Article by Riley Burr Art by Carina Rockart
Have you ever seen Home Alone? Of course you know it, it’s the classic Christmas family comedy, featuring an immoderately violent booby-trap montage that every child under fifteen and divorced dad over thirty is guaranteed to enjoy.
That’s every kid’s dream, right? To be home alone? Kevin (played by Macaulay Culkin) has the time of his life all alone in this big house. The problems start when he goes into the basement. I shit you not, this was the scariest scene in the entire movie because the basement is dark and full of junk, so you never know what could be hiding around the corner. And there’s this furnace that Macaulay Culkin (who plays Kevin) is super scared of, and in his imagination, the furnace opens up like a mouth and calls his name.
The whole scene feels like a nightmare, but do you wanna know what scared me the most? In the shot right before the furnace opens, there’s a mannequin in the corner. Every time I’ve ever watched this movie, I think it’s a person in there staring right at Kevin (Macaulay Culkin). And it’s extra scary because there’s something off about it, you know? Like, if it were a real person, why’s it standing so still? Why doesn’t it have a face?
And you know how scared I am of things that look like people but aren’t. Case in point, that old-ass Abraham Lincoln animatronic. You know, the one that Walt Disney made in the sixties, which kept malfunctioning, went missing for a few years, and now lives in a museum without its skin on. It’s a real thing. Look it up. It’ll freak me out forever. Anyway, back to Home Alone.
Then you realize it’s just a mannequin, and then you feel a little silly about it all. And then the furnace is speaking to Macauley Culkin (Kevin), and that’s not as scary as the mannequin, and you feel even sillier (or I guess I do) because the furnace is supposed to scare you, and the mannequin isn’t.
Anyway, maybe I’m looking for an objective opinion, and I guess I just wanted to ask: Do you think I’m too scared? Of everything, the world, politics, my job, the mannequin in the corner? Listen, I know I’m a nervous person, but do you think it’s getting out of hand?
Okay, to lean further into the metaphor, do you think I search for mannequins? I think I’m always afraid, and so I’m always searching for something to blame my fear on. And for some reason, I tend to choose the mannequin in the corner rather than the talking furnace.
(Like how the only times I get nervous on airplanes are when they take off and land, when they’re the closest to the ground.)
(Like how I’m afraid you’ll think I’m being too pretentious while I’m talking about how afraid I am.)
The thing about Kevin is that in the beginning of the movie, there’s nothing he wants more than to be alone. And then at the end, he asks Santa (the kid-equivalent of God) to bring his family back to him.
And the thing about humans is that we can’t stop ourselves from making something out of nothing. I’m not unique; I’m guilty of this. I love hearing music as my fingers hit the computer keyboard and finding metaphors in the sunlight on my desk. People love to see things where there isn’t anything, until those things are scary, like mannequins in a rich kid’s basement. But is there anything scarier than the nothing just being… nothing? Maybe it’s not anything special, maybe it’s just fingernails or just sunlight or just a rich kid’s basement. Maybe there’s nothing to be afraid of, but at the same time, there’s nothing to admire.
Is there anything more terrifying than that?
Well, okay, maybe animatronic Abraham Lincoln. Seriously, look it up at your own risk. (There’s an example of humans doing something they never needed to be doing, taking a long-dead national hero and turning him into a creepy quasi-functional robot. Seriously, Disney?)
But really, I’m talking about existential dread. I think that’s where art comes from. I mean, we’re all searching for some kind of meaning in the universe, some kind of reflection that we can recognize ourselves in. And so we create art, beautiful and terrible and desperate art.
Did you know one of the first-ever documented forms of human art is in a cave in Argentina? It’s covered floor-to-ceiling in handprints. They’re all different sizes and shapes, left by hundreds of people, centuries and centuries and centuries ago.
I guess no one has ever found what they’re searching for, because we all just keep leaving more handprints and finding more mannequins and falling in love with each other over and over again.
Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.