and negotiating families tensions.

Kevin may have been a childhood hero, but as a recently diagnosed autistic adult, I felt more identified with his meltdown and subsequent exclusion from the family dinner than ever. Kevin’s other “issues” also felt eerily familiar. He gets in the way and drives everyone mad by stating the obvious, he is pedantic, he calls out injustice and tells on his elders. He has trouble tying his shoelaces but needs to know his toothbrush is approved by the American Dental Association. He is also creative, resourceful, imaginative and demonstrates considerable ingenuity for an eight year old. Is Kevin McCallister an autistic icon? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

A home for the holidays?

Watching the movie back last week triggered many memories of similar moments growing up when I was credited with ruining family festivities and sent to my room without dinner. Like Kevin, I usually caused far more havoc than I ever intended nor imagined possible and the consequences of my meltdowns became more severe as I got older.

Unlike Kevin, I wasn’t forgotten, I was intentionally left out of family holidays. From 13 onwards I never again joined my mother and brothers for the annual trip to France because I was “too much to handle.” I would be sent to my father’s, where I pretended not to mind missing out on the trips to Disney or waterparks or Mediterranean beaches, all paid for by my grandfather.

It's not all on my mother it has to be said, the older I got the less I seemed to enjoy those holidays and the more trouble I seemed to get in. The last time I went to France, I spent three whole days in the bedroom of our caravan, curtains drawn, crying without pause for a reason I no longer remember. Still, the active exclusion and the feeling like I was the family pariah did little but fuel a deep sensitivity to rejection and an escalation of my autistic meltdowns and shut downs. The measures taken against me were increasingly punitive until I was permanently ejected from the family home at 18.

Though my mother and I did eventually make our peace, I never really felt like a fully fledged member of the family again. Mum and I were lucky though, we managed to have two lovely Christmases together before she passed away in 2008, at 47. With her went the glue that held our already splintered family together. A lot happened in the years after her death, but my estrangement from all of my immediate family has its roots in my turbulent adolescence.

Christmases since then have been about getting through the day, sometimes resembling the few days Kevin spends home alone, watching movies and eating piles of marshmallows and ice-cream in my pyjamas. Other years I have been welcomed as the ‘extra’ guest with extended family or friends. I’ve become accustomed to tropical Christmases, where the temperature rarely falls below 25 degrees and a few days at the beach are always welcome. It can be easier to stay in the tropics and bury my feelings in sunshine, movies and sugar, than acknowledging of all the absences and silences that define my first family.

Wish upon a star…

And yet Home Alone remains my favourite Christmas movie. It’s not about Santa, it’s not about presents and it’s not about Jesus. It’s about how to prevent two inept burglars from robbing your empty home at Christmas by leaving your problem child behind.

There’s the nostalgia factor: those very 90s Christmas jumpers (sweaters for the gringos), that outrageous wallpaper and the memories of a time before smart phones and video calls.

There’s Joe Pesci - icon - wheezing, cursing and spluttering his way through a series of mishaps before promising to end Kevin permanently.

There’s John Candy improvising as a washed-up polka musician and Catherine O’Hara bribing and begging her way across the ocean and then the US to return to her son. And there’s the mean, miserly Uncle Frank (Gerry Bamman) who everyone loves to hate. There are rogue spiders, Micro Machines, flying irons, blow torches and glass bauble booby traps. We learn not to judge people by their appearances, least of all cops (ACAB), and that the most important thing for the holidays is to spend them with the people you love, whether that be your first family or chosen family.

I like to think that, as dysfunctional and painful as the circumstances of our first families can be, it’s sometimes nice to lose yourself in a bit of wish fulfilment over the holidays. I’m glad Kevin’s mother makes it back to him and they get to spend Christmas together, even if they lose him again in New York a couple of years later. 

Pyjama party…

Despite being the grinchiest of grinches, this Christmas is a little special for me. It’s the first time my girlfriend and I will spend it together with our whole manada: her two dogs Max and Oye and my cat Kiki. We’ll be mostly lazing about in our PJs, watching movies and overdosing on sugar. We’ve made a pact that if she’ll watch Titanic with me I’ll watch the director’s cut Lord of the Rings trilogy with her. Apparently, this is a fair deal considering how bad Titanic and how good LOTR is (her words, not mine)!

So dear AutCasts and OutCasts, how will you be spending the holidays?

What are your favourite movies to watch and rewatch over the break?