Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: 24

No, Virginia, “Die Hard” Is Not a Christmas Movie

December 20, 2023 / / 25 Comments

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 now-battered copy of “Nothing Last Forever” I bought in 1989 at the long-gone Bronx bookstore Paperbacks Plus

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:

Eddie Murphy returns as Axel Foley—sort of—in “Beverly Hills Cop III” (1994)

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?

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Changing the Narrative: Why Some of Our Most Popular Stories Affirm Our Most Pernicious Beliefs—and How Storytellers Can Rewrite This Bad Script

June 25, 2018 / / 55 Comments

I can’t say it was by deliberate design, but the blog this year has been heavily focused on the power of storytelling as a cultural lodestar, one that reflects the changing times as much as it influences them.  Like gravity, or capitalism, narrative is a governing force in our lives that mostly operates invisibly, if for no other reason than we’ve gotten so accustomed to its ubiquity.

“As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations.  Our children demand we tell them stories before they go to bed, so we lace those narratives with the values we want them to take with them into their dreams and their adult lives.  Likewise, the stories and myths of our religions and national histories preserve and promote certain values over time.  That’s one reason civilizations and their values can persist over centuries” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now, [New York:  Penguin Group, 2013], 16).

Taking those values “into our dreams,” as Rushkoff puts it, is a crucial proviso, because it underscores the subconscious way storytelling works:  A good story seduces you with the promise of entertainment, incrementally winds you up into a state of suspense, and only lets you out when it’s made its point—when it’s imparted its takeaway moral.  Over and over we submit to this experience, fondly recalling with friends the parts of a story that made us jump, or laugh, or cry, but seldom do we give much consideration to its underlying ethos; that sort of subtextual scrutiny, let’s face it, begins and ends in third-period English.

But if fiction is the means by which our mores and traditions are conferred, then it is also, accordingly, the way in which bad ideas are inculcated, even by trustworthy artists.  Much of this is owed, quite innocently, to utilitarian narrative patterns that have, through mass-repetition, developed into accepted sociocultural precepts.

You all know the rules: sin equals death

Genre conventions are part of a pact storytellers make with their audience, a set of tacitly agreed-upon expectations:  an action thriller will have violence; a slasher film will feature teenage sex; a romantic comedy will pair ideologically (and adorably) mismatched lovers.  The best stories find a way of at once honoring and challenging those tropes (Scream, The Dark Knight); most, however, simply take them as an uncontested given.  Commenting on the erotica blockbuster Fifty Shades Freed, comedian Bill Maher noted:

“Psychologists have to explain how in the age of #MeToo, the number-one movie in America is about a woman on a leash.  Or, how in romantic comedies, there are only three plots:  she married her boss; stalking is romantic; and ‘I hate you and then I love you’” (Bill Maher, “New Rule:  Hollywood’s Grey Area,” Real Time with Bill Maher, February 16, 2018).

To a certain extent, given their sheer volume, archetypal scenarios are unavoidable.  And most writers, I suspect, don’t promulgate them with an actively malignant agenda:  I don’t imagine screenwriter J. F. Lawton, for instance, set out to make the case that prostitution is romantic when he conceived the neo-Pygmalion fairy tale Pretty Woman; that was simply an incidental if unfortunate concomitant.  Artists, after all, have consumed thousands of stories, too, and are therefore as susceptible to the subliminal indoctrination of culturally ingrained—and narratively reinforced—worldviews as the rest of us.  Some of our most cherished American myths even help to explain how we’ve arrived at this dangerous moment in history.

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Saving the Cat from Itself: On Deconstructing “Game of Thrones” and a Troubling Pattern of Misanalysis

June 17, 2016 / / 18 Comments

Ah, Save the Cat!—the screenwriting manual some swear by… while others forswear altogether.  Here are my thoughts on why it is a worthy—even indispensable—storytelling program that has been irreparably corrupted by the very people who teach it.

The folks over at Save the Cat!, which does not include the program’s late innovator Blake Snyder, offered an object lesson last week on the misapplication of craft.

It’s common practice for Save the Cat! to break down a current or classic movie and illustrate how it conforms to a story’s fifteen major narrative “beats” as Snyder identified them (Blake himself published an entire book dedicated to this skill-building exercise, which I recommend—certainly over any of the recent analyses on the STC! blog).  This is what a sample “beat sheet” (of my own authorship) would look like (click on it for a closer look):

A "Save the Cat!" breakdown of "Raiders of the Lost Ark"
A “Save the Cat!” breakdown of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”

Simple enough, right?  The entire story summarized at its most basic, macrostructural level.  That’s the kind of plot overview I’ll painstakingly compose before I begin Word One of my screenplay or novel, so I know the plot is always tracking in the right direction.  It’s an indispensable application to help a writer “break the back” of his story, as well as an excellent learning tool:  By reverse-engineering well-regarded movies, you can teach yourself the fundamentals of mythic structure.  That is ostensibly the reason Save the Cat! offers sample deconstructions on a near-weekly basis.

As part of the exercise, Save the Cat! assigns its cinematic subject a genre per Snyder’s codified classifications (you’ll notice I designated Raiders an “Epic Fleece”), but, quite frankly, the Cats are usually confoundingly off the mark:  In the last year alone, they’ve misidentified Brooklyn (for the record, it’s “Family Institution”), The Empire Strikes Back (“Fantasy Superhero”), Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (“Caper Fleece”), Room (“Family Institution”), Whiplash (“Mentor Institution”), Her (“Separation Passage”), and Birdman (which, as I demonstrated in a previous post, is a “Fool out of Water” story).  Not particularly encouraging.

In their most recent breakdown, they’ve attempted to apply Blake’s beat sheet to the pilot episode of Game of Thrones.  With my Raiders breakdown in mind, have a quick look at their effort here (feel free to skim—you only need to get the gist in order to follow my assessment of it).

Using "Save the Cat!" to analyze "Game of Thrones" proves tricky
There’s a VERY particular reason “Game of Thrones” failed to reach a satisfying conclusion…

Notice how clean and to-the-point the Raiders analysis is?  Now compare that with the Game of Thrones breakdown, which is mired in needlessly copious detail and author commentary, as the analyst attempts to illustrate that “Winter Is Coming,” like any other good story, conforms to the Save the Cat! precepts—and yet the more closely the episode is studied, the less it seems to actually adhere to them!

So, instead of saying, “Gee, this isn’t going like I originally thought at all—Game of Thrones appears to operate on an altogether different narrative wavelength,” the analysis is instead loaded with conditionals:  “this B Story doesn’t fully interweave with the journey of the main protagonist”; “the main story of the pilot episode is structurally the equivalent of just Act One from Blake’s beat sheets”; “many of the storylines weaved over the series often will not simply resolve where their Act 3 would normally otherwise end, but rather they then evolve into a new story.”

Wouldn’t any of that seem to suggest the conclusions of this experiment in narrative reverse-engineering aren’t supporting the thesis?  Not according to this examination, which posits instead that “Blake’s other beats are simply yet to come.”

Here’s the logical (read:  actual) takeaway:  The reason the analyst had such a hard time making Game of Thrones fit comfortably within the Save the Cat! paradigm is because it doesn’t.

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Pop-Culture Digest: Musings on Annalise Keating, Postnarrativity, and “Twilight”

October 13, 2015 / / 14 Comments

Readers of this blog (I trust I’m not being quixotically presumptuous by my use of the plural form) have come to expect in-depth, long-form essays here, but today I’d like to try something different:  I thought I’d offer brief commentary on three unrelated pop-cultural developments that are directly relevant to articles I posted this past summer.

 

MURDER!

In my analysis of the first season of How to Get Away with Murder, I concluded by asserting that series creator Peter Nowalk left himself little choice but to reconfigure protagonist Annalise Keating’s psychological profile (yet again) on account of how carelessly he exhausted her backstory in the initial fifteen-episode run.  And, boy, he did not waste any time proving me correct.

Right in the season premiere, we learned (via one of several clunky pieces of exposition) that Annalise has a “wild-child” side (who knew?), and later we saw her partying the night away under the strobe lights of a dance club—with her students, no less!

No, sorry—that doesn’t play.  Here’s why:  It is a complete violation of one of her core traits (and a defense mechanism, at that)—“publicly composed and guarded.”

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Diversity on Television: Lessons in Characterization from “Jane the Virgin”

February 24, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Considering the vastly improved representation of minorities on network TV this season—Empire, Black-ish, Cristela, Fresh Off the Boat, How to Get Away with Murder—it isn’t altogether surprising that the most delightful, dynamic, dimensional character to grace the small screen at present has emerged from the freshman pack.  What did catch me off guard, I’ll be big enough to admit, is that it was the least likely character on the last show I expected.

After nearly a decade of identity crisis, anemic ratings, and critical indifference, The CW, bastion of star-crossed supernatural romance and small-screen superheroics, scored its first Golden Globe win this season—for an adaptation of a Venezuelan telenovela, no less:  Jane the Virgin.

Jane offers something a little different than its Big Network counterparts—something harder to categorize:  deftly written dramedy that concurrently satirizes and honors its telenovela heritage, complete with idiosyncratic flourishes like a whimsical narrator and on-screen text commentary.  Some of its characters, like Jane’s father, telenovela superstar Rogelio de la Vega (portrayed by Mexican actor Jaime Camil), are as consciously absurd as the series’ plot twists.  Yet in spite of his ostensible function as straight-faced comic relief, an analysis of Rogelio’s five traits shows him to be a case study in psychological complexity and originality.

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A Survivalist’s Guide: The Continuing Relevance and Reinterpretation of Rambo

September 4, 2014 / / 12 Comments

Here I am—intrepid screenwriter—gearing up to embark on a dizzying new adventure in my writing career:  my first full-length novel—a work of historical fiction (with supernatural twist, of course—the change in venue isn’t indicative of revamped storytelling sensibilities on my part!).  In a plot convenience straight out of a first-draft screenplay, Writer’s Digest recently hosted a novel-writing conference here in Los Angeles; among the seminars offered was a “Historical Fiction Boot Camp”—taught by no less than bestselling author David Morrell, who introduced the world to Rambo in his inaugural novel, First Blood (1972).  I’d have likely attended the workshop regardless, but given that on my most recent vacation I lazed on the beach and read three Morrell novels in a row, the happenstance of it all seemed too providential to dismiss.

During both his seminar and keynote address, Mr. Morrell spoke with endearing candor about his life’s experiences and path to becoming a writer, much of which you can read about—if you haven’t had the pleasure to hear him speak in person—in his 2012 essay Rambo and Me:  The Story Behind the Story.  If the man feels in any way that he lives in the shadow of his first—and most iconic—creation, one wouldn’t suspect as much from chatting with him, which I was lucky enough to get a chance to do.  As a child of the eighties, Rambo holds profound nostalgic significance for me; I went through a phase (as my dearest childhood friend can lamentably attest) in which a plastic jade Buddha amulet dangled totemically from my neck and I responded to any conversational overtures with nothing more eloquent than a sneering curl of my upper lip.  Mr. Morrell was gracious enough to answer my Rambo-related inquiries—with a smile; not a sneer!—and recounted some of his experiences on the development of the third and fourth films of the franchise.  The behind-the-scenes history of the storied movie series has been well-documented in the thirty-odd years since the first entry’s initial release, but to hear tales of the productions from the horse’s mouth was a thrill to rival any of Rambo’s breathless derring-do.

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Sleight of Hand: The Deceptive Hero of “House of Cards”

July 22, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Caught myself up on the first season of House of Cards this past weekend.  I know, I know.  But, better late than never, right?  After all, isn’t that the advantage of on-demand viewing?  Nowadays, a good series is always available to be discovered.

Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood in “House of Cards”

There are shows that I tune into and consciously try to like, and then there are those that win me over midway through their pilot episode without any premeditated cooperation on my part.  House of Cards falls squarely in the latter category.  It’s a classic Institutionalized story, which Blake Snyder defines as any tale about the “crazy” or self-destructive group dynamics of an institution—in this case, Congress.  Washington is well-represented in political television drama at present, but I certainly haven’t seen a series in which power plays are an end unto themselves:  The movers and shakers that populate House of Cards make no attempt to justify their self-serving agendas with hollow allegiances of fealty to the Republic.  And protagonist Frank Underwood’s stylized, Shakespearean asides to camera—a tough trick to pull off (Kevin Spacey makes it look so natural, hence his consecutive Emmy nominations for the first two seasons)—lend an intimacy that endears the audience to a character with which we might not otherwise be predisposed to empathize.  (He works for Congress, after all, and have you seen their approval numbers of late?)  Like most serialized protagonists, Frank is comprised of five key traits; I’m eager to get on with the second season, so let’s take a quick look at them:

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Like Clockwork:  The Inner Workings of Jack Bauer

July 9, 2014 / / 4 Comments

This is the first in a series of posts on characterization, in which I reverse-engineer a psychological profile for an established fictional character.

Subsequent studies feature Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) of House of Cards; John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) of the first four Rambo films (and later the fifth); Annalise Keating (Viola Davis) of How to Get Away with Murder; the Joker of both Tim Burton’s Batman (Jack Nicholson) and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (Heath Ledger); “Stephen Colbert” (Stephen Colbert) of The Colbert Report; and Rogelio de la Vega (Jaime Camil) of Jane the Virgin.

Four years ago, the clock ran out on 24, the groundbreaking “real-time” television drama starring Kiefer Sutherland as indefatigable counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer.  A writer on Lost once told me how much he loved 24 for being such an immersive entertainment experience:  It made him completely forget, as he watched it, that he was both a television scribe and a liberal!  Indeed, the series remained so reliably entertaining throughout its initial eight-season run that its often outlandish plot twists never seemed to irrevocably strain the audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief, nor did its occasionally controversial depictions of both Muslims and the use of torture overshadow its legacy as an evolutionary pioneer in serialized television.

A 21st-Century Superhero

From the outset, 24 was a bit of an anomaly:  a high-concept television series in a medium predicated far less on concept than on character.  Speaking broadly, feature films exploit a premise to elicit our interest; there’s an implicit What would you do? embedded in a movie’s central conceit that compels us to engage in its finite dilemma and vicariously explore the ramifications.  Television, by design, isn’t finite—it’s open-ended; a foundational premise needs to be built to last—across multiple seasons, ideally—rather than burn through all of its permutations over the course of two hours.  In TV, concept supports character:  We come back week after week to Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital to check in with Meredith and McDreamy, to Downton Abbey for a visit with the Crawleys.  24 is no exception.  And the only character to have appeared in every episode—or even, more generally, every season—is Jack Bauer:  He’s the common denominator—the reason we keep coming back.  The innovative real-time format is why we came to 24 back in 2001; Jack is why we’ve stayed with it through 2014.

24 Live Another Day

More than even its nonelliptical narrative, Jack is the show’s key component, as 24 fits firmly in the Superhero mold.  For the uninitiated, a Superhero story need not be strictly about a costumed crime-fighter; Blake Snyder defines it as any tale about a character with a special power (Jack is the country’s foremost counterterrorism expert), a nemesis (in the case of 24, the literal villain du jour), and a curse (on account of the reliable efficacy of his superpower, Jack is solely and repeatedly called upon to do the dirty jobs and make the personal sacrifices to save the day, day after day).  Jack is what Snyder defines as a “People’s Superhero,” like James Bond and Olivia Pope. 

Jack’s Back

“Jack, simply getting your life back isn’t gonna change who you are… and you can’t walk away from it.  You know that.  You’ve tried it.  Sooner or later, you’re gonna get back in the game.”

Secretary of Defense James Heller in “Day 6:  5:00 a.m.–6:00 a.m.”

Superheroes are routinely called back into service for the greater good—such is their calling and their curse—and Jack isn’t immune:  He’s blazed back into action in this summer’s limited-run revival series 24:  Live Another Day.  Though the threats he faces have changed with the times—it’s drones and hacktivism now—all the time-honored tropes that made 24 such crackerjack entertainment are present and accounted for:  Infiltrations!  Exfiltrations!  Mass-casualty detonations!  Botched undercover operations!  Presidential assassinations!  Traitorous machinations!  Everything we loved, just as before.

Also exactly as before:  Jack Bauer.  He has been one of the most consistent protagonists of any contemporary long-running series.  Not predictable, mind you—an analysis of his five governing characteristics shows him to be a deceptively unconventional hero—but consistent.  Let’s deconstruct him, a trait at a time. 

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