Searching for John Hughes by Jason Diamond

Author:Jason Diamond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

The Home Alone house in Winnetka is a redbrick, Georgian-style beauty on a quiet, leafy street. People with access to a car can easily find the address online, drive a little over a half hour north from Chicago, and park in front of it for a second, imagining a young and puckish Macaulay Culkin defending his home against the two bumbling burglars played by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern. It has become a tourist attraction, a landmark in the middle of an area where people expect privacy. Recent owners put up a fence to keep people off their lawn, but the people keep coming regardless. They come to get a live glimpse of something from their childhood, the home that Pesci’s Harry calls “the silver tuna,” and what they get is beauty for miles, with every road that leads to Kevin’s house offering reasons to drive slowly and admire the landscape during any time of the year. If people want the scenic route, they can drive up the uncharacteristically winding part of Sheridan Road known as “the ravines.” They take that all the way to the border of Glencoe, turn around, head down Green Bay Road, and drive a few minutes down to the McCallister residence on Lincoln Avenue.

On the journey, they’d notice there’s something almost New England–esque about the drive that bends and shifts in ways not familiar to most Illinois residents, who are more used to the state’s flatness. Large gated houses, endless foliage, and the faint smell of Lake Michigan not too far away fills the air; it’s the most breathtaking stretch of road in all of Cook County, and possibly one of the best in the region, until maybe you get up into the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula or any part of Wisconsin that the locals claim is “God’s country.” Unlike those places, however, that stretch near the lake that’s so massive you could easily mistake it for being an ocean isn’t some untouched and expansive landscape with a sky so big that it looks as though you can walk forward and right into it. It’s a combination of pastoral and progress almost quaint and antique because it’s so quiet and dominated by nature, like man only had to move a few things around and pave a small sliver of it. It’s like the stormy, husky, brawling big city that Carl Sandburg immortalized in his poem is a million miles away; driving up Sheridan and then back down to Kevin McCallister’s house is more akin to traveling through an Impressionist painting. It’s downright pretty. One can see why people with means would want to settle there.

Home Alone also calls to mind a painter from another era, one whose name is linked to a simpler time in America, a time that Hughes might not have lived through, but was certainly fond of. Sure, there’s plenty of slapstick humor and loads of schmaltz throughout the film that made Culkin a massive child star, but there’s also something that’s undeniably Norman Rockwell about it.

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