A ‘Home Alone’ holiday

In theaters Friday: Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-wrecked, Carnage, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

New on DVD/Blu-ray: Fright Night, Kung Fu Panda 2, Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Remember the scream? Not 1996’s pop-referencing horror movie. Not Edvard Munch’s often-parodied expressionist painting. Kevin McAllister’s scream.

I do, because I was 10 years old, the same age as star Macaulay Culkin, when the first Home Alone film was released, and I wanted to be Kevin McAllister. After the comedy became a huge success, I recall watching in amazement as classmates, teachers and other sundry grown-ups around me began miming the violent shout little Macaulay does when applying after-shave at any given opportunity to show shock, awe or surprise. It was an embarrassingly glorious instance of culture permeation at its widest and most bizarre, and it lasted for months.

Maybe the next permutation in 2011 is an Internet meme—or a 19 Kids and Counting episode—who knows. But what is certain is this comedy of errors directed by Chris Columbus and written by the late great John Hughes has become a modern holiday classic.

I think that is because, despite the film being essentially a slapstick comedy-turned-fairy tale with an unbelievably huge built-in conceit, people can identify with Kevin and his plight both before and after his family accidentally leave him en route to an extended European vacation. Everyone has felt forgotten at times, as a child and an adult, especially during the manic shopping, cooking, cleaning and decorating rush of Christmas. Kevin just wants to belong, to feel significant within his large family. And if he does not get that sense of self-worth from his parents, he’d rather have solitude.

“This house is so full of people it makes me sick. When I grow up and get married, I’m living alone. Did you hear me? I’m living alone!”

And everyone has had run-ins with a sibling or cousin or neighbor as unrepentantly rotten as Buzz. To shove an entire cheese pizza into one’s mouth just so someone else cannot have a piece just isn’t right—no matter how you slice it.

At age 10, I loved Home Alone because I admired Kevin’s ability to look at tree ornaments, Micro-Machines and paint buckets as weapons to combat bumbling intruders. I lusted after his zip-line making abilities, his tree house, and that mighty bowl of ice cream he constructs. Now, I love Home Alone for different reasons.

See, by movie’s end, Kevin has defeated burglars Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. He’s gone shopping, done the laundry, cooked his own meals, decorated the house, attended Christmas mass and even helped the old codger down the street reconnect with an estranged son. He is completely self-sufficient, an 8-year-old island unto himself in suburban Chicago. And yet, all he wants for Christmas is the family he wished away in the beginning. He’s grown up not to the point that he doesn’t need his family, but to a level of maturity where he realizes that he absolutely does. No matter your spiritual persuasion, that is a message of Christmas I hope everyone embraces this year.

Oh, and Fuller, go easy on the Pepsi.