Ah, it’s that magical time of year! When the Hudson hawk nips at the nose, and the skyline over the New Jersey Palisades bruises by midafternoon. When chimney smoke from private houses spices the air, and strings of colored lights adorn windows and fire escapes. And, of course, when the Internet engages in its annual bullshit debate as to whether perennial holiday favorite Die Hard, currently celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary, is a Christmas movie. And since “bullshit debates” are my brand…
In fourth grade, I scored what was, by 1980s standards, the holy grail: a best friend with HBO. Over the following five years, I slept over at his house every weekend, where we watched R-rated action movies into the night. Whatever HBO was showing that week, we delighted in it, no matter how idiotic (Action Jackson) or forgettable (Running Scared). For a pair of preadolescent boys, that Saturday-night cinematic grab bag abounded with illicit wonders.
Much as we enjoyed those movies, though, they were for the most part—this isn’t a criticism—ephemeral crap. We howled at their profane jokes and thrilled to their improbable set pieces, but seldom if ever revisited any of them (Beverly Hills Cop [1984] and its sequel [1987] being a rare exception), and certainly none inspired us to playact their scenarios as we had with PG-rated adventures Ghostbusters (1984) and Back to the Future (1985). They entertained us, sure, but didn’t exactly impress upon our imaginations in any lasting or meaningful way…
That is, not until an action thriller with the snarky guy from Moonlighting (1985–1989) and Blind Date (1987) came along. I still remember seeing Die Hard (1988) for the first time, on a thirteen-inch television with side-mounted mono speaker at my friend’s Bronx apartment. As a viewing experience, it was about as low-def as they come, but that didn’t diminish the white-knuckled hold the movie had on us; we watched it in astonished silence from beginning to end. From that point on—and this was the year no less than Tim Burton’s Batman had seized the zeitgeist, and our longstanding favorites Ghostbusters and Back to the Future got their first sequels—Die Hard was almost all we could talk about.
At the time, Manhattan College was in the process of erecting a twelve-story student residence overlooking Van Cortlandt Park, and we would gather with our JHS pals at the construction site on weekends, running around the unfinished edifice with automatic squirt guns, playing out the movie’s gleefully violent plot. Hell, at one point or another, every multistory building in the neighborhood with a labyrinthine basement and rooftop access became Nakatomi Plaza, the setting of a life-and-death battle staged and waged by a group of schoolboys, our imaginations captive to the elemental premise of Die Hard.
We obsessed over that fucking movie so exhaustively, we passed around this still-in-my-possession copy of the pulp-trash novel it was based on—Roderick Thorp’s Nothing Lasts Forever (1979)—until every one of us had had a chance to read it:
The thirteen-year-old boys of the late ’80s were far from the only demographic taken with Die Hard. The movie proved so hugely popular, it not only spawned an immediate sequel in 1990 (which we were first in line to see at an appallingly seedy theater on Valentine Avenue), but became its own subgenre throughout the rest of that decade. Hollywood gave us Die Hard on a battleship (Under Siege), Die Hard on a plane (Passenger 57), Die Hard on a train (Under Siege 2: Dark Territory), Die Hard on a mountain (Cliffhanger), Die Hard on a bus (Speed), Die Hard on a cruise ship (Speed 2: Cruise Control), Die Hard in a hockey arena (Sudden Death), Die Hard on Rodeo Drive (The Taking of Beverly Hills), Die Hard at prep school (Toy Soldiers)…
Christ, things got so out of control, even Beverly Hills Cop, an established action franchise predating Die Hard, abandoned its own winning formula for the third outing (scripted by Steven E. de Souza, co-screenwriter of the first two Die Hards) in favor of a half-assed “Die Hard in an amusement park” scenario. This actually happened:
None of those films has had the staying power of the original Die Hard. Mostly that’s owed to Die Hard being a superior specimen of filmmaking. Director John McTiernan demonstrates uncommonly disciplined visual panache: He expertly keeps the viewer spatially oriented in the movie’s confined setting, employing swish pans and sharp tilts to establish the positions of characters within a given scene, as well as imbue the cat-and-mouse of it all with breathless tension.
McTiernan consistently sends his hero scuttling to different locations within the building—stairwells, pumprooms, elevator shafts, airducts, the rooftop helipad—evoking a rat-in-a-cage energy that leaves the viewer feeling trapped though never claustrophobic. The narrative antithesis of the globetrotting exploits of Indiana Jones and James Bond, Die Hard is a locked-room thriller made with an ’80s action-movie sensibility. It was and remains a masterclass in suspense storytelling—often imitated, as the old saying goes, never duplicated.
Perhaps another key reason for the movie’s durability, its sustained cultural relevance, is owed to its (conditional) status as a celebrated Christmas classic. Like It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) and Love Actually (2003), Die Hard is a feel-good film—albeit with a considerably higher body count—one is almost compelled to watch each December. Yet whereas nobody questions any of the aforementioned movies’ culturally enshrined place in the holiday-movie canon—nor that of cartoonishly violent Home Alone (1990)—Die Hard’s eligibility seems perennially under review.
Why does the debate around Die Hard die hard… and is it, in fact, a Christmas movie?
Now I Have a Machine Gun… HO-HO-HO
Die Hard is, notably, but one of many R-rated action films of its era set within a Yuletide context, alongside the likes of First Blood (1982), Invasion U.S.A. (1985), Cobra (1986), Running Scared (1986), Lethal Weapon (1987), and The Last Boy Scout (1991). Who knows why Christmas became such a go-to backdrop for these kinds of films. Action movies tend to be conspicuously conservative in their values, often featuring a solitary law-enforcement officer (usually a white man) who will go to any lengths necessary to protect the “little folks” under his auspices from drug traffickers, international terrorists, communists—all the standard-issue cinematic bogeymen of the Reagan era.
Police officers are, historically, defenders of the status quo—keepers of the peace (meaning existing power structures, with all the rights and privileges those socioeconomic hierarchies confer/withhold)—and what if anything symbolizes peace and traditional values with greater universality than Christmas?
Within the context of the latter half of the twentieth century, “peace” can be understood as a euphemism for “law and order,” with its dog-whistle connotations, and “traditional values” as consumerism and materialism—the raison d’êtres for suburbanization, for white flight. Therefore, when our action heroes are placed in mortal danger at Christmastime, the stakes are far higher than one cop’s survival or the thwarting of some nefarious criminal plot; the American way itself—read: social privilege—is under assault.
Christmas notwithstanding, is there a more accurate sociocultural barometer of male insecurity than a given era’s action heroes? It isn’t happenstance the decline of the British Empire coincided with the creation of hypermasculine MI6 operative James Bond in 1953. Half a century later, hypercompetent counterterrorist agent Jack Bauer of 24 would offer similar reassurance to rattled American audiences in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and ensuing War on Terror.
In the 1980s, midway between Bond and Bauer, the archetypal Stallone and Schwarzenegger action heroes—John Rambo, Dutch Schaefer (Predator)—provided a revisionist heroic narrative for the American male left permanently demoralized by Vietnam. (A steel-haired Rambo came out of retirement during the Trump administration to violently dispatch brown-skinned sex traffickers coming across the border from Mexico. Thank you for your service?) Time and again, whenever masculinity—usually in the form of either patriarchy or Western supremacy—is existentially threatened, our action heroes come to the rescue.
In 1985, Rambo took care of our unfinished business in Vietnam in Rambo: First Blood, Part II, and Rocky won the Cold War—on Christmas Day! on Christmas Day!—in Rocky IV. Those aspirational fantasies were more or less realized in reality by the late 1980s, when Ronald Reagan vanquished communism that glorious morn he “knocked down the Berlin Wall using his nutsack as a wrecking ball” (Stephen Colbert, “Billie Jean King,” The Colbert Report, season 9, episode 145, aired September 9, 2013, 22 min.).
It was around this same time—the dissolution of the Soviet Union—that so many hit TV series of the ’80s featuring macho Vietnam vets as their protagonists (The A-Team, Magnum, P.I., Miami Vice) were winding down. Hell, even Stallone’s versatile heroes seemed out of place in a world devoid of commies, with Rambo living anonymously in a Thai monastery in Rambo III (1988), and Rocky back on the streets of Philly once again in Rocky V (1990), no money in his pocket or anyone left to fight.
The ’90s offered a kinder, gentler Arnold, with Schwarzenegger softening his image by appearing in a series of successful Ivan Reitman–directed family comedies, and rehabilitating the T-800 from the unstoppable killing machine of The Terminator (1984) to a cyborg who discovers his inner Mary Poppins in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), in which he acts as a wish-fulfilment father figure to the young boy whose very existence he was originally programmed to snuff. The end of the Cold War inspired the action hero to embrace his sensitive side. Enter John McClane.
I Will Never Even Think About Going up in a Tall Building Again…
Many have observed how McClane, at the time of Die Hard’s release, represented a new kind of action hero—a physically and emotionally vulnerable one, in contrast with the steroidal stoicism of mid-’80s Stallone and Schwarzenegger. This is true. It wasn’t brute strength that was McClane’s superpower so much as his stubbornness, hence the movie’s title. To my view, however, the more salient difference is the personal issue that motivates him—the then–au courant threat to traditional manhood McClane is meant to grapple with and, for the target audience’s vicarious pleasure, assert dominion: second-wave feminism.
As portrayed by Bruce Willis in Die Hard, John McClane is a proudly old-fashioned New York cop. He carries a single duffel bag with him on his visit to L.A. He sits in the front seat of the limousine sent to fetch him from LAX. He bemoans the intrusion of hip-hop in the sanctified genre of traditional Christmas music. He scoffs at the touchscreen directory in the lobby of Nakatomi Tower (“Cute toy,” he mocks). He’s frustrated by his estranged wife’s professional use of her maiden name (“Christ,” he mutters at the sight of it in the directory). And he feels totally out of place at the office Christmas party, full of white-collar assholes drunk on cheap champagne and high on coke (“Fuckin’ Californians…” he sneers out of one side of his mouth).
“You throw quite a party,” he tells his wife’s boss (James Shigeta). “I didn’t realize they celebrated Christmas in Japan.” Right—Christmas is an American tradition, goddammit! Don’t you watch action movies?
When McClane reunites with his wife, Holly Gennero1 (Bonnie Bedelia), it’s their first face-to-face in six months, since she accepted a job as a corporate executive that necessitated a move to L.A. McClane, by his own admission, didn’t bother to go with her—or the kids (more on their festering resentment later)—erroneously reasoning she’d come crawling back to him in short order.
Through this backstory, we’re introduced to an action hero who has less in common with super-soldiers John Rambo and Schwarzenegger’s John Matrix (from Commando, also scripted by de Souza) than he does the male Baby boomers of Thirtysomething (1987–1991), born into a postwar world of conventional gender roles only to find themselves struggling, as young husbands and fathers, to adapt to the reality of increasing equality between the sexes. (Willis was 32 at the time of filming.) McClane’s masculinity is challenged, if not fully threatened, by a corporate ladder–climbing wife with zero interest in playing Suzy Homemaker.
And while McClane learns humility from his life-and-death ordeal—during the film’s Dark Night of the Soul, he confesses to his new pal, LAPD Sgt. Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), that he regrets not being more supportive of Holly—it’s hard to view the film’s closing statement as anything close to progressive:
The very theme of the movie is violence as redemption; it is only by means of his heroic effort to fight the terrorists that McClane saves his marriage, just as Al, through violence, saves his police-hood—in effect, his manhood. There are no female officers involved in the mission and, for that matter, no female criminals. . . .
Richard Brody, “Eighties Action Movies I’ve Never Seen: Die Hard’s Culture of Violence,” New Yorker, August 3, 2017
Right. At the climax, McClane saves Holly from plummeting down the side of the building along with the villain clinging to her wrist by unclasping her corporately gifted Rolex—the very emblem of her independence. She at that point explicitly recommits to her married surname, and then, when confronted down on the street by an opportunistic reporter (William Atherton), punches his lights out. By the film’s coda, Holly has not only adopted her husband’s name, but his preferred mode of problem-solving, as well.
I am, admittedly, far from the first critic to note the symbolism embedded in the wristwatch. Scores of books and articles have been written about the subtext of Die Hard, with particular respect to its deeply conservative ethos: that the primary antagonist, Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), has ties to a militant left-wing West German terrorist organization, meaning he’s a commie at heart, even if his criminal agenda—stealing corporate bearer bonds—is textbook capitalism (commies and socialists are all hypocrites, anyway, right?); that the Nakatomi Corporation itself “is an emblem of the then widely stoked fear that Japanese high-tech businesses were threatening to dominate the American economy” (ibid.).
On that point: The L.A. high-rise in Nothing Lasts Forever, the publication of which coincided with the 1979 oil crisis, is not a Japanese-owned multinational, but rather the corporate headquarters of Klaxon Oil, and the terrorists’ program—exposing Klaxon’s illicit transactional association with the Military Junta of Chile—is political/ideological. But positioning American fossil-fuel extractors as morally dubious wasn’t really gonna fly in the Reagan era—not after the Gipper had the solar panels installed by that tree-hugging pussy Jimmy Carter torn off the White House roof.
In the conference room, as Hans admires the scale models of Nakatomi’s various global-industrialization projects on imperialistic display, note how one is a petroleum refinery and the other an offshore-drilling platform. Implicit in this throwaway detail is the notion that extractive exploitation is only something to worry about when it stands to enrich foreign competitors.
Between the publication of the novel and the release of the movie, the Reagan presidency codified the end of—the reversal of—the progressive economic policies and social programs that seeded and nourished the very postwar prosperity that created the American middle class. But Die Hard would prefer to see second-wave feminism as the prevailing social cancer of its era, not neoliberal capitalism.
But as I said: Die Hard’s themes and motifs have been exhaustively analyzed elsewhere. And besides which, I doubt any of its subtextual imagery is intentional, anyhow. I don’t actually think Die Hard is trying to say anything; there’s no more meaning to take from it than there is from a ride on the Coney Island Cyclone. It’s an entirely visceral experience, not an intellectual exercise—the kind of empty-calorie entertainment Hollywood’s been serving up for decades. As Stephen King observed in 1981:
In place of the ideas that books and novels give us, the movies often substitute large helpings of gut emotion. To this American movies have added a fierce sense of image, and the two together create a dazzling show. Take Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry, for instance. In terms of ideas, the film is an idiotic mishmash. In terms of image and emotion—the young kidnap victim being pulled from the cistern at dawn, the bad guy terrorizing the busload of children, the granite face of Dirty Harry Callahan himself—the film is brilliant. Even the best of liberals walk out of a film like Dirty Harry or Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs looking as if they have been clopped over the head… or run over by a train.
Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Gallery Books, 2010), 57
Add Die Hard to that list—and Rambo, James Bond, and 24, while you’re at it. Die Hard is an idiotic mishmash of ideas, manipulating its audience by appealing to both our violent fantasies and, incongruously, our holiday sentimentality. That’s why it works—it pushes all the right buttons. (Home Alone succeeds for much the same reason.) But that’s not to suggest Die Hard doesn’t promote some noxious ideas, not least of which is the way it glorifies the “solitary hero” trope.
He’s Alone, Tired… and the Only Chance Anyone Has Got
Everyone in Die Hard save McClane is either arrogant (Nakatomi executive Harry Ellis), incompetent (the LAPD), unscrupulous (the on-scene reporters), dismissive (the 9-1-1 operators), distracted (the limo driver), corrupt (Gruber’s gang), inefficient (the FBI), or authoritatively clueless (the news anchors and pundits). Everyone. McClane is the lone voice of reason in a world filled with idiots.
And while popular fiction and media have always mythologized the righteous loner—through the hardboiled whodunits of Humphrey Bogart and Westerns of John Wayne; the sundry police officers and gunslingers portrayed by Eastwood and wasteland warriors of dystopian sci-fi—Baby boomer McClane represented the most relatable and accessible iteration of that American archetype to date: the Reaganite cowboy.
McClane possesses none of the sneering cynicism or emotional aloofness of Sam Spade, Ethan Edwards, Harry Callahan, or Snake Plissken; there is, refreshingly, a genial warmth about him, a self-effacing humor—the same qualities Reagan demonstrated to win over a country demoralized by Watergate and Vietnam and the energy crisis. In contrast with Carter’s downbeat message of consumption-doesn’t-supplant-community, Reagan championed the spirit of American individualism via deregulated capitalism: our God-given right to have what we want, when we want—and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. (Certainly not anyone from the government!) Die Hard is suffused in the Reagan ethos:
“Die Hard” is a furiously anti-bureaucratic, anti-governmental film. The movie displays thoroughgoing skepticism toward authority, toward officialdom, toward those in power at all levels, from the local L.A.P.D. captain (Paul Gleason) to the F.B.I., whose takeover of the mission is greeted as sneeringly by McClane (“The feds?”) as it would have been by Ronald Reagan himself. McClane’s braggadocious response to the first terrorist he catches, who stands up to him, serves as the movie’s own statement about the right way, rather than the approved way, to dispatch a miscreant:
“You won’t hurt me.”
“Yeah? Why not?”
“Because you’re a policeman. There are rules for policemen.”
“Yeah, that’s what my captain keeps telling me.”
Brody, “Die Hard’s Culture of Violence”
The message embedded in Die Hard, however unintentional, is that the social compact applies to everyone else, not the “hero.” He’s too good, too smart, too capable, too fucking righteous to be hamstrung by rules. Those are for idiots so woefully devoid of his impeccable instincts. He is the hero; he is everything.
Again: Die Hard is hardly the first movie to promote such an idea. But what makes it different from the Westerns and policiers before it is that it was a hyper-successful, trendsetting example of what’s known in screenwriting parlance as a Dude with a Problem movie.
As defined by Blake Snyder in his Save the Cat! storytelling program, the essence of Dude with a Problem (DWAP) is that an innocent hero quite suddenly—and through absolutely no fault of his own—finds himself in an unfolding crisis whereby the stakes are nothing short of life and death. Misery (1990), Mission: Impossible (1996), The Martian (2015), Gone Girl (2014)—all DWAP movies. Implicit in this story model is the notion of a protagonist (again: typically a straight white man) as both victim and hero.
That is certainly true of Die Hard (and the endless knockoffs it inspired): McClane is not only a victim of circumstance, but also, consequently, of the sheer ineptitude of everyone around him. Not only can he expect no help from anyone else, but it becomes his responsibility to save those everyday dummies from themselves—to be, however “reluctantly,” the hero of the story.
Make no mistake: Movies like Die Hard and its ilk inadvertently trained a generation of viewers (largely but by no means exclusively men) to view themselves as the righteous protagonist of their very own heroic narrative—cursed to be the smartest guy in a world teeming with morons who, owed to their incurable idiocy and groundlessly inflated sense of self, don’t recognize his moral and intellectual preeminence.
That Die Hard is violent, and that it inspired scores of other wantonly violent action movies, isn’t why it’s so culturally pernicious. It’s that it helped to breed a generation of what I pejoratively call “everyday heroes”: assholes for whom the rules don’t apply, who treat everyone else as obstacles to be circumvented or steamrolled, and who, contradictorily, see themselves as victim-cum-hero. This worldview is evident in the impatient and aggressive way drivers conduct themselves behind the wheel these days, and it’s certainly the animating spirit of the MAGA movement (of which Reagan could arguably be considered the grandfather, Newt Gingrich the father, and Trump the prodigal son).
Here’s an Oscar-winning DWAP that deftly avoided those tropes: The Fugitive (1993). Wrongly convicted of his wife’s murder, Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) is an innocent hero thrust into a life-or-death struggle, but he’s no smarter or more competent than anyone else, including law enforcement and the criminal conspirators. The movie doesn’t position Kimble as the only virtuous or capable person in the world of the story, and he seldom if ever resorts to violence to solve problems. It isn’t only Kimble that has a brain; the movie does, too. It’s the thinking person’s Die Hard, and it’s just as suspenseful and entertaining. It isn’t so goddamn insecure that it needs to exalt the hero by denigrating everyone around him.
Orphan of a Bankrupt Culture
It’s fitting that John McClane should’ve inspired a legion of “heroic” disciples, both on- and offscreen, because he, too, was an explicit product of his own formative pop-cultural influences:
The culture of violence in “Die Hard” isn’t merely practical, it’s national—Hans Gruber mocks McClane over the walkie-talkie: “Who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he’s John Wayne, Rambo, Marshal Dillon?” (Of course, McClane’s response is famous: he prefers Roy Rogers, and takes to the battle purring, “Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker!”)
ibid.
Exactly—McClane, having grown up on Westerns like any good boomer, purposefully adopts a TV-cowboy persona, just as Ronald Reagan channeled that same affected swagger as a politician. (And like Reagan, Roy Rogers—also born 1911—was a Republican. Again: I doubt the filmmakers were trying to make a political statement, but McClane’s choice of alter ego offers insight into the unconscious ethos of the storytellers.) And much like Reagan was our first screen-trained president, it could be argued John McClane was our first pop culture–savvy action hero, consciously fashioning himself after and fancying himself a mythic American archetype. Like us, he’d grown up watching—and loving—action movies.
The late ’80s seem to be the point at which pop culture, like Skynet in The Terminator, became self-aware. Only a year before Die Hard, the teenage characters in Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (1987), when confronted with a vampire coven in their California beach community, relied on their knowledge of such supernatural perils from the countless TV shows and horror comics they’d consumed. They weren’t subject to the steep learning curve that challenged the ignorant protagonists of earlier monster movies, and they diffused tension with pop-referential humor: “It’s the attack of Eddie Munster!” one adolescent vampire-slayer cries when confronted by a frothing ten-year-old bloodsucker.
Suddenly, filmmakers, critics, and viewers all became aware that they were functioning in an environment of pop culture, as if fish had suddenly become aware of living in water, and the attention paid to the most prominent productions of mass media further amplified them, turning filmmaking into a mighty feedback machine of cultural self-reflection.
ibid.
It wouldn’t be until the mid-’90s that metatextual self-commentary achieved cinematic apotheosis through Scream (1996), and emerging screenwriters like Quentin Tarantino (whose forte was crime thrillers) and Kevin Smith (slacker comedies) and Joss Whedon (pseudofeminist SF/horror) made pop-cultural references in dialogue de rigueur, but Die Hard was a harbinger of all to come; John McClane and Mr. Brown (Tarantino) from Reservoir Dogs (1992) probably would’ve liked one another (… before they blew each other away, of course). Hell, in those embryonic days of Hollywood’s chrysalis to the industrial-scale cultural “feedback machine” it is today, Willis reprised the role of McClane for a self-satirizing cameo in National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1 (1993).
But even before McClane went meta, he was a character that related to (and positioned himself within) his world through the two-way lens of pop culture. He even celebrates blowing Hans away at the movie’s climax with a fanciful smoking-barrel blowout, wishing his bested adversary “Happy trails.” John McClane might even be one of the unheralded founding fathers of contemporary nerd culture: a comfortably violent, wisecracking badass—the kind social outcasts dream of being, hence their devotion to grimdark superhero fiction—who learned everything he needed to know in life from the junk-food entertainment he was raised on.
The erudite antagonist of Die Hard, Hans Gruber, refers to McClane as “another orphan of a bankrupt culture.” Fuck that pretentious douchebag’s “classical education” and subscriptions to Forbes and Time! McClane shows him: Hans is a left-wing elitist who’s carefully orchestrated robbery is foiled by a street-smart, improvisational, wisecracking, working-class hero for whom “facts from newspapers” are just the boring version of trivia on Jeopardy!
If Ronald Reagan demonstrated to a demoralized nation that a B-movie actor was the right man to conquer the Soviet Union, Reaganite cowboy John McClane showed us there is nothing more noble than getting your values and your most critical life lessons from Hollywood entertainment—that what elitist foreigners like Hans Gruber, with his manicured beard and tailored suits, refer to as a “bankrupt culture” is, in fact, everything great about being an American. Yippie-ki-yay, muthafucka—and Merry Christmas, too!
In the 1980s, pop culture produced a president who inspired an action-movie avatar who assured his impressionable audience that individualism is heroic, violence is masculine, and there’s no greater virtue—that nostalgic paean to all-things-’80s Ready Player One (2011) will back me up on this—than being a lifelong fanboy of the idiotic entertainment you grew up on. To hell with Rambo—John McClane is the most Reaganesque character Ronald Reagan never played.
And did I mention he’s a cop?
Drop It, Dickhead, It’s the Police
While Die Hard may have no use for bureaucracy or government institutions—lest we forget the nine most terrifying words in the English language—it certainly venerates the go-it-alone lawman with a license to kill (who’s not afraid to use it!). The filmmakers demonstrate this not only through McClane, but through the movie’s only other virtuous character:
[T]he main sidekick to [McClane] is the uncle from the Steve Urkel show, and more importantly a fellow cop in the movie (and also the Urkel show). . . . This good, wholesome cop made only one innocent and totally forgivable mistake in his life, killing a (undoubtedly black) kid with a toy gun. Now he’s too psychologically damaged to engage in police-sponsored-murder of civilians ever again. Thankfully, [McClane] comes to the rescue, and his inspiring courage and heroism show him the light. When the end of the film finally comes, and one last Communist is still standing, [Powell] becomes the hero [by] blowing him away with his standard issue firearm, finally able to murder for the bourgeoisie once again!
Dash the Internet Marxist, “Marxist Movie Review: Die Hard,” Medium, November 4, 2021
While that may be a comically exaggerated interpretation—again: I don’t think the movie is intellectually ambitious enough to have anything near a conscious political agenda—it nonetheless rightfully indicts Die Hard as one more entry (a massively popular one, at that) in a long tradition of pro-police propaganda, compliments of Hollywood, that began in earnest with 1950s procedural Dragnet (the catchphrase from which McClane notably quotes in Die Hard 2, as he surely would have grown up watching it) and continues to this day through, among other media, the Law & Order juggernaut, the cultural influence of which is absolutely alarming, as John Oliver details in this essential half-hour analysis from 2022:
Ever notice how much we love the police in this country? I can’t walk around my block—in as ostensibly liberal a city as New York, of all places—without spotting half-a-dozen bumper stickers burnishing pro-police messaging (“I Support Law Enforcement”) or imagery (those thin-blue-line U.S. flags that are somehow more insidiously potent than any on-the-nose sloganeering).
You know what I never see? Bumper sticks that read “I Support the Postal Service.” Or “I Support the Department of Sanitation.” And yet if either of those agencies disappeared tomorrow, I daresay we would miss them both immediately and immensely. But, alas, they don’t have a multibillion-dollar PR apparatus portraying them as exciting or sexy—building an entire lifestyle culture around what’s supposed to be a taxpayer-funded public service. We can appreciate the police, sure, but is it really healthy to love them?
Two kinds of police appeared on mid-century American television. The good guys solved crime on prime-time police procedurals like “Dragnet,” starting in 1951, and “Adam-12,” beginning in 1968 (both featured the L.A.P.D.). The bad guys shocked America’s conscience on the nightly news: Arkansas state troopers barring Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, in 1957; Birmingham police clubbing and arresting some seven hundred Black children protesting segregation, in 1963; and Alabama state troopers beating voting-rights marchers at Selma, in 1965. These two faces of policing help explain how, in the nineteen-sixties, the more people protested police brutality, the more money governments gave to police departments.
Jill Lepore, “The Invention of the Police,” New Yorker, July 13, 2020
Audiences—particularly those of the privileged white variety—have been trained by Hollywood to view police as noble in intention, wise in judgment, and justifiably violent when necessary, because they exist for the righteous purpose of protecting good people from bad people, simple as that. That’s certainly how my friends and I, those of us who used to play “Die Hard at Manhattan College,” viewed them, having grown up on movies like Die Hard and TV procedurals such as NYPD Blue. And God only knows what they’ve trained police officers to think about themselves. Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd, is exactly my age—a mere three weeks older. I’ll bet he play-acted Die Hard with his pals, too.
A friend of mine—a career officer for the NYPD—once told me that many people who pursue a line of work in law enforcement don’t actually have any discernable personality or identity of their own; this is a quality (or arguably lack of one) he’s observed in multiple colleagues, he said. They join the force precisely because it offers a well-defined culture to which they can readily assimilate. And there is no doubt police culture has been amplified and mythologized by Hollywood, through its crime procedurals and action thrillers—the police–entertainment complex.
Nowhere is this cultural ouroboros more evident than in the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013–2021), in which Andy Samberg’s fun-lovin’ Detective Jake Peralta—sure he’s immature as hell, but goddammit if he doesn’t have the best arrest rate in the precinct!—overtly and incessantly cites Die Hard as the precise reason he became a cop, even going so far as to name his firstborn son “McClane.” It’s a classic Hollywood setup: An Italian-American cop2 with a prized muscle car, unconfronted daddy issues, and a Die Hard fetish gets assigned to a precinct in Central Brooklyn… and comedy ensues!
Samberg is two years my junior, meaning he’s part of the same cohort that grew up hero-worshipping John McClane. He’s a member of the home-video generation, like the Gen-X teens in Scream and technocapitalist-sociopath James Donovan Halliday (Mark Rylance) in Ready Player One, for whom popular entertainment became a kind of socioreligious belief system, and the VCR its study bible. Jake Peralta doesn’t consider himself an orphan of a bankrupt culture at all; like Halliday’s brainwashed protégé Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and video-store virgin Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), he’s a blissfully indoctrinated disciple of it3.
Gee, I wonder if Samberg/Jake ever saw the Die Hard sequels… because they offer a far more instructive lesson as to what becomes of orphans of a bankrupt culture.
Last Man Standing
Despite also being set on Christmas Eve, there is little evidence to suggest so much as a single discussion has ever occurred as to whether Die Hard 2 qualifies as a Christmas movie. It’s not a film anyone talks about at all, really. I find that at least a little odd, since of all the sequels, Die Harder comes closest to recapturing the cowboy spirit of the original.
In Die Hard 2, set at Dulles International Airport, McClane is still the most capable man in a crisis, stymied by short-sighted bureaucrats and needlessly hostile local law enforcement. He still disdains technology (“As far as I’m concerned, progress peaked with frozen pizza,” he says). And he’s still comfortably violent, inventively dispatching bad guys by crushing one terrorist’s head in luggage flattener, stabbing another in the eye with an icicle, and kicking one through the whirring turbofan of a jet engine. Ya know—Christmassy stuff!
The only real difference is McClane and Holly are enjoying a renewed honeymoon period following the events of the first movie. But that—and several other characteristics of the franchise—would conspicuously change with the third Die Hard…
By Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), which abandoned both the “contained thriller” approach and Christmas Eve setting of the first two films in favor of having McClane run his ass all over New York City in late summer, John and Holly have separated (for unspecified reasons), and are now living on opposing coasts once again. “He’s stepped on so many toes in this department, by this time next month he’s going to be a security guard,” McClane’s commanding officer comments. “His own wife wants nothing to do with him, and he’s about two steps shy of becoming a full-blown alcoholic.”
Except… it isn’t merely that McClane has seen better days; it’s that his character is hardly recognizable in Vengeance. While nominally “John McClane,” Willis has by all evidence reprised the wrong role here: that of burned-out detective Joe Hallenbeck from The Last Boy Scout. The Reaganite cowboy of the first two Die Hards is gone. No longer is McClane the smartest person in the room; in fact, he’s so hung over for most of the movie, new sidekick Zeus Carver (Samuel L. Jackson) is saddled with the task of deciphering the riddles in a high-stakes citywide game of Simon Says they’ve been coerced into playing by the villain (Jeremy Irons). Meanwhile, McClane and Zeus’ on-the-fly dialogues mostly consist of accusing one another of racism—to both considerable viewer discomfort and no discernable narrative purpose.
Other than “redemption through violence,” the original Die Hard may not have been about all that much, but at least it had an unambiguous worldview: the individual is good; institutions are bad; formal education is snobby, pop culture is noble; foreign corporations empowering American feminists is the new threat to traditional gender roles. I suspect the reason for all that pointless bickering in Die Hard 3, even though racism has nothing to do with the movie’s theme (not that it has one) or the characters’ arcs (not that they have any), is because the movie has no appreciable weltanschauung, consciously or otherwise, so the filmmakers were overcompensating: The “buddy cops” have to talk about something, so why not skin color?
Except Die Hard with a Vengeance isn’t about racism, or vengeance (despite the title), or individualism (in this movie, it’s the police force that has its act together and McClane, under suspension at the start of the story, who’s mired in personal and professional dysfunction), or any discernable theme. It’s the second sequel to a hit movie whose DWAP formula had been so overfarmed throughout the early ’90s, and it’s desperately trying to come up with a new and bigger spin on an increasingly tired premise. As a narrative concept, Die Hard proved to be particularly susceptible to the law of diminishing returns.
So, it seems, did John McClane. Five years after his previous adventure, the former Reaganite cowboy, now an ostracized drunk, resurfaced to find himself irrelevant in the early years of the Clinton presidency and third-wave feminism. In the film’s original, unused ending, the villainous Simon Gruber actually succeeds, and McClane, suspected by the FBI as an accomplice to the heist, is fired from the NYPD. Some months later, McClane tracks Simon down in Hungary and murders him with premeditated sadism. This is far cry from the feel-good codas of the first two films, in which McClane and Holly ride off into the Christmas-morning sunrise to the romantic (and old-fashioned) tune of Vaughn Monroe’s “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”
Though that uncharacteristically nihilistic climax was scrapped at the behest of the studio in favor of a conventional (and logic-defying) shootout sequence along the U.S.–Canadian border, complete with a hopeful dénouement in which a victorious McClane reaches out by payphone to his estranged wife, the John McClane we meet a dozen years later more closely resembles the man with nothing left to lose—which includes his family, sense of humor, and soul—from the intended epilogue of Die Hard 3.
In Live Free or Die Hard (2007), McClane stumbles into the plot of what could’ve been a season-long story arc on 24, in which cyberterrorists knock out the nation’s telecommunications capabilities and power grid. The villain (Timothy Olyphant) describes McClane as a “Timex watch in a digital age,” and is he ever. Holly has divorced him. His daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) openly hates him, and has even assumed her mother’s maiden name of Gennero. (Turns out, the threat to his masculinity first identified in Die Hard was not unfounded. Fuckin’ feminists…) And he’s saddled with escorting an “amusingly” manic, Millennial computer hacker (Justin Long) from New Jersey to D.C.; the obnoxious kid delights in denouncing everything McClane stands for, from neoliberal Reaganomics to classic rock.
He may still be a gainfully employed New York cop, but this is otherwise the down-and-out McClane from the discarded postlude of With a Vengeance. McClane keeps the wiseass one-liners a-comin’, just like the old days, but sans the yippie-ki-yay swagger from the first two films, or even the embittered cynicism of the third one. In other words: Die Hard with a Valium.
Director Len Wiseman shoots Live Free like a glossy technothriller, full of fluid camera movements in chrome-and-concrete environs; McClane’s usual apparel—wifebeater and trousers—is notably replaced here with an earth-toned ensemble—chocolate-brown leather jacket and army-green henley—to contrast him with all the besuited cyberterrorism agents and the film’s desaturated cyan color palette. McClane quite literally wears his analog-age values on his sleeve. (If only the characterization, alas, had been given half as much creative consideration as the costume design and cinematography.)
In this way, the John McClane of Live Free or Die Hard reminds me of latter-day Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) in Michael Mann’s Heat 2: a shell of his former self; a twentieth-century hero who had the misfortune of surviving—of dying hard?—to a new millennium that had no place for him. Watching Live Free, you can’t help but wonder: Was Jack Bauer not available to deal with this shit?
Things get even weirder in A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), which takes McClane to Russia for a noisy and convoluted Bourne-style spy thriller. (Seriously.) Turns out, it isn’t just McClane’s wife and daughter who hate him; so does his estranged son (Jai Courtney). The bad-dad trifecta!
Seems John Jr. (who now goes by Jack, because none of McClane’s relatives wish to be associated with him even by name) resented his father’s absence, growing up in California while McClane was drinking himself to death in New York. Despite having no one to model violent masculinity for him, Jack nonetheless grew up to be a CIA operative even more artfully adept at and comfortable with killing than his absentee father. However, like his fellow War on Terror–era action heroes Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne, and decidedly unlike his onetime Reaganite-cowboy father, no-nonsense Jack McClane has no sense of humor or appreciation for pop culture.
But by those days, John McClane didn’t have much of a sense of humor, either. (“Reagan is dead,” one of the bad guys reminds him, and I guess we’re meant to assume the Gipper’s spirit lives on—dies hard—in McClane?) So, when he and Jack Bauer team up to foil some byzantine Russian terrorist plot (I was too goddamn bored to even try to understand it), they discover blowing away bad guys is the best mode of family therapy.
The father/son relationship has all the simmering tension of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade minus any of its subtlety, wit, or emotional depth, but eventually John and Jack bond over their mutual love of pornographic carnage. After a tender moment of healing before the film’s climax, a warm-cockled McClane literally says, “All right, let’s go kill some motherfuckers.” Ah, the son becomes the father and the father, the son. And a new generation of righteous heroes comes of age!
Nobody’s Hero
While Good Day is so braindead and artless it makes the original Die Hard look like a Godard film, it nonetheless bears that franchise hallmark of “redemption through violence.” Only in “killing some motherfuckers” can McClane and his son express their mutual affection and begin to heal the ties that bind, much the way violence paved the way for McClane and Holly’s reconciliation in the first film.
And yet the arc of the Die Hard narrative—the story of McClane’s life, and that of Mann’s men Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley’s, too—demonstrates that solitary, self-righteous heroes have a limited shelf life. That when you’re the most sensible, most capable person in a world full of half-witted plebeians, eventually there’s no place left for you in that world. The smartest guy in the room tends to be the loneliest. Just ask Ebenezer Scrooge, who justifies his perdurable antisocial misery by stating, “What else can I be when I live in such a world of fools as this?”
Yeah. Because being a solitary hero means exactly that: You are a solitary hero. (“Why are you now determined to prove that this Penguin is not what he seems?” Alfred the butler asks Bruce Wayne in Tim Burton’s 1992 Christmastime actioner Batman Returns. “Must you be the only lonely man-beast in town?”) Or as McClane himself explains it:
You know what you get for being a hero? Nothing. You get shot at. You get a little pat on the back—blah, blah, blah. Attaboy. You get divorced. A wife that can’t remember your last name. Kids don’t wanna talk to you. Get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me, kid—nobody wants to be that guy.
From Live Free or Die Hard, screenplay by Mark Bomback
Nobody should want to. Except movies like Die Hard—and action heroes like John McClane—have systematically trained entire generations of moviegoers to celebrate that archetype, and even to aspire to its smarter-than-thou certitude in our everyday lives.
It isn’t merely that the original Die Hard brilliantly serves up cathartic violence and Christmas sentimentality in one delicious dish. Rather, it’s that it affirms the culturally ingrained presumption that we are, each of us, the sole voice of reason in a world of shitheads; that police culture is inherently noble (and state-sponsored violence, therefore, warranted); that obsessing over pop culture is itself virtuous. John McClane of Die Hard embodies the American birthright Reagan restored to a demoralized nation: that of Randian individualism, law and order, and conspicuous consumerism.
Such is the reason why Die Hard gets rewatched every Christmas while the sequels go overlooked: No one cares to be reminded that the guy who emerged triumphant for knowing better than anyone else wound up all alone, like Mr. Scrooge, taking his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern. At the holidays, we would much rather cheer on the guy McClane was: the profane wiseacre who acted like a self-righteous asshole with impunity and was rewarded for it. Die Hard thumbs its nose at the spirit of community championed by earnestly prosocial Christmas classics like It’s a Wonderful Life and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! It’s a Christmas movie for an audience that delights in the postmodern irony of citing Die Hard as its favorite Christmas movie.
While I have moral reservations about Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon, at least that Christmastime thriller was about a solitary hero (Mel Gibson’s Riggs) who finds healing in partnership (with Danny Glover’s Murtaugh), and eventually becomes integrated into a family—a family that expanded its membership with each sequel. All the characters had a permanent and vital place in that group, from Joe Pesci (Lethal Weapon 2) to Rene Russo (Lethal Weapon 3) to Chris Rock (Lethal Weapon 4); they all contributed something of value to the team.
Whereas McClane’s circle of associates shrunk with each successive sequel, Riggs’ broadened—such was his cosmic reward for ultimately recognizing he was too old for this shit (that is, being violently vengeful). For my money, Lethal Weapon is arguably endowed with a far purer Christmas spirit—at least for a violent action movie—than Die Hard ever was. “Die Hard is a Christmas movie, I’ll give you that,” concedes film critic Richard Roeper. “Lethal Weapon is a Christmas story.”
Does Lethal Weapon, then, occupy a place in the Christmas-movie canon? Who knows. More to the point: Who gives a shit. Such a debate is, after all, exactly the kind of obsessive-compulsive elevation of disposable entertainment to essential literature that took root in the ’80s, was given steroidal amplification in the Internet Age, and has, nearly a quarter century into our new millennium, made us all willing agents—or, alternatively, hostage buyers—of a bankrupt culture, indefinitely consigned to a state of commercial adolescence.
Inquiries as to whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie—or which actor delivered the best interpretation of Clark Kent, or how the 007 theme songs stack up—are the kind of juvenile deliberations that once, within my lifetime, occurred exclusively on schoolyards; now there are blogs (including this one) and podcasts and YouTube videos devoted to endlessly relitigating such inconsequential nonsense in earnest.
Because this is what social media does: It puts arguments in front of you over and over again, tempting you to think that you just might be the one special person who can cut through the nonsense and be rewarded for your clarity and insight with attention from your peers. We all know that this is not true, and that we will fail, but that doesn’t make us stop. . . . This is the way in which many of us have chosen to live for most of the year. Must we live this way at Christmas, too?
Kaitlyn Tiffany, “Is [REDACTED] a Christmas Movie?”, Atlantic, December 24, 2021
I recall another of Alfred’s wise observations from Batman Returns: “Sometimes it’s a diversion to read such rubbish. Most of the time, it’s a waste of time.” Hear, hear. Moving forward, I’m not sure I’m going to give any more of these bullshit debates oxygen. Such is my hopeful New Year’s resolution.
In that spirit, the salient question isn’t “Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?” Rather, it’s “Why are we still discussing this?”
Better yet: Why are we still watching Die Hard at all?
Shadows of Things
For me, Die Hard is most decidedly a Ghost of Christmas Past—and no longer a welcome one, at that. Some Christmas movies of yore still put me in touch with my then-me, like A Christmas Carol (1984), pretty much the only movie I ever watched with my late father (and, by my subjective appraisal, the best screen adaptation of the story), and Home Alone, the first movie I ever went by myself to the theater to see (and consequently learned, like Kevin McCallister, the not-insignificant difference between solitariness and solitude). The experience of watching those each Christmas is twofold: I remember what it felt like to see them the first time, as well as enjoy and appreciate their storytelling from the perspective of a middle-aged writer.
To be sure: I admire the scrappy filmmaking spirit of John McTiernan’s Die Hard. But to me the movie is a time capsule of the Reagan era, whose ethos I have come to actively oppose. I am a democratic eco-socialist, and I lament having lived my entire life in the neoliberal shitstorm Reagan welcomed—one of rising wealth inequality and carbon emissions, of increased instances of mass shootings and road rage. Like Reaganism itself, Die Hard is a movie I wish to God we’d leave behind in the twentieth century, not literally adapt as illustrated storybooks to read to our children at Christmas. As I’ve noted elsewhere:
Interrogating the stories we have long taken for granted is healthy, especially the comforting ones. When the narratives and mythologies still feel helpful and true, resolving to do more to live up to them is also healthy. But when they no longer serve us, when they stand in the way of where we need to go, then we need to be willing to let them rest and tell some different stories.
Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), 173–74
Reflexive disdain for government and the normalization of violence are key selling points of the presidential campaign of next year’s likely GOP nominee. I suspect Die Hard, in its own small (but not insignificantly influential) way, helped condition the culture to accept and even adopt such a nihilistic mindset. I wonder if it would surprise the thirteen-year-old kid who used to regard Die Hard as a paragon of storytelling excellence that, thirty-five years later, his first novel would stand in opposition to the values it espouses?
The Dogcatcher is a horror/comedy about a municipal animal-control officer whose Upstate New York community is being terrorized by a cryptid. It’s a story about the crucial role our public servants and institutions play in civil society, the moral obligations and social responsibilities we have to one another; it champions a spirit of We’re in this together that is all but absent from the movies and television shows that have been produced in my lifetime. (And it eschews pop culture–heavy dialogue, a persistent and tiresome artifact of ’90s screenwriting I can’t tolerate.) Donating my Die Hard DVDs to the public library and publishing The Dogcatcher, both of which I did this past year, is my small way of honoring Naomi Klein’s recommendation—to let old stories rest in favor of producing new narratives.
Some old narratives, admittedly, still feel helpful and true. I’m reminded of this passage from the granddaddy of all Christmas stories, itself a screed against the kind of 19th-century industrial capitalism that seems downright quaint when measured against globalized neoliberalism:
But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843
With its Randian ethos and redemption-through-violence message, that sure as shit doesn’t describe Die Hard. Is it a fun movie? Sure. Is it a Christmas movie? Not for me it isn’t; you decide for yourself. Its values aren’t anything I care to celebrate, at Christmas or otherwise.
Pretending to be John McClane at thirteen was a blast; in 2023, navigating a world full of John McClanes, of “everyday heroes” for whom the rest of us are bit players in their personal heroic narratives—idiots who won’t get out of their way, not fellow passengers to the grave—is dispiriting and exhausting. Even Andy Samberg, who produced and starred in an Emmy Awards–honored tribute to Die Hard, had a come-to-Jesus epiphany on this matter:
Brooklyn [Nine-Nine] is facing a significant challenge in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by a police officer. “The writers are all rethinking how we’re going to move forward,” Samberg, who also exec produces the series, told People in July. “[Everyone is] discussing how you make a comedy show about police right now, and if we can find a way of doing that that we all feel morally OK about? I know that we’ll figure it out, but it’s definitely a challenge.”
Lesley Goldberg, “‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ to End With Abbreviated, Delayed Season 8 on NBC,” Hollywood Reporter, February 11, 2021
What they figured out was that the sun had to set on the fictional 99th Precinct. When Brooklyn Nine-Nine returned for its belated ten-episode eighth season in 2021, Jake’s partner Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz), motivated by the George Floyd protests, had quit the force. Jake briefly tries to prove he’s one of the “good ones,” but by series’ end he, too, has retired from the NYPD to be a stay-at-home dad—the very thing his proudly recalcitrant idol John McClane never did. Good for Jake.
“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” Charles Dickens wrote. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.” Jake—and, really, Samberg—at some point realized Die Hard is a stupid, even arguably dangerous, movie to venerate. And so, putting his money where his mouth is, he let it go. So did I. As Dickens himself would’ve surely concurred, redemption-through-humility makes for a much better Christmas story.
2023 was the first full year in which I reduced my blogging output from monthly to quarterly; I reallocated that time and creative energy for The Dogcatcher. Given how much fiction I intend to produce in the coming years, I may blog less frequently still in 2024. The blog’s 120 posts will remain open for comments, and new essays will continue to be published here, however irregularly. I appreciate the support I’ve received this past year with respect to both the blog and The Dogcatcher, and I wish one and all a happy holiday season and healthy, prosperous, peaceful New Year!
Footnotes
- In the shooting script and onscreen, Holly’s surname is alternatingly—and seemingly indiscriminately—also spelled “Gennaro,” with both versions sometimes even appearing in the same scene (note the way the spelling changes when the name is highlighted on the touchscreen). I have opted to use “Gennero,” since that’s the version that appears on her office door. ↩︎
- Jake is established as half-Jewish and half-Italian. ↩︎
- Jake is also a proudly obsessive fanboy of ’80s cartoons Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Transformers. ↩︎
The hubster and I watched a “Christmas” movie called A Pocketful of Miracles, but it’s not a Christmas movie. It just takes place in December. But it’s a charming, wonderful movie that highlights Bette Davis’ acting skills and totally worth veneration.
Somehow, Priscilla, I’ve never managed to see Pocketful of Miracles, this despite its impressive pedigree (Frank Capra, Glenn Ford, Bette Davis, Peter Falk). I will be sure to seek it out now!
Die Hard is far from the only film that falls into that nebulous category of Is it or isn’t it a Christmas movie? In the course of researching this essay, I stumbled across that quote from film critic Richard Roeper, who eloquently distinguished a Christmas movie (like Die Hard) from a Christmas story (like Lethal Weapon). Therein lies the difference, methinks.
Having never seen Pocketful of Miracles I’m speaking a little out of turn here, but perhaps being set at Christmastime, it’s a Christmas movie, whereas Capra’s earlier film, It’s a Wonderful Life, is unambiguously a Christmas story (this despite only the third act of the film taking place over Christmas!). That’s the metric I’ll use moving forward: If it’s merely set at the holidays, it’s a Christmas movie, but if Christmas is inextricably integral to the movie’s themes and morals, then it’s a Christmas story.
Thanks, Priscilla, for being so supportive of the blog in 2023. I wish you and your husband Happy Holidays and the best of health and productivity in the New Year!
I always savor your discussions of movies. We often have different takes on stuff so I have a whole conversation with you as I’m reading–“But wait, Sean! What about…”. I’ll add one tiny piece to this amazing discussion. The super hero men like Bruce Willis and Clint Eastwood. For me, they are less about a “sociocultural barometer of male insecurity than a given era’s action heroes?” than encouraging me to believe in my own ability to take care of myself. Not depend on others in case they didn’t show up on their white horses.
Good post and do write more!
>(“Why are you now determined to prove that this Penguin is not what he seems?” Alfred the butler asks Bruce Wayne in Tim Burton’s 1992 Christmastime actioner Batman Returns. “Must you be the only lonely man-beast in town?”)
Batsy was right, of course
This was meant to be a general reply, not specifically to Jaqui
Indeed! As I just noted in my reply to Jacqui, superhero stories are really effective at speaking to the special hormonal loneliness of adolescence. As it happens, Batman Returns came out the summer I was sixteen, and I very directly related to its themes: feeling misunderstood and angry and alone. All three of the main characters — Batman, Catwoman, and the Penguin — deal with and are expressions of those feelings, each in their own way. It’s a wonderful movie, in many respects; a superior piece of storytelling to the first one. It’s a much purer “Tim Burton movie” than Batman — not merely in terms of its stylistics, but the way it relates to the plight of the “misunderstood outsider,” which is a theme that runs through virtually all his movies. (By contrast, superheroes in Schumacher’s Batman films aren’t “misunderstood freaks” at all, but rather hero-worshipped celebrities.) Batman Returns was exactly the right movie at exactly the right time in my life; I drew a lot of comfort from it. (As I did from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which also came out that same year, and were all about socially ostracized “superheroes.”) For better or worse, Hollywood would never make a comic-book movie as idiosyncratic as Batman Returns these days. To watch it now, it almost comes off as an art film!
Jacqui!
Blake Snyder, who codified the Dude with a Problem genre, also identified five different subtypes of Superhero stories: “Comic-book Superhero” (that would be movies like Superman and Batman); “Fantasy Superhero” (that’s The Matrix and Buffy the Vampire Slayer); “Storybook Superhero” (Harry Potter, The Lion King); “People’s Superhero” (The Mask of Zorro, James Bond); “Real-life Superhero” (Hamilton, Gandhi). “It’s not easy being special” is how Snyder summarized this type of story.
“Superhero” stories are some of our oldest and most durable narratives: the Gospels, the Homeric epics, etc. We’ve been telling stories about demigods, messiahs, and larger-than-life saviors for literally thousands of years! So, something about the archetype resonates deeply in the human psyche. Certainly one of the reasons for this — by no means the only reason — is because these stories are fundamentally aspirational. The granddaddy of modern superhero cinema, Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie (1978), understood this and made it explicit: Jor-El (Marlon Brando) sends Kal-El (Christopher Reeve) to Earth because its people, in his estimation, have the capacity for greatness: “They only lack the light to show the way.”
To the extent that they serve as aspirational exemplars, superheroic figures — or “chosen ones,” if you like — have cultural value. I think they’re especially useful in demonstrating human potential to — and inspiring greatness in — children, and also as wish-fulfilment models for misunderstood adolescents. But I would also argue the monopolistic stranglehold superhero fiction has had on our culture for the past twenty-plus years is indicative of a cultural assumption of the preeminence of the individual above all. We’ve all become “special someones.” And I think we need to get back to telling the kinds of stories that were popular in those years of postwar prosperity — the kind that championed a spirit of We’re all in this together. As environmentalist Bill McKibben said two years ago, “The most important thing an individual can do is be a little less of an individual.”
For that reason, I’d like to see fewer narratives about individual “heroism” in favor of more that promote communal heroism. That’s what I tried to do with The Dogcatcher, and that’s what I advocate for here on the blog. Superheroic characters are fun, but we’ve told a lot of those stories in my lifetime. Our culture is capacious enough to accommodate different kinds of heroes, in different kinds of narratives. Here’s to great storytelling in 2024!
And here’s to you and yours, Jacqui! Wishing you health, happiness, and creativity in the New Year! Thanks for all the support!
>I may blog less frequently still in 2024
You have many intelligent and thoughtful commenters here. I hope some of them offer to do guest posts to help take up the slack
I’d absolutely be open to guest posts! It’s time for me to step back from these pop-cultural debates, anyway. Over the past year, a number of my essays — notably “Superman IV at 35″ and “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born” — have put forth the assertion that we were never meant to carry any of this pop-cultural ephemera into adulthood. And the more I’ve explored that, the more I’ve come to believe it.
And my disdain for these kinds of arguments is only reinforced every time the algorithms suggest articles like “Star Trek: Generations Is The Most Useless Star Trek Movie By A Lightyear.” Why are we relitigating this… again? Christ, it isn’t even the 30th anniversary of Generations! WTF?! If you don’t like Generations, don’t fucking watch it anymore. Let it go. But why do we need the 400th “think piece” on why it was “disastrous” for the franchise? (I am on record as having declared Generations my favorite Trek film. I’m in no way saying it’s the best, but I find it terrifically entertaining, creative, and thought-provoking. And yet there’s always some asshole on the Internet who can’t wait to tell me how wrong I am.) I’m so over pop culture.
When I stepped back from blogging a year ago, the intention was to ease my workload by producing only four deep-dive posts per year instead of a dozen. But when I would finally sit down again to write a new essay, I’d inevitably discover I had so much to say and, consequently, I would invariably get lost in the weeds. My posts on Heat 2, the Buffy movie, and car culture all wound up consuming much more time and creative energy than I’d initially budgeted for them! I’d planned all year to do a Christmas post on Die Hard… and once again, the essay became a goddamn doctoral dissertation. And in the drafting of it, I realized I’ve been in the process of saying my final “So long, and thanks for all the memories” to a number of characters/franchises I’ve been following since my youth. And with this post, I’m not merely bidding Die Hard adieu, but I’m kind of using the opportunity to say, “I don’t want to talk about pop culture anymore. I’m sick of it.”
So, moving forward, I’ll post personal essays and behind-the-scenes looks at some of the projects I’m working on — I’ve got some stuff I’m really excited about in the pipeline — but I just don’t want to give any more oxygen to these idiotic pop-cultural debates. I don’t want to know about this stuff anymore, which is why I haven’t watched anything Star Wars–related since The Last Jedi, I’ve never seen The Matrix Resurrections or Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and I’ll never even accidently watch half a minute of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny or Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F. I’ve been a demonstrably happier person since I extricated myself from the tyranny of fandom.
All that said, Dell, I am not going anywhere! The plan to reallocate my time and energy into my fiction. And the blog will remain a creative outlet for me whenever I’m inspired to write short-form nonfiction. I’m not ending this ongoing project, merely downgrading it from a regular commitment to an intermittent hobby.
My friend, congratulations again on Mighty: An Anthology of Disabled Superheroes! I wish you more success and the best of creativity in the New Year!
Sean
A well-written critique! I wrote a similar critique of an old favourite, ‘Conan the Barbarian,’ which is of course another product of the Reagan era. I discussed the way the film symbolically and allegorically presents the neoliberal agenda coupled with the idealizing of hypermasculinity, quite similar to ‘Die Hard.’ Some woman trashed what I wrote, saying it was superficial to the point of being silly, that it’s so obvious that the film represents Reaganism and hypermasculinity…as if I was presenting the idea as a great insight; she totally missed the fact that I was presenting the idea as a dangerously seductive one, as again was the case with ‘Die Hard,’ as you presented it.
Thanks, Mawr! I’m going to read your analysis of Conan over the holidays, and I’m also looking forward to your just-published piece on This Is Spinal Tap, which is one of my all-time favorites! You always do such reliably thorough and fascinating analyses of the films you study. For anyone who enjoys my deep-dive deconstructions, they don’t hold a candle to Mawr’s! Check his stuff out on Infinite Ocean.
Exactly — I’m in no way suggesting my “insights,” such as they are, into Die Hard are in any way novel or astute, merely pointing out that it’s precisely because the movie is so sublimely entertaining (and, at this point, so widely regarded as a classic) that we might not pause to interrogate the morals the storytellers are promoting. (This was an argument sci-fi author David Brin made in his 1999 Salon article “Star Wars despots vs. Star Trek populists.”) As I point out in the piece above, Die Hard was literally adapted as an illustrated storybook in 2017. Families love to watch Die Hard to celebrate the holidays, but I would caution them to consider the values they are celebrating — and, consequently, passing down to their children.
Thank you, Mawr, for reading the piece and taking the time to comment on it! I wish you happy holidays, and look forward to more great analyses on Infinite Ocean in 2024!
Sean – you are a master of movie dissection and reflection. I particularly loved your reminiscence about Yuletime movies shared with your friends. For me, anything reflecting the youthful feeling of Holidays past is in essence ‘a Christmas movie.’
Thank you, Dave! As reminders of our own innocence, the popular entertainment we enjoyed as children can continue to have lasting value to us throughout the changing seasons of our lives — absolutely! The trick, for me, is bearing in mind that appreciating the sentimental or nostalgic significance of a movie like Die Hard or Ghostbusters or License to Drive in no way means the me of today endorses the values embedded those stories.
In that sense, these movies are not only welcome reminders of my innocence, but also of my naïveté — and they serve as markers of my lifelong journey toward greater sensitivity and intellectual enlightenment. There’s absolutely no shame in having taken pleasure from movies like Die Hard in the past. But it is also right and healthy to let those stories go at some point… which is easier said than done in a media landscape that seeks to suspend us in a state of commercial adolescence — that is, lifelong subscribers of the ephemeral crap we grew up on. When we let go of that stuff, we make room in our lives for new stories, and we open our minds to having old assumptions — the kind that die hard — challenged and refined.
On the subject of making room for new stories, Dave publishes really wonderful book reviews on his blog. I encourage one and all to pop over there and check some of them out! You might get a great recommendation for your winter reading list!
In the meantime, Dave, here’s to your health in 2024! The fight for a fairer, more sustainable world continues, and bless you for being on the frontlines, my friend!
Wonderful insights here Sean on why so many films that aren’t particularly Christmas themed are equated with Christmas. I think certain movies get their Christmas fame from a certain era that a generation resonates with, not necessarily making them Christmas movies, but more of a comfy cozy feeling of remembered Christmases of past, and becoming a ritual.
Merry Christmas to you! 🙂
Well said, Debby. I’m reminded of this passage from a 2017 New York Times op-ed:
The holiday movies and television specials we grew up with can transport us to a Christmas Past that feels warmer, safer, and even more festive than those of Christmas Present and Yet to Come. The ritual of watching them each year puts us in touch with times gone by. Those movies/shows become snapshots, in a way — windows into a time that slips further out of reach with each passing year. That they can do that is in itself a kind of Christmas magic, I suppose.
Merry Christmas, Debby — and a Happy New Year to you! Thanks for all the support!
As always, Sean, you have given us an incredibly well thought-out, well researched, beautifully written analysis of your chosen topic. I must tell you how delighted I am by the language and format you’ve chosen in just your first paragraph:
“Ah, it’s that magical time of year! When the Hudson hawk nips at the nose, and the skyline over the New Jersey Palisades bruises by midafternoon. When chimney smoke from private houses spices the air, and strings of colored lights adorn windows and fire escapes. And, of course, when the Internet engages in its annual bullshit debate as to whether perennial holiday favorite Die Hard, currently celebrating its thirty-fifth anniversary, is a Christmas movie. And since “bullshit debates” are my brand…”
The flourish of literary yesteryear imagery leads almost unnoticed into current-day, first person, eye-rolling, here-we-go-again resignation. Well Done, Sir!!
As for the rest of your piece, it is always educational to see your chosen topic through the lens of your experience and big-picture world view.
The original Die Hard release was such a big deal at that time that I did see the movie. I was a fan of a few of the actors in the film but not at all drawn in by all the violence. So I passed on the rest of that franchise.
Star Trek, however, was the other way around. I was enchanted by the original series and sought out each new iteration with great enthusiasm!
I couldn’t agree with you more about the onslaught of Star Trek criticism that has been launched into public view over the years! It seems to me there must be some psychological reward there for people looking to prove something to themselves. Why they think they can accomplish that by tearing something else down is a baffling but all too common occurrence.
Each version of the Star Trek franchise has its own unique sensibility and each one has something to offer the viewer – yes, even Star Trek V; The Final Frontier, which has been roundly vilified, has lessons to teach if you make the space to listen.
I look forward to discovering to which new worlds your future blog pieces will travel. And to accompany you on your journey as you boldly go where no blog has gone before!
Thank you, Tara, for the kind words. Happy New Year to you!
It isn’t merely Star Trek that is subject to exhaustive perennial reappraisal; it’s every multimedia franchise from the latter half of the 20th century that’s still commercially viable today. For example: The latest subject inspiring no fewer than a zillion worthless “think pieces” over the past two years is the retroactive assertion that the misbegotten Star Wars prequels — those universally hated movies from two decades ago — are actually brilliant, thank you very much, and isn’t it about time we recognized them as such? Whoosh — complete pendulum swing. This revisionist perspective is likely owed to Millennials who came of age on the prequel trilogy now, at midlife, deeming it their Star Wars, in contrast with the Xer-owned original trilogy and the recent sequel trilogy, which will, presumably, one day be nostalgically venerated by Generation Z.
As franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek — among many, many others — have continued and expanded, they’ve been an integral part of the formative experiences of multiple successive generations at this point. Such was a topic I explored in “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born,” arguing that Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while proprietarily beloved by Millennials, is in fact a Gen-X pop-cultural castaway, and — for my money — ours was better. (But don’t tell!) In that spirit, each generation asserts a special claim on those IPs, arguing for the preeminence of their era above all others. (After I expressed dissatisfaction with the Star Wars sequels in an informal conversation with my preteen nephew some years ago, he unironically assured me that Star Wars wasn’t intended for my generation, it’s meant for his, hence the reason those movies don’t resonate with me.)
In a healthy pop-culture landscape, we would simply be able to say, “This iteration of [Star Wars/Star Trek/Buffy/Doctor Who/James Bond/Batman/etcetera] appeals and/or speaks to me, that one doesn’t. But it can all coexist. What do I care?” (This is a topic I first broached a whopping seven years ago in “This Counts, That Does Not.” Hard to believe I’ve been formally discussing this shit for that long. Perhaps that’s why “No, Virginia, Die Hard Is Not a Christmas Movie” is my intended final word on the matter. Fingers crossed.) Alas, we do not live in a healthy pop-cultural ecosystem.
We’re living through a very regrettable — and hopefully not interminable — period of corporate superfandom, in which we’re conditioned and required to pledge our undying fealty to our favorite media franchises. Being a “superfan” means consuming every new product in the franchise. It’s a lifetime subscription, irrevocable. (I covered this subject at length in “In the Multiverse of Madness: How Media Mega-Franchises Make Us Their Obedient Servants, Part 1” and “Part 2.”)
I was once such a superfan. I thought if I loved something at any point in my life, I was obligated to follow it to the ends of the Earth. In fact, it was A Good Day to Die Hard that finally — finally — broke that spell and triggered my long journey of self-deprogramming. I didn’t much like Live Free or Die Hard upon its release in 2007, but when Good Day came out, I nonetheless felt obliged to see it — I owed it to the 13-year-old me who’d loved Die Hard, after all. Good Day is pretty much the only movie I very nearly walked out on halfway through. I stuck it out, though, but on my way out of the theater, I resolved to never see another Die Hard again. (As fate would have it, they never made any more of them.)
Not long after that, I was obligatorily reading the latest Batman comic I’d purchased, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t actually remember the last time I’d enjoyed a comic book — the early ’90s? — and yet I had continued to buy and read them every month in the intervening decades. It had become a homework assignment that I dreaded — like those tiered training courses Scientologists are required to keep purchasing and passing — but it had never occurred to me that I could simply… opt out.
At that point, I pulled I-don’t-know-how-many-boxes of comics out of my closet — about ten (containing an estimated 3,000 individual comic books in total) — and drove them to a specialty shop on Ventura Boulevard, where I sold off the entire collection for several hundred bucks. (I would’ve happily given them away.) I never bought another comic again. (And since returning to New York, I went through my old bedroom closet, pulled out tons more comics from back in the day, and donated them all to a friend of mine who trades in those sorts of collectables on eBay.)
Soon after, I started applying the same mentality to my DVDs, selling off all but the small handful I watch on an annual basis (like The Lost Boys and Bram Stoker’s Dracula) to the old Amoeba Music on Sunset Boulevard. Then I began reappraising all the media franchises I’d previously felt compelled to follow — Star Wars, Star Trek, Terminator, Halloween, Alien, Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park, James Bond, Mission: Impossible, The Matrix, the superhero movies of Marvel and DC — and I let them all go. Just like that. I gave myself permission to stop following them… and discovered I didn’t miss them. Quite the opposite: I reclaimed my money, time, attention, and sanity from the tyranny of superfandom. And in return, I not only had room for new experiences and new stories, I also reconnected with the (small handful of) movies/shows in those expansive franchises that, once upon a time, actually added value to my life… before I’d become conditioned to allow them to rapaciously extract value from it.
I’d grown up on syndicated reruns of Star Trek, and had caught the first three movies on local TV. Beginning with The Voyage Home, I made the trek (pardon the pun) to the theaters to see each new movie, and I remember the anticipation for Star Trek: The Next Generation, which premiered when I was in junior high school. So, the TOS movies and the TNG series were my “era” of Star Trek. I recall being so satisfied with the conclusions to both of those series — The Undiscovered Country and “All Good Things…” — and I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard Kirk and Picard would be teaming up in a new movie! How would this even be possible…?
When I went to see Star Trek Generations during my freshman year of college, it was everything I could’ve hoped for from a Kirk/Picard team-up film. It passed the torch from Shatner’s era to Stewart’s beautifully. Furthermore, Shatner and Stewart had real screen chemistry! (They left me wanting more, which is the highest compliment I can pay. And thank God they never actually gave us more!) And the sci-fi conceit that allowed those two characters to meet — an extradimensional realm in which the rules of spacetime do not apply — was a really creative alternative to the usual time-travel narrative trope. It was such a joyous movie to see!
When I look at the movie now, I still feel very much the same way. (Sometimes, as this blog post attests, one’s opinion will change over the years — and that is good, right, and fine — but in this case, I still think Generations is a pretty terrific Trek offering.) But as a feature-film franchise, it’s fair to say The Next Generation wasn’t nearly as creatively successful as The Original Series, and, consequently, we’ve been subject to no fewer than eight-billion analyses of “where it all went wrong,” with Generations taking the brunt of the criticism for being “too much like a two-hour episode of TNG,” “not giving Kirk a fittingly heroic death,” blah, blah, blah. (As I understand it, even Patrick Stewart expresses dissatisfaction with Generations in his new memoir.)
Okay, fine — for some members of both the creative team and the audience, Generations fell short of expectations. But once that’s said, then it’s time to move on. But that’s not the way the Internet works. As Kaitlyn Tiffany observes in that Atlantic article I quoted above, social-media posts put the same stupid arguments in front of us over and over and over again, tempting you to think you just might be the one special person — the McClane-like voice of reason in a world full of folks who “just don’t get it” — who can cut through the noise for the shallow satisfaction of claiming the title of World’s Smartest Nerd that day.
Such is why, for absolutely no justifiable reason, we continually get articles like “Star Trek: Generations Is The Most Useless Star Trek Movie By A Lightyear.” Published just last month, it has absolutely nothing new or insightful or meaningful to say about Star Trek or Generations. It’s just “content.” Filler. Geek clickbait. I’ve read at least fifty other essays exactly like this one over the years, each more useless than the last.
To your point: Why not another article on why Star Trek V: The Final Frontier was a complete turd? What’s it been — two whole months since someone crapped out one of those? Personally, I think The Final Frontier is a narratively ambitious if fatally imperfect movie — I think Shatner’s reach exceeded his grasp, and both the screenplay and special effects weren’t up to snuff — but there’s nonetheless plenty to enjoy and appreciate about it, not least of which is that it at least tried to speak to a humanistic issue. (As I’ve written about elsewhere, creative experimentation doesn’t always succeed, but it’s still worth attempting.)
If Star Trek V brings you pleasure, keep it in your library; if it doesn’t, let it go. But the movie is 35 fuckin’ years old at this point, and everything to say about it has already been said — many times over. Same goes for Generations, celebrating its 30th later this year. Same for the Star Wars prequels (which are honorable failures, neither “cinematic abortions” nor “unheralded masterpieces”). And the Pierce Brosnan Bonds. And Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And the Joel Schumacher Batman movies. And the Matrix sequels. And Prometheus…
We cannot keep relitigating this stuff ad infinitum. That’s not film criticism; it’s vanity. It’s obnoxious, and pointless, and exists for the sole purpose of draining what little remaining joy pop culture has to offer, if any. Articles like “Star Trek: Generations Is The Most Useless Star Trek Movie By A Lightyear” — and there are hundreds of new ones just like it being published every day — are written for a single two-pronged purpose: affirming the likeminded position of legions of other disgruntled “fans” for the dopamine hit of upvotes, and angering/upsetting those who actually enjoy/value the movie — those poor, misguided souls who aren’t nearly as perspicacious as you. As Shatner himself once said: “Get a life.” That shit has got to stop…
But that’s not going to be happening anytime soon, I’ll concede. As long as there are geek-credentialed Xers and Millennials walking this Earth*, this shit will be endlessly revisited and debated online. Such are the consequences of elevating ephemeral crap to fine art, as we were systematically trained to do. We treat comic books and video games with the same solemn reverence once reserved for literature and theater and cinema. We don’t know the difference anymore. We’re all Wade Watts at this point — orphans of a bankrupt culture, exclusively and obsessively invested in the same finite pop-cultural interests with no appetite for anything different or challenging.
(*BTW: There’s absolutely nothing wrong with liking “geeky” things, like Star Trek and The Lord of the Rings and videogames and comics. Nothing. What I object to is the hostile takeover of the culture by geek interests that occurred around the turn of the millennium, and how, consequently, we’ve all become hostage buyers of those endless — and often juvenile — transmedia franchises. But if the 2023 box office is an indication and not an aberration, perhaps the proliferation of nerd culture has finally reached its saturation point? We’ll see…)
From this point onward, I steadfastly refuse to participate in that. And it isn’t because I’m an elitist; it’s because I’m sick of gorging on junk food. I yearn for cultural and intellectual nutrition. My generation got completely off-track. We’ve been on a 40-year pop-culture binge, actively cooperating in our own infantilization so the corporations that own our favorite IPs can extract an ever-greater share of value from our money, time, and attention. I don’t want to enrich them, and I don’t want to take part in any more of these culturally retarding conversations. Going into this new year, I want to finish the personal project I started eleven years ago when I went to see A Good Day to Die Hard: I want to move on from all of this 20th-century ephemera, once and for all time. All of it — the good, the bad, and everything in between.
To that end, I’m looking forward to new subjects to explore here! And for the first time since I launched this ongoing project — the blog — I have no idea what comes next! “I should’ve done this a long time ago,” Captain Picard observes wistfully as he joins his shipmates at the poker table in the Next Generation series finale. “So… five-card stud, nothing wild. And the sky’s the limit.”
Hey Sean,
Re: “…none inspired us to playact their scenarios as we had with PG-rated adventures Ghostbusters…”
That reminded me of the fun we had when I was six or seven. You’re two or three years my senior, I think, but I think you were still young enough to play this way when Ghostbusters was all the rage. Did you and your friends ever act out something similar to the following scenario. (We playacted a lot of scenes, but I think this was our favorite.)
You (or someone else) is standing at the top of a jungle gym or something else raised above everyone else (or perhaps just on the ground if nothing that could serve as a tower or dais was available). Facing you are a few friends, preferably four if you’re going to do it right, but it could be more or less. You growl out “Are you a God?” One of the friends waits a couple of seconds before saying “no.” You then turn your torso to the side, fling your arms out straight, then turn back to those assembled and say “then diiiiiieeee” as they all scream, fall backwards, and roll and tumble across the lawn. Trade places with the person in the catbird seat, and repeat.
That one never got old. It was always fun to be Gozer but just as fun to be one of those getting rolled away. Ah, those were the days. Do kids even play that way anymore? I wonder. I see a lot of them fiddling with screens of all kinds, but I can’t remember the last time I saw some acting out (and sometimes altering) movies/books/TV shows/plays, etc. They don’t know what they’re missing.
Yes! Of course! Oh, gosh, those were happy days. On several occasions throughout The Dogcatcher, Frank and Waff reference the times as kids when they used to playact as Ghostbusters — ghost-hunting in the crypt of the university chapel, etc. — and all of that was taken directly from my own childhood. I’m honestly not sure if that even would’ve been true to Frank and Waff’s formative experiences, given that they are established as being about 30 — a good fifteen years my junior. By the time they were in that eight-to-twelve age range, Ghostbusters — as a franchise, I mean — was kind of in hibernation.
I suppose it’s possible they could’ve seen the two movies on cable and perhaps been exposed to the Real Ghostbusters cartoon on a streaming service, but more than likely Frank and Waff would’ve been into Toy Story or Harry Potter or Avatar: The Last Airbender. Having never had kids myself, I can’t really cite examples of popular children’s entertainment from the ’00s and ’10s or even now. I knew making my Animal Control buddies rabid Ghostbusters fans was a bit of a generational stretch — though Frank and Waff and I were the same age when I first conceived The Dogcatcher fifteen years ago! — but I just sort of trusted that no one would notice or care, and that maybe Ghostbusters even carried enough cultural currency to have influenced kids beyond Generation X. That was the one significant pop-cultural indulgence I allowed myself, and it’s fitting in that The Dogcatcher was directly inspired by the supernatural comedies I’d loved as a kid (and I even quoted Ghostbusters II in the epigraph).
I recall my proudest impromptu Ghostbusters moment as a kid happened about the same time as when we were having those Die Hard battles on the construction site of Horan Hall at Manhattan College — right around 1989, thereabouts. My two best friends — they were brothers — had just moved from the Bronx to the Lower East Side. On moving night, we’d packed up a U-Haul truck with all their stuff, and they climbed into the cab beside their dad. I should’ve gone home at that point, but I couldn’t resist an adventure, so I squeezed in the front seat beside them. (Why their dad didn’t send me home at that point is a mystery.) Anyway, we drove all the way down the FDR to their new address, parked, went upstairs, and saw the empty apartment for the first time.
The younger brother was particularly excited about their new digs, disappearing down the railroad-style hallway to inspect each room and closet. The older brother — who was my age and my best friend (his kid brother was just our sidekick, like Jerry O’Connell in Stand by Me) — was a bit reticent about the place. It was a big change, and I don’t think he knew entirely what to make of it. (Hell, I didn’t know what to make of it, losing my two best pals overnight.) I recall he looked to me for my impression of the apartment, asking me in earnest what I thought.
Without hesitation, I hooked him by the arm and gently walked him over to the living-room window: “I think this building should be condemned,” I said, straight-faced. “There’s serious metal fatigue in all the load-bearing members; the wiring is substandard, it’s completely inadequate for our power needs; and the neighborhood is like a demilitarized zone.”
That diffused all the tension he was feeling, and he immediately fell into hysterics. And then at that precise moment — you couldn’t have staged this if you’d tried — the younger brother came running out from the back rooms and blurted, “This place is great!” — just like Ray does in the movie! At that point, the older brother and I started howling, and the younger one was left completely mystified about what exactly we found so funny.
Anyway, I’m still friends with those two guys — I even thanked the younger brother in the Acknowledgments section of the book for a creative contribution he made — and their parents still live in that same apartment. As for the metal fatigue and faulty wiring, I cannot speak to whether that was ever addressed by the building’s management.
Thank you, Pierce, for stopping by and sharing a little of your Ghostbusters joy. I wish you health, happiness, and creativity in the New Year!
Sean
My 92-year-old dad has asked me about 100 times (literally) what motivates the MAGA crowd, and my response includes a lot of what I’ve learned from reading your posts, Sean: a cultural celebration of bad guys, violence, criminality, breaking the rules, and hyper-masculinity (even the women), all of which are under attack. I no longer watch movies like Die Hard. I can’t help but see your points in action, and they just don’t interest me anymore. I appreciate the education! Wishing you much creativity in the new year, and a curve toward moral sanity in our world. 😀
Whenever one sets out to draw connections and identify causalities in a formal treatise such as this, Diana, there is always the risk — perhaps even the inevitability — of being reductive. This caused that. See? Such is the simpleminded, conspiratorial thinking that QAnon inspires in its adherents.
Consequently, it would be inaccurate and unfair to blame Die Hard by itself, or even the action genre on the whole, for all that ills society. But when I attempt to trace a sociopolitical line through the arc of my own lifetime — I was born in 1976 — here’s what I see: In the 1970s, American morale was about as low as it could be in the wake of the political assassinations of the ’60s, Watergate, Bloody Sunday, the Vietnam War, the energy crises, the recession, and the Iran hostage crisis. (Did I leave anything out?)
Meanwhile, things were no better at the cinema, where the New Hollywood movement was serving up one “downer” after another — movies about antiheroes whose stories tended to end tragically or violently: The Godfather and Chinatown and Taxi Driver, et al. People were understandably demoralized, and no one — not even Tinseltown — had an encouraging word to offer. (The who-saw-that-coming? success of Jaws in 1975, Rocky in 1976, and Star Wars in 1977 illustrates just how starved mid-’70s audiences were for a little triumphant catharsis.)
Then came Ronald Reagan, who was determined to get the country back on track with his signature mix of sunny optimism, cowboy diplomacy, and deregulated capitalism. As Reagan began the process of dismantling the so-called “welfare state,” Hollywood moved away from the gritty independent cinema of the ’70s to the glossy high-concept movies of the ’80s — formulaic, feel-good stories that promoted American exceptionalism via an MTV aesthetic: Flashdance, Top Gun, The Secret of My Success, Purple Rain, Rocky III and IV. Overnight, the brown-and-orange color palette of the 1970s was supplanted by the Day-Glo iridescence of the ’80s. And the values embedded in the aforementioned movies — individualism and hypercapitalism — are very much in keeping with the spirit of the Reagan presidency.
Die Hard was merely a new cinematic expression of the Reagan ethos. The film purposefully conflates and idealizes hypermasculinity, violence, and neoliberalism in one action-packed extravaganza. It set a tone for the kinds of stories Hollywood produced — and the kind of heroes it venerated — throughout the ’90s, something I studied in greater detail in my book review of Heat 2. Suffice it to say, we were smitten with the solitary antihero who does things his way, rules and norms be damned — and unlike their ’70s forebears Harry Callahan and Popeye Doyle and Jim Brannigan, Axel Foley and John McClane and Martin Riggs knew how to keep state-sponsored violence fun:
I don’t think there’s any question that 30 years spent consuming stories about sympathetic antiheroes — and that includes, by the way, The Sopranos, celebrating its 25th anniversary this week — conditioned an electoral majority of Americans to see, however counterintuitively, a “people’s champion” in Donald Trump. (For more on this subject, I highly recommend James Poniewozik’s 2019 book Audience of One: Television, Donald Trump, and the Fracturing of America.)
The MAGA movement is replete with John McClanes — victims-cum-heroes who think they’ve got all the answers to everything, whose instincts outweigh your facts, and who would right every wrong in this world if only all the idiots and pussies and liberals would get the fuck out of their way. The irony, of course, is that for all their flag-waving belief in American individualism, the MAGA crowd has uniformly fallen in line behind a media messiah, and they eagerly await his next commandment. They all love Big Daddy because he “tells it like it is” and doesn’t give a shit what rules or norms he breaks. And yet they themselves are all braindead cultists — a hivemind, like the Borg on Star Trek. They don’t have an original or individualistic thought in their heads!
In that way, they’re not altogether dissimilar from many of the people that join the NYPD — overwhelmingly Trump supporters themselves, it’s worth noting. I mentioned in the essay above that a friend of mine, a career officer in the NYPD, once told me that many people become cops because they’re attracted to police culture — they want to be part of “the club.” So, the great irony of so many of these folks that love Reagan and Trump and the spirit of fuck-you individualism they embody is that they’re all ultimately sheep. They’re the “idiotic” bit players in a Die Hard movie who won’t get out of the righteous hero’s way! But they don’t see that in the mirror; they see the righteous hero himself.
I don’t know, Diana — maybe that’s all reductive and simplistic, too. I imagine historians and sociologists and philosophers are going to be writing about this particular period of history for at least the next half century, trying to figure out what it all meant and how we got here. The answers to those questions sure as hell aren’t going to be found in “No, Virginia, Die Hard Is Not a Christmas Movie”! LOL! But since at least 2018, when I published “Changing the Narrative,” I’ve been deconstructing and denouncing the “solitary hero” trope in a series of essays (“‘It’s Over, Johnny,'” “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown,” “The Ted Lasso Way,” “Patriarchal Propaganda,” “There He Was… and In He Walked,” “Sorting through the Clutter,” and my book reviews of Blood, Sweat & Chrome and Heat 2, among others). At the moment, I kind of feel I’ve said all I have to say about the matter. But let’s see how this year goes — it’s always possible I’ll have new insights to express, depending on how things shake out in November.
In the meantime, I plan to produce more prosocial fiction like The Dogcatcher. That’s how I’m going to be spending my winter, spring, and summer. This coming June, the blog will celebrate its tenth anniversary, and over the past decade, I’ve extensively and exhaustively explored the subject of narrativity — not merely how we tell stories (craft), but the kinds of stories we tell (moral imagination). And while not all of this blog’s 120 posts are golden eggs, I can point to more than a handful of them and say, “That’s got value.” (I’ve curated those posts on my Start Here page.)
Through those essays — both the earlier thought experiments and the polished pieces that came later — I’ve gained a much clearer sense of the kind of fiction I want to put out into the world (and the kind I don’t). That’s the gift this project gave me. It’s been a journey of self-education — an interrogation of the methods and the morals of narrativity. I never really sought to enlighten others so much as enlighten myself. “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” And if others, like yourself, have taken some measure of value from it, so much the better.
That journey is in no way over, but I definitely feel, for the time being, I’ve said everything I have to say about the state of popular entertainment, and I am dangerously close to repetitive territory (provided, that is, I haven’t already long stepped across the border!). I want to spend the year to come exercising moral imagination through my fiction writing and my climate activism. And if the blog can be an outlet or a forum for those ends, then I’ll click the “New Post” option without hesitation. But there’s too much at stake this year to be debating the merits of 30-year-old movie franchises for the 400th time. I’ve been proselytizing for years that it’s time to put away childish things, and now I’m compelled to put my money where my mouth is. Basically: It’s time for me to shut up! LOL!
Here’s to you, Diana — and to the best of health, happiness, creativity, and compassion in the New Year!
>unlike their ’70s forebears Harry Callahan and Popeye Doyle and Jim Brannigan, Axel Foley and John McClane and Martin Riggs
I don’t know about Branningan, but at the end of the first Dirty Harry movie, he quits the police force and at the end of the first French Connection movie, Doyle’s transferred out of Narcotics. Neither case was presented as a “happy ending”
Compare that to the fates of the other three you’d mentioned in the ends of their first movies
Yes, that’s exactly right, Dell: In Dirty Harry and The French Connection (both 1971), the filmmakers at least implied there was a terrible price to pay for being a solitary, violent antihero. Both of those movies have real downer endings (French Connection especially), in keeping with the spirit of the era. (Though as far as ’70s policiers go, Chinatown takes the cake for downbeat dénouements.) Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, by stark contrast, each fade to black with the protagonists reunited… while a traditional Christmas song leads us into the end-credit roll. And Beverly Hills Cop closes on a standard-issue Simpson/Bruckheimer freeze-frame outro, Eddie Murphy’s gleeful-trickster grin stretched from one side of the screen to the other.
Conveniently, the personal consequences imposed on both Harry and Popeye were, shall we say, overlooked by Magnum Force (1973) and French Connection II (1975), respectively, in which Callahan is still an inspector with the SFPD and Doyle still a narcotics detective, dispatched by the NYPD to France to finish what he started in the first movie (a credulity-straining premise to say the least). I admittedly have not watched any of the Dirty Harry films in 20 years (I sold my DVD boxed set ages ago), but my recollection of Magnum Force was that it seemed to be a direct response to liberal criticisms of the first film, suggesting that there are dirty cops, and then there are cops willing to do the dirty jobs, and that Harry is most decidedly the latter… and God bless him for it.
I both admire the creative direction of French Connection II and also think it was an entirely unnecessary sequel. The filmmakers flipped the script, taking uber-competent urban avenger Popeye Doyle off the gritty streets of New York, where he operates in comfort and with confidence, and relocating him to the pretty streets of Marseille, where he’s a total fish out of water. Conceptually, that was fairly inspired, but it also turned Popeye into an almost comical character. And then in contrast with the fish-out-of-water drollery, we get that very long sequence in the middle of the movie in which Popeye is subjected by the heavies to heroin injections(!), which is (intentionally) uncomfortable to watch, followed by his painful cold-turkey detox (brilliantly played by Hackman).
And even though Popeye gets his man at the end of the sequel, unlike the open-ended finale of the Friedkin film, he basically just murders Charnier in cold blood! While I admire the filmmakers for refusing to heroize Popeye (unlike the Dirty Harry sequels), you can’t help but wonder if any of this was really necessary, or if in fact Friedkin knew exactly what he was doing when he left both Charnier’s fate and Popeye’s descent into self-destructive obsession unresolved out on Wards Island. (Also, the sequel is surprisingly light on action, given the reputations of both the first film and director John Frankenheimer.)
In many respects, The Seven-Ups (1973) is a much more effective follow-up to The French Connection, closer in spirit and tone to the original movie but nonetheless presenting an all-new narrative, unconnected to the events of the first movie. Rather than shifting the setting, they shifted the focus from Popeye to his sidekick Buddy (Roy Scheider). I mean, they for some reason gave Buddy a different surname, but for all intents and purposes, The Seven-Ups can rightly be considered a spinoff from The French Connection; Scheider is manifestly playing the same character. (During the sequences in Jaws in which Chief Brody reflects on his disheartening experiences as a New York cop, one’s mind almost involuntarily flashes back to footage from The French Connection and The Seven-Ups!)
Crime thrillers and policiers certainly have a uniquely concise way of reflecting the sociopolitical conditions and mores of their particular era. One can’t study the films/TV shows of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, for example, and deny this — a topic I examined at length in both “Forget It, Jake, It’s Tinseltown” and my analysis of Heat 2. Aesthetically, this stuff is often brilliant, from Dirty Harry and French Connection to Die Hard and Miami Vice to Reservoir Dogs and NYPD Blue (the first season of which is an absolutely groundbreaking work of mad genius, still dramatically breathtaking even 30 years after its debut), even if I’ve admittedly raised reasonable moral objections to the genre as a whole.
I think the genre has kind of languished, however, since the turn of the millennium. I’m really hard-pressed to think of any cop or neo-noir movies over the past 25 years that have had the cultural impact or resonance of any of those late-20th-century offerings. Meanwhile, on TV, I guess we had The Wire and The Shield, but those were outliers in a sea of stultifyingly formulaic procedurals like the storyless (and pointless) CSI franchise, to say nothing of pure pro-police propaganda like Blue Bloods.
I couldn’t help but think when I read Heat 2 that it felt like a requiem for a dead genre — which is probably a good thing. Supposedly, Michael Mann is prepping the Heat sequel as his next film, so I guess we’ll find out if the genre has any life in it yet. Personally, I don’t think there’s any going back to the “good ol’ days” of cinematic police deification — which, if true, would be a welcome sign of progress.
wishing you a 2024 filled with writing success! would be thrilled if you’d write a guest blog post about your writing for my site! If you think it might be fun or helpful to have my followers meet you, here’s the link for general guidelines: https://wp.me/p6OZAy-1eQ – da-AL
Thanks for the opportunity, da-AL! I’m currently occupied with several long-form fiction projects being developed/drafted, but when I come up for air, I’d be happy to consider guest-posting on your blog. In the meantime, if you’re interested in knowing more about my most recently published work, hop on over to “The Dogcatcher Unleashed: The Story behind My Debut Novel.” Wishing you only the best of health and creativity in 2024!