A Common Mistake People Make About Home Alone All the Time
What can be a good casus belli for a righteous fight? Someone getting the facts wrong.
This is what happened in one of the Home Alone threads on Reddit. A Redditor u/foxmag86 made a post devoted to what they see as a common mistake people keep making about the famed franchise.
The user is angry that a lot of people believe that going to Paris for Christmas shows how rich the McCallister family is. This is simply not true for just one obvious reason. It is not them who paid for the holiday trip.
The fan argues that while they definitely appear to be upper-class, they are not the ones gifting a Paris trip for the entire McCallister family. It is Peter's brother living in Paris, who's paid for the McCallister family's journey. And Kevin's mom explains just that to Harry dressed up as a cop.
"My husband's brother transferred to Paris last summer and both of his kids are still going to school here, and I guess he missed the whole family. He's giving us all this trip to Paris for the holidays, so we can be together," she says in the movie.
The post got attention of other fans who didn't care much about who paid for the trip. Their focus shifted to how wealthy the family were. After all they own a huge house surrounded by other impressive big houses in a nice neighborhood with a church. Everything is prepared for Christmas, the streets and the buildings are illuminated and the whole area looks well looked after. The burglars' aim is the McCasllisters' house, which they call the Silver Tuna – it indicates that there are more valuable things inside compared to the rest of the neighborhood.
One of the redditors made a quick search and shared the results – 671 Lincoln Ave in Winnetka, IL, arguably the nicest suburb of Chicago. A real house there is valued at about $2.2M today. The fans agree that the family definitely don't seem to represent somebody with financial problems.
But then they say that in general there's no point in discussing it since the movie is not about their financial standing and it doesn't matter if they paid for the trip themselves or it was someone else who did it.
The discussion made foxmag86 update the original post with a note in the end, saying that a lot of people either didn't read the post or missed the point completely. Was there any? The user added that they never said that the McCallisters were not wealthy. The only reason the post was made is to share an observation about them not paying for their trip to Paris. Fair enough. After all, anyone can post whatever they want on Reddit!