‘I made my family disappear’: Echoes and inversions of King Lear in Home Alone
On a scale of ‘Christmas story’ to ‘not a Christmas story’, it’s quite likely that most people would put King Lear closer to the latter. However, with its family bust-ups, green-eyed siblings and inclement weather, Shakespeare’s tragedy arguably has a lot in common with any number of classic and contemporary festive tales. To name just a few, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (dir. Chechik, 1989) and pretty much every EastEnders Christmas Day episode ever made immediately come to mind. Maybe Lear is actually a Christmas story, but Shakespeare just forgot to set it at Christmas.
Home Alone, Chris Columbus’s 1990 blockbuster comedy that launched Macauley Culkin’s star into the stratosphere, also fundamentally fits this pattern. The film is primarily remembered for its young protagonist Kevin McCallister (Culkin) protecting his family home from invasion by bungling burglars Harry (Joe Pesci) and Marv (Daniel Stern), but the aforementioned plot elements are undoubtedly there once again. The central premise of Kevin accidentally being left behind by his family when they fly to France for Christmas is kickstarted by a significant argument between Kevin and his family the night before. Other than this shared thread of family disharmony, however, Home Alone might seem to have little in common with Lear — there’s no scene in Shakespeare’s tragedy, for example, in which Goneril and Regan get their comeuppance as Lear hurls paint cans at them down a flight of stairs. But, beneath Home Alone’s slapstick exterior and festive jukebox soundtrack, there are clear echoes of Lear to be found within John Hughes’s typically rich screenplay.
The film’s Lear echoes perhaps come to the surface most noticeably in a scene shared between Kevin and his elderly neighbour ‘Old Man’ Marley (Roberts Blossom) which takes place in a church towards the end of Home Alone’s second act. Marley is presented to the audience prior to this scene as a terrifying silent presence in a handful of scenes, characterisation which comes from the world of the film largely being presented through Kevin’s eyes. Early in the film, Kevin is traumatised by his older brother Buzz’s (Devin Ratray) tall tale of Marley secretly being the ‘South Bend Shovel Slayer’, supposedly a serial killer hiding out in the McCallisters’ neighbourhood — an event which colours his perspective on Marley until the church scene. As well as showing Kevin (and the audience) he isn’t the intimidating figure he’s been presented to be, Marley is also finally given the chance in this scene to speak and reveal his backstory: ‘Years back … I had an argument with my son … We lost our tempers, and I said I didn’t care to see him anymore. He said the same, and we haven’t spoken to each other since.’
Whilst Marley’s backstory doesn’t precisely correllate with Lear, the shared threads are there: a father falling out with his grown-up offspring, leading to Marley’s Lear-like banishment of his son and his own isolation and estrangement from his family — he’s sitting alone in the church to hear his granddaughter sing in the choir because he won’t be welcome when his son attends later that night. There is also a sense that, like Lear, Marley has shifted from anger and rashness to humility and remorse at his previous behaviour — he advises Kevin that ‘how you feel about your family is a complicated thing … Deep down, you’ll always love them. But you can forget that you love them. You can hurt them, and they can hurt you. That’s not just because you’re young.’
At one point, Marley and Kevin echo the insightful candour shared between Lear and his Fool. When Kevin asks Marley why he doesn’t simply get back in contact with his son, Marley admits that he’s afraid his son won’t talk to him, to which Kevin cheekily asks: ‘No offence, but aren’t you a little old to be afraid?’ When Marley replies ‘You can be a little old for a lot of things. You’re never too old to be afraid’, Kevin regales Marley with his own experience of overcoming his childish fear of his basement. Marley’s brief response — ‘What’s your point?’ — is somewhat reminiscent of Lear’s dismissals of the Fool’s wisdom hidden in yarns and riddles — ‘This is nothing, fool.’ (1.4.126). Just as Lear rejects the Fool’s observations to deflect from the lessons they might teach him, Marley initially resists Kevin’s roundabout way of convincing him to face his own fear and call his son.
Marley’s story is very much a subplot in Home Alone. But, just as Lear’s subplot of family disharmony in the Gloucester household parallels the main discord between Lear and his daughters, so the case of Marley and his son mirrors Kevin’s own predicament. It’s also almost certainly not a coincidence that Marley shares his name with the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge’s former business partner in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Much like Scrooge, Kevin is offered a glimpse of his possible future through an encounter with Marley currently suffering the consequences of making similar choices, prompting him to mend his misanthropic ways — although Kevin’s opening animosity towards others is admittedly confined to his own family, rather than Scrooge’s wider rejection of humanity.
Whilst Kevin is at the opposite end of the age spectrum to the usual interpretation of Shakespeare’s ageing monarch, his actions in the opening act of Home Alone — particularly towards his mother Kate (Catherine O’Hara) — have a distinct Lear-like quality. There is no explicit love test as in the play’s opening scene, but Kevin spends time seeking attention from his parents, siblings and extended family, none of whom give him gratification. After an argument with Buzz, Kevin is sent to bed early alone on ‘the third floor’, leading to the following exchange:
KEVIN: Everyone in this family hates me.
KATE: Then maybe you should ask Santa for a new family.
KEVIN: I don’t want a new family. I don’t want any family. Families suck!
KATE: Just stay up there! I don’t want to see you again for the rest of the night.
KEVIN: I don’t want to see you again for the rest of my whole life. And I don’t want to see anybody else either.
In an inversion of the father-daughter dynamic between Lear and Cordelia, Kevin banishes Kate with a stinging denouncement from son to mother. In a neat (albeit most probably coincidental) further parallel, just as Cordelia leaves Britain for France following her banishment, Kate too sets off for France the next day along with the rest of the family. Whilst Kevin’s banishment of his family is perhaps not intentional in the same way as Lear’s, both are uttered in the heat of the moment, and both characters are clearly initially pleased with their newfound freedom in the scenes that follow. Where Lear revels in being ‘unburdened [to] crawl towards death’ (1.1.40), Kevin delights in the belief that he’s ‘made his family disappear’ and the chance ‘to shake all cares and business from [his] age’ (1.1.38) —youth, in Kevin’s case, rather than advancing years. Lear uses his freedom to surround himself with his hundred knights for continuous merriment; Kevin similarly enjoys ransacking Buzz’s bedroom, watching the gangster movie his Uncle Frank (Gerry Bamman) had previously forbidden, and even riding a sledge down the stairs and out of the front door.
However, like both Lear and Marley, Kevin realises his decisions have led to isolation and regrets his harsh actions towards his family. As a family-friendly comedy, Columbus and Hughes don’t offer a bleakly tragic conclusion similar to that of Shakespeare’s play. Kate spends much of the film going to extreme lengths to be with Kevin as soon as possible, and the two share a heartfelt reunion on Christmas morning. Marley too is reunited with his son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter on Christmas Day, having apparently taken Kevin’s advice to get in touch with his estranged family. However, Columbus does give the audience one more nice Lear parallel in Marley’s rescue of Kevin on Christmas Eve from Harry and Marv. Hanging from a door hook, Kevin is moments away from having all sorts of unpleasant revenge exacted upon him by the criminals for the repeated injuries and humiliations he’s put them through that night. Marley arrives in time to knock Harry and Marv unconscious with his snow shovel and carry Kevin to safety — much as Lear is reported to have ‘kill’d the slave that was a-hanging thee [Cordelia]’ (5.3.272). Unlike Cordelia, however, Kevin of course lives to see his own inverted Lear narrative out to a happy conclusion with his mother Kate.
So, do I believe that John Hughes and Chris Columbus had King Lear in mind when they respectively wrote and directed Home Alone over thirty years ago? Almost certainly not. With that in mind, what’s the point of highlighting the Lear echoes and inversions to be found in the film? I would argue that discovering Lear within Home Alone highlights a wider human propensity at play to retell the same stories, and revisit the same innate impulses we all share. Home Alone contains echoes of Lear, but Shakespeare’s play was itself a retelling of any number of sources contemporary to and predating the playwright’s time — Shakespeare arguably revisited and reworked the story of an elderly king’s familial disharmony because he saw something in the tale which continued to resonate. Home Alone’s parallels with Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and numerous other Christmas stories place the film as a late-twentieth-century entry in a long line of stories about parents falling out with children and the potential consequences of this, with Christmas arguably acting as an emotional catalyst to this universally recognisable scenario. Maybe if Shakespeare had in fact set King Lear at Christmas, he might have given audiences the same happy ending Hughes and Columbus give to Marley and his son, and to Kevin and Kate. That’s a question I’ll have to leave unanswered for you to keep… you filthy animals.
