The coincidence of the photo of Trump facing a child with ‘Alone at home’
The participation of the current president in Macaulay Culkin's film takes on a new meaning: there is a frame exactly like the now legendary cover of 'Time' that condemns his immigration policy
The cover of the latest issue of Time magazine this week became one of those instantly classics. In one of those that summarize the state of the world. The image of President Donald Trump facing a girl, the daughter of a Honduran migrant detained in Texas (obviously after an edit by those responsible for the art of the publication that mixed two different photos) has become so famous that social networks have not taken long in wondering: where had I seen this before?
Well, it was in the movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), the second part of the successful Home Alone (1990), the most famous family film of the nineties and one of the highest grossing in history. Trump's appearance in the film made sense: Macaulay Culkin's character, Kevin McCallister, stays at the Plaza Hotel in New York when he gets lost in town, using his parents' card. From 1988 to 1995, Donald Trump was the owner of the Plaza Hotel and made his wife at the time, Ivana Trump (they married in 1977 and divorced in 1992), the person in charge of managing it.
The scene from Home Alone 2 in which Donald Trump crosses paths with Macaulay Culkin.
According to Matt Damon in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, there was a strange clause in the permissions that Donald Trump gave to all those responsible for the films that were shot in a location on his property. One that says a lot about Trump's character and that is no longer even strange today: that he reserved the right for an appearance with a phrase to be introduced for him in the script and, thus, be able to appear in the film.
Trump was not scheduled to appear in Home Alone 2. He was not in the original script. But he made use of his power. And it is his power that is clear in the image: a gigantic Trump informs a small Macaulay Culkin of where the reception of his own hotel is, which he bought for almost 400 million dollars (343 million euros) in 1988 and became in the most talked about and famous real estate deal of the decade in Manhattan.
It is curious to compare the two photographs: in one, Donald Trump is all kindness to a child he is trying to help. In the other, located already in 2018 and in a country that Trump governs, the US president is represented as a wall before a girl who seeks a better future outside of her country. But Macaulay Culkin is an American boy, blond, cute and wealthy. The Honduran girl, whose name we do not know, comes from what he called "shitty countries." The tweet that faces and compares both images, uploaded by Panamanian Pablo Touzón, has more than 1,600 retweets and arouses all kinds of comments on the Internet.
"Creative, great and accurate" or "Reality surpasses fiction" are some of the comments from Twitter users regarding these two confronting images. The Simpsons are not the only ones who got ahead of themselves when it came to showing Trump stamps that became real. Trump himself seems to be repeating himself and getting some of the images of him to repeat themselves. Only now his power goes far beyond the walls of the Plaza Hotel.
