Home Alone is about how the atomization of suburban life leads privileged white males into becoming violent reactionaries. The protagonist is barely connected to his family, and thus gets easily left behind when the rest of the family goes on vacation. There aren't any neighbors or friends or extended family around to check on him. This gives him free reign to arm himself, and he acts out his most sadistic violent fantasies on a couple of impoverished guys who dare commit property crimes.
Having just rewatched, the Wet Bandits are not people who deserve critical support. They deduce that a kid is home alone and decide that it is still worth it to knock the place off. Hes fucking 8. Thats sadistic as shit, I don't care about class difference. He also shoots you with a BB gun and is obviously willing to defend himself and can probably call the cops, so just cut your losses and fuck off.
And in the 2nd one they escape from prison and decided to throw it all away to literally set out to revenge kill a 9 year old.
EDIT: I should also add that both of the first 2 (any home alone movies without Macaulay Culkin are revisionism) do show the constant incompetence/uselessness of police, the pure foolishness of yuppies/petite bourgeoisie, and that working class/poor people are cool and good (John Candy and his polka band, the old man neighbor, the pigeon lady).
Even in the first movie when they’re mostly just robbing Kevin’s rich neighbors, their calling card is flooding people’s homes. That isn’t redistributive at all, they’re just doing it to hurt people because they can. The Wet Bandits are sadists.
A standard reading of A Christmas Carol, as presented in most adaptations, suggests that winning the hearts and minds of greedy, miserly, and spiteful people in positions of power is a sufficient first step to solving poverty and the other social ills stemming from it. But Dickens constantly wrote stories steeped in themes stemming from Victorian-era poverty and stark, unmistakable class stratification and would clearly have a more cynical view of the situation; it's telling that it takes a supernatural force like Marley's ghost and the three spirits to even get Scrooge to consider being less of a miserly dick to everyone around him, when in the first act he's presented as a lost cause. This subtext is stripped away in most 20th- and 21st-century adaptations which present the story in a vacuum, independent of the context provided from Dickens's other work (particularly later, more jaded stories like Great Expectations, which feels like a gritty parody of Oliver Twist).
Someone here mentioned Mao’s treatment of Puyi and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Scrooge basically gets the Puyi treatment, except with Puyi it took years of meeting with literal human experimentation victims to make him into a comrade, while one night with a trio of ghosts turned Scrooge from a shitty business owner to a “good” business owner.
I am not an expert on Dickens but my suspicion is that he would view the poverty in the world as part of human nature and more or less impossible to undo. I once attempted to read “Bleak House” and my impression there was of a static, rotten-to-the-core, utterly hopeless civilization.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas is about a comrade doing solid praxis and then undoing it following a spontaneous conversion to liberalism
There was a meme here a few days ago about how the moral of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is that weirdness is okay so long as it can be exploited.
Rudolph is every autistic kid who was good at math or science in school and got shuttled into a PMC career track.
Couldn’t it be argued that A Christmas Story is an anti-capitalist classic? Basically everyone in that film lusts after commodities again and again, only to realize that they provide no satisfaction of any kind.
Most Christmas films I think are actually at least a little leftwing, if unconsciously so? All of them basically say that it’s our common humanity that counts, not commodities (brought to you by Slave Labor Camp #4).
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation:
Your boss can’t cut your wages if you know where they live and don’t mind sending your redneck cousin over with an RV full of [CHRISTMAS CHEER] to [INVITE THEM TO YOUR PARTY].
in santa claus is coming to town there's a ton of parallels that show the problems of prohibition and make santa an outlaw distributor of illegal goods. the whole movie comes off extremely pro drugs.
another way to look at it is that it promotes materialism, but that's just every christmas movie.
It Happened on 5th Avenue:
Squatting is cool and good, build communal housing, Fuck the rich (but post American film code, so they had to include the billionaire as a good guy)
