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ABSTRACT
In a 2017 article for the comedy website Cracked, Christopher Daed argues that “Die Hard and Home Alone are the EXACT same movie.” Daed was not the first to make this connection: a cursory search reveals frequent comparison on social media. Very little scholarship, however, has seriously engaged with this pairing. In this paper, I examine how both Die Hard (1988) and Home Alone (1990) use narratives of redemptive violence to define idealized American masculinity. Both films portray families ruptured by influences both foreign (the imposition of foreign culture) and domestic (maternal neglect) that are restored by their protagonists’ defense of Christmas, family, and by extent, old-fashioned American values. I situate both Die Hard and Home Alone within the canon of American Christmas films, arguing that their enduring, linked popularity is indicative of a rejection of the perceived weakness and femininity associated with many other Christmas narratives. I focus in particular on the films’ oft-overlooked treatment of religion: Christmas, after all, is a religious holiday, and its relationship to American identity cannot be separated from the ubiquity of Christianity in American life. I argue that both Kevin McCallister’s church attendance and his violent defense of his home align him with John McClane as all-American defenders of Christmas and the family.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The majority of It’s a Wonderful Life, however, does not take place at Christmas, and the film only came to be associated with the holiday because broadcasters started airing it during Christmas in 1976, after it entered the public domain. White Christmas, which prominently features WWII veterans in its plot, reuses the song ‘White Christmas’ from the less enduringly popular WWII-era film, Holiday Inn (1942).
2. A blatantly festive name: John must save her and, in doing so, save Christmas. I have chosen to refer to her by her first name throughout this paper for the practical reason of not choosing between or constantly using both of her last names.
3. Holly is able to work as an executive because she is aided in housework and motherhood by her nanny, a woman of color who a sleazy reporter threatens with potential deportation in order to gain access to the McClane children. Though the film does not comment on this work arrangement, it quietly speaks to the often-unacknowledged labor done by working class women (frequently women of color) in order to allow upper-middle class white women to ‘have it all’.
4. Leading to a long-standing meme in which fans ask ‘what Kevin McAllister’s dad did to afford this house & a vacation to Paris for 9 people’ and suggest theories such as the McAllisters being a mob family (Bruk Citation2016). Notably, this meme is at least partially based on error: the film establishes that Peter’s brother paid for the entire family to visit Paris.
5. Her career in fashion also provides Kevin with several mannequins, allowing him to fake a large house party and confuse the burglars.
6. Interestingly, the scripted version of this scene is more violent. Kate doesn’t care if ‘I have to hijack a pilot at gunpoint, if I have to fly through a 300 mile wall of solid snow’ in addition to giving up her belongings and selling her soul to the devil (Hughes Citation1990, 75).
7. He thinks he has killed eleven, but Karl remains improbably and persistently alive until Powell can dispatch him at the last minute, as discussed later in this section.
8. According to a 2015 video from Distractify in which doctors diagnose the actual damage of Kevin’s various traps, as least three of the individual pratfalls each man experienced could have each been fatal (DistractifyYT Citation2015).
9. Given the film’s status as a Christmas story, it does not feel like a stretch to identify Old Man Marley’s name as a tribute to that most famous Christmas Marley, the ghost Jacob Marley who visits his former partner Ebenezer Scrooge. If anything, however, Home Alone’s Marley serves as a proxy for the Ghost of Christmas Future, giving Kevin a glimpse into the separation and grief that may occur if he holds a grudge against his family.
10. Powell’s backstory is based on decades of real incidents in which police officers shot unarmed civilians with toy guns; the most notorious recent incident is likely the 2014 murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by a police officer who claimed he thought Rice’s toy pistol was a loaded weapon. Unlike most recent discussion of these incidents, however, Die Hard centers the police officer’s experience.
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Notes on contributors
Melodie Roschman
Melodie Roschman has a PhD in English from the University of Boulder, where she studied gender, popular culture, and religion. Her dissertation, “Identity, Counternarrative, and Community in Progressive Christian Women’s Memoir,” examines the narrative community surrounding the late Rachel Held Evans. She moonlights as an independent scholar and writer while working full-time as a Communications Officer for the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.