In Defense of Home Defense

Every Christmas, and perhaps this year more than most, our thoughts turn towards the things we always look forward to every year. Presents under the tree, stockings filled to the brim with candy and smaller gifts, turkey for dinner, Celtic Woman Christmas specials.

Watching an eight year old child beat the snot out of the Wet Bandits.

Every year, there are also several videos posted to YouTube which analyze various aspects of Home Alone and its only good sequel. Videos about dark Home Alone theories, an analysis of all the laws Kevin and his family break, even CinemaSins have weighed in on the various “sins” of the film, and a rebuttal of that video also exists.

One video released last year used Home Alone as a framing device to argue that specific laws which gun-toting Republicans swear by are garbage laws that are racist and enabling of gun violence. YouTube channel Renegade Cut is generally a channel I like watching because it feels like the person behind it is trying to be informative and analytical about various things both related to movies and politics, and I agree with some of it. I can see his point about racist laws enabling gun violence, and after the 2020 we had, perhaps more people than ever before are aware of the true role that police have in white society, and why Black Lives Matter is and has always been necessary. That said, maybe sometimes he goes too far with his analysis.

Castle Doctrine was the main subject of his Home Alone video. What is a Castle Doctrine? Basically it’s a law that gets put on the books that protects you from consequences if a burglar breaks into your home and tries to steal your possessions, murder or rape you, and you happen to injure or kill him first. It’s also a game available on Steam that, interestingly enough, lets you set traps to protect your home from other players and is set in the year 1991, exactly one year after Home Alone and one year before Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.

Castle Doctrine laws are important because otherwise, you could be the one jailed if someone breaks into your home. Just ask Tony Martin, a British farmer who was sick and tired of his home being robbed. He claimed ten burglaries had taken place already before one fateful night in 1999 when he shot at a pair of burglars in his home. The police were doing nothing, according to the farmer, so the use of potentially deadly force was justified in his mind. The court system wasn’t convinced, and it was the farmer defending his property that got thrown in jail.

Lest you think that this is an isolated case and things have improved in the United Kingdom, no they haven’t. There was a recent case where an elderly man was arrested after managing to injure a burglar in his home, a burglar who later died from his wounds. There isn’t strictly a Castle Doctrine law on the books in England, but there is a law that allows for one to defend oneself or their property, but the key words in the law are that one must use “reasonable force”. Unfortunately, the definition of “reasonable force” is unclear and open to interpretation, considering that the prosecution in the Tony Martin case convinced the jury that the farmer was lying in wait for the burglars so that he could shoot and kill them.

One thing that the Renegade Cut video tried to argue was that Castle Doctrine can be abused, except that it’s very hard to find incidents where gun-happy Americans use Castle Doctrine to get away with murder. Have you noticed that it’s always Americans who get criticized for fetishizing guns? I mean, to be fair, there is a lot of evidence that they do, and that they believe that the nation’s surplus of guns and glorification of gun violence are never the problem. The Renegade Cut video might’ve been inspired by the incident in September of 2018 when former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger entered the apartment of Botham Jean and murdered him. Guyger claimed that she was acting in defense of her own apartment, saying that she entered the wrong apartment and mistook its owner for a burglar, thus she claimed she was acting within the parameters of Castle Doctrine, despite that she was the one trespassing.

While the video didn’t mention Amber Guyger in its indictment of Castle Doctrine, it did mention an incident in Montana that it referred to in vague terms, so I looked it up. It’s arguable that the murderer in this case, one Brice Harper, did feel like his life was threatened by the victim, Dan Fredenberg when he walked into Harper’s garage, and justifiably so since Harper was sleeping with victim Fredenberg’s wife and was incredibly upset. Was Harper trying to incite Fredenberg into his garage so he could go all The Purge on him and get away with it? I don’t know, maybe. But it’s hard to argue that Harper was hoping to gun someone down in his home and that’s why he had a gun.

Thing is, it takes a lot of work to get someone you don’t know to come into your home, and you can’t just hope that you’ll be burgled someday. Most people who enter your home know you in some manner or another, and the vast majority of the time, you’re on friendly terms with the other person. The whole notion that people are buying guns just to wait for someone to show up uninvited in their house so they can shoot to kill and get away with it is ludicrous, and I’m surprised you can get away with such an argument in British courts of law. Renegade Cut did not make the direct claim that people are buying guns and waiting for other people to enter their home, but he did insinuate that the related Stand Your Ground law makes it legal to buy a gun and track down an unarmed teenager to kill, which was an oddly specific insinuation to make, so there was likely an unmentioned incident that inspired him to say it. Renegade Cut did say “The truth is, nobody buys anything without the intention of using it, and that includes lethal weapons” so make of that what you will.

I do agree that the pizza delivery driver did nothing to deserve being treated the way he was, but to be fair: the McCallister family was in chaos the first time he showed up with pizza and it took a while for someone to get the money to him. The second time he showed up, with a plain cheese pizza just for Kevin, and the eight-year-old terrorized him with the infamous scene from Angels With Filthy Wings… well, Kevin was eight years old and had been without adult supervision for a little while! Even with how mature Kevin sounded at times (“Is this toothbrush approved by the American Dental Association?”), he was still just a kid. I have met many youngsters in my time working retail, and for every one of them who acts like he was raised to be proper and mature for his age, there are literally hundreds who aren’t. Besides, I’ve met people older than me who think that “smell my fart” is still an acceptable game to play. Should Kevin have known better than to terrorize a pizza delivery driver? Maybe. But chances are he didn’t.

The video argued that since the McCallisters were rich, they could afford to replace their stuff and Kevin should’ve just called the police and be done with it. Yes, he knew the Wet Bandits were coming and when, and he could’ve stayed at the church, safe with his neighbour there, but instead he chose to go home where he wasn’t going to be safe so he could booby trap it and wait for the Wet Bandits to come. He goaded them into falling for more of his traps. This I agree with. But again, he was eight years old. I was eight years old in 1990, too. Do you know what I was watching at the time? Saturday Morning Cartoons, and a lot of them. Being in the Pacific Time Zone and getting, for some reason, plenty of East Coast channels in our cable package (honestly, Revelstoke Cable, what were you thinking?), we had to tape a lot of the good ones if we wanted to see them. Being lucky enough to live in Illinois, Kevin probably was able to see them without having to wake up too early or use the VCR. Some of the most popular ones, not only because they were older and constantly getting repackaged, they might’ve been cheap to license as well, were Warner Brothers cartoons. By the time Kevin would’ve started watching it, The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show was an hour long and occasionally featured one such cartoon that I’d like to focus on, Operation: Rabbit.

It is no accident that the final act of the film was shot like a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

The basic gist of Operation: Rabbit was that Wile E. Coyote, Genius, announced his intention to have Bugs Bunny for dinner. Bugs decided he was having none of that and rejected Wile’s offer. So Wile attempted to attack Bugs and his home with various plans he dubbed “Operation: Rabbit” in an attempt to cook and eat his chosen prey. The fact that they were both clearly sentient and could communicate with one another in a civilized manner and they still had a predator and prey relationship seemed to put the cartoon sometime before Beastars in the furry timeline between feral animals and Zootopia.

It was well within Bugs Bunny’s right to defend himself and his home, since he was directly being attacked. After his plans failed, Wile showed up at Bugs’s property again and threw in the towel. What Kevin might’ve learned from the cartoon was that when you found yourself the protagonist of a situation like that, you had to defend yourself and your home. So he came up with a plan he simply called “BATTLE PLAN”, and given that he was eight years old, he likely didn’t realize that it was actually the villain who came up with the detailed plans in the cartoon and it was the protagonist who foiled them. However, that is entirely beside the point.

Renegade Cut took a lot of issue with the final act because he said Kevin was defending “his stuff, his Christmas presents and his rich family’s silverware.” I disagree. I feel like Kevin was trying to protect his home, not his stuff. At one point, Kevin even told a man dressed as Santa that he didn’t want any presents as long as he got his family back.

The video was right, stuff is just stuff, it can be replaced. Apparently the McCallisters were loaded if they could afford not only to support their large family, but to also take that large family on vacation to France. There were a few details in the first movie that led me to conclude the family wasn’t as loaded as Renegade Cut would have me believe but that’s not important. They were living in a rich neighbourhood in the most desirable home to rob out of all their neighbours, the Wet Bandits said so themselves, so I’d be willing to concede that they did have some money. But there’s one thing that money can’t replace if it’s stolen from you, and that’s a sense of safety. All of us need a place we can go to in order to feel safe, and our home is meant to be that place. We can close and lock the door and then we don’t feel as vulnerable to the outside world, but if someone can break in at any time and violate the safety of your home, what do you have left? You can be surrounded by expensive things but your home no longer feels like your home. Now you know that at any time, anyone can come into your home and possibly threaten you and your family. Any time you’re out, you could come back and notice your door hanging open. Granted, this can happen to anyone even if it’s not happened before, but we at least have an illusion of safety if we haven’t been the victim of a break in before. That illusion is gone once your stuff is stolen. It could be your jewelry and video games, it could be some cheap trinkets you don’t care about, it doesn’t matter. Once you’re the victim of a break in, whether you can afford to replace your things or not, you can’t replace the illusion of safety. You will always worry about what you might find when you get home.

Renegade Cut, throughout the video, kept trying to exaggerate the message of the film in order to support his position, but perhaps unintentionally hit the nail on the head when it came to Home Alone. He stated that Harry and Marv’s backstory wasn’t explored and by the second film, they were being portrayed as cartoonish villains, and he was right. They’re supposed to be cartoon villains. It’s rare that villains got clear motivations and back stories in cartoons beyond basic threats to the lives of the protagonists or something they hold dear. In Operation Rabbit and various other cartoons involving Bugs Bunny, the antagonists were often trying to kill Bugs. Wile E. Coyote wanted to eat the rabbit because he’s a coyote and that’s what he was supposed to do (never mind the fact that it’s the role evolution gave his species, so it’s either that or starve), and Elmer Fudd wanted to kill the rabbit for no other reason than he’s a hunter and that’s what he was supposed to do (because he’s a human and I guess humans were supposed to be selfish and kill for no reason… there’s an argument that can be had that Elmer Fudd was a strawman but this isn’t the essay for that). Wile E. Coyote would eventually find a more permanent foe with the Road Runner, whom he would try to eat in various cartoons but always fail.

Harry and Marv were like Wile and Elmer. They didn’t need complex backstories because they were cartoon villains. We’re not watching Home Alone for a complex narrative about good versus evil. We watch Home Alone because we want to see an eight year old (ten in the sequel) defeat a pair of bumbling criminals. There’s a time and place for complex villains, and there’s a time and place for cartoon caricatures. If you’re trying to remember the motivation of a villain and all you can come up with is “they wanted to rob the place because they wanted to rob the place,” then you’re likely watching cartoon villains. Harry and Marv were so deliciously over the top that if they had mustaches, they’d be twirling them. The traps that they constantly sprung were clearly deadly but they were meant to shrug it off just like Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff.

If I want to be fair to Renegade Cut, and I really do because I enjoy watching his videos, even when I disagree with them, he mentioned several times that Home Alone is a good movie, and I do think that he genuinely still does like watching it. You can critically analyze something you like, and lovingly point out its flaws. I proved that this year, but that said, I still felt this video missed the mark a bit.

Can Castle Doctrine laws be abused? Perhaps, especially if you ask the family of Botham Jean. Fortunately in that case, the police officer responsible was successfully tried for murder. Castle Doctrine laws would’ve done Tony Martin a world of good, especially since law enforcement did not respect his right to be safe on his own property. Whether or not you agree with such laws, I’m sure we all want to feel safe in our own homes, especially during the holidays.