Save this article to read it later.

Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.

I am immediately sent back to my car for having a bag one centimeter too large.

Article image

Yes, I tell her.

Like Kevin McCallister, I am alone.

Once Im inside, I observe that no one else is solo at this event.

I observe that going solo to this event is, in fact, incredibly weird.

I am getting looks.

This is an event for families and rowdy groups of friends.

I expected the crowd to be made up of mostly millennials (highly susceptible to 90s nostalgia).

But actually, its a mix.

There are some millennials, with and without kids, but older people too.

Many of them wear ugly sweaters with light-up components or Santa hats.

I talk to a few of them, and theyre from New York and Connecticut.

Stratford, Fairfield, Cromwell, Westchester County.

Christmas is ten days away, and this is something festive to do.

Many audience members have heard about the event from Instagram.

A goth couple who traveled all the way from Long Island tell me they are big Culkin fans.

They mentionBunny Ears, the name of both his humor website and his podcast.

Another group from Westchester, maybe in their 40s, has made posters.

I dont know what theyre going to do with the posters.

Hold them up when Culkin comes out?

I overhear a lot of people talking about him.

Hes a sweet guy.

They are talking about a 2019 movie calledChangeland.

Though I listen for it all night, no one mentionsParty Monsterat the nostalgic Macaulay Culkin Christmas event.

Most of the adults are drinking, so I decide to get a drink too.

But when I order one, the bartender tells me, We dont have those tonight.

She looks at me like Im the pervert who invented this $22 drink.

I order a Modelo instead.

The lights flicker, and the crowd surges toward the theater.

The house is mostly full, with only a few empty seats here and there.

It takes a while for the audience to filter in, and the music swells.

Im next to a group of bros as the opening credits roll.

One of them exclaims, The score is unmistakable, and another says, John Williams, dude.

1 at the box office for 12 consecutive weeks.

My children watch it every year, quoting its catchphrase: Keep the change, you filthy animal.

The movies politics are best left unexamined.

They belong to a different era, when the inequalities of this country were perhaps not yet so vast.

The McCallisters are the 1 Percent, it wrote gravely.

This was a career mistake for sure, but you could sort of see his point.

Everyone plays second fiddle to Macaulay Culkin inHome Alone.

I do know tonight is different, though.

The smell of weed wafts toward me.

The audience is up and down, getting more drinks.

Everyone has tacitly agreed that talking is acceptable.

People quote along with the most famous lines.

Buzz your girlfriend, woof, and so on.

Kieran Culkin as the bed-wetter cousin brings the house down.

A kid to my left sings along with Rockin Around the Christmas Tree.

The hilarity peaks with the final booby-trap sequence.

They would be dead, announces the guy next to me.

Even one fall down the McCallisters icy steps might kill an adult.

But this isnt realism, its the Road Runner versus Wile E. Coyote.

Pummeled for a consecutive 15 or 20 minutes, the thieves dont even bleed.

His mother returns on Christmas Day and gets slightly less applause.

I thought hed be taller, an audience member remarks, the old cliche about the famous.

The event has oversold his role in the evenings program.

Culkin answers gamely; hes relaxed.

But everything he says has a tinge of melancholy.

you’ve got the option to feel his weariness with the child-star thing.

The entertainment industry has extracted so much from him.

As if he should be more entertaining, have more funny voices cued up.

I find myself wondering what he was paid to be here.

But I hope it was worth it.

Two weeks on the road at Christmastime, playing such glamorous locales as Medford, Massachusetts.

Even his bits betray a little darkness.

But Culkin didnt go.

I didnt want wine, he says.

I wanted to go to school.

Still, he doesnt deliver these anecdotes with acrimony.

Someone just got hit in the head with a sandbag.

We love you, Kevin!

a fan calls from the expensive seats.

He says, matter-of-factly, My name is Macaulay.

They dont make movies likeHome Aloneanymore.

The corporate calculus doesnt work out.

Maybe culture was always as vacant as it is now.

Maybe it has always felt like an era of decay, the end of things.

Better to look back and feel something than to look around and feel nothing.

Even if the past inevitably cant live up to our memories of it.

Even if Macaulay Culkin is just an adult now, too tired to run an Airbnb.

In the final part of the evening, there is an interactive game.

The kids do not seem particularly starstruck by Culkin or enthused about these prizes.

And why would they be?

Its not so easy to connect the person on the stage to the kid in the movie.

Anyway, the movie belongs more to their parents than it does to them.

Culkin, forever dutifully fulfilling his contract, concludes by saying, Merry Christmas, you filthy animals.

But the audience is already leaving, sliding into parkas, chatting among themselves.

No one really seems to hear him.