Sean P Carlin

Writer of things that go bump in the night

Tag: Naomi Klein

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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The Year of Yes: Why the American Jobs Plan Must (and Will*) Become Law

July 1, 2021 / / 4 Comments

U.S. President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan is the politically ambitious, morally imaginative piece of legislation we need to tackle the ever-worsening climate crisis by rebuilding our country and rebooting our economy through grand-scale public-works projects.  Whether we actually get it, however, comes down to how hard we—all American citizens—are willing to fight for its full passage and implementation.

In 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic cast a floodlight on the pervasive environmental injustice, wealth disparity, infrastructural neglect, and systemic racism here in the United States, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) introduced a fourteen-page nonbinding resolution that prescribed a holistic approach to addressing those interconnected crises known as the Green New Deal.

In 2021, Markey (far left) and AOC (at the podium) reintroduced the Green New Deal (© Greg Nash)

Often misunderstood by the public (it was about defining the problems and establishing aggressive targets for solving them, not proposing specific policy solutions, which were meant to come later), mocked by establishment Dems (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissively referred to it as the “green dream”), and knavishly mischaracterized by the right (The libs are banning hamburgers!), the Green New Deal is a straightforward-enough concept undermined by inadequate messaging from its own advocates as well as reflexive outrage from conservative media.  So… let’s try this again:

The idea is a simple one:  in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts.  Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s quality of life in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to the breakdown of any semblance of social cohesion.  Challenging these underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once.

In tackling the climate crisis, we can create hundreds of millions of good jobs around the world, invest in the most systematically excluded communities and nations, guarantee health care and child care, and much more.  The result of these transformations would be economies built both to protect and to regenerate the planet’s life support systems and to respect and sustain the people who depend on them.  It would also strive for something more amorphous but equally important:  at a time when we find ourselves increasingly divided into hermetically sealed information bubbles, with almost no shared assumptions about what we can trust or even what is real, a Green New Deal could instill a sense of collective, higher purpose—a set of concrete goals that we are all working toward together.

Naomi Klein, On Fire:  The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2019), 26

Klein makes a compelling argument in On Fire, but, alas, the strongest case for a Green New Deal was presented by the pandemic itself.  And after decades of incremental steps in which, time and again, Democrats invariably ceded more legislative ground than they gained—lest they be accused of supporting the kind of Big Government programs Saint Reagan had long since poisonously reframed as unpatriotic and un-American (socialism!)—the candidates seeking the nomination for president last year found themselves jockeying for the green ribbon of Most Environmentally Visionary.  Despite its bumpy rollout, the Green New Deal changed the entire political conversation.  As Klein noted in 2019:

The emergence of the Green New Deal means there is now not only a political framework for meeting the [recommended carbon-drawdown] targets in the United States but also a clear (if long-shot) path to turning that framework into law.  The plan is pretty straightforward:  elect a strong supporter of the Green New Deal in the Democratic primaries; take the White House, the House, and the Senate in 2020; and start rolling it out on day one of the new administration (the way FDR did with the original New Deal in the famous “first 100 days,” when the newly elected president pushed fifteen major bills through Congress).

ibid., 31

And here’s the thing:  We actually met the first two goals of that “long-shot” plan!

Sort of.

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What Comes Next: Lessons on Democracy and Narrative from “Hamilton”

August 18, 2020 / / 8 Comments

Less than three months out from arguably the most important presidential election in living memory, our democracy is in deep, deep shit.

Need we recap?  Commuting Roger Stone.  Gassing Lafayette Square.  Suppressing the vote.  Sabotaging the Postal Service.  Floating the postponement—and actively undermining the credibility—of the November election.  Sending federal agents to detain (read:  abduct) protestors in Portland.  And that’s just a topline best-of-Trump-2020 compilation.

This is America?

Let’s face it:  The spirit of nihilism that animates MAGA was never about making America great again so much as it was burning the Republic to the ground.  That’s what Trump’s supporters really voted for in 2016, and it’s the one big (if never quite explicit) campaign promise he might actually deliver on:  reifying the very American carnage he once claimed exclusive qualification to redress.  To wit:  The nightly news plays like an apocalyptic bookend to the rousing founding-of-America story told in Hamilton.

Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Anthony Ramos, and Lin-Manuel Miranda in “Hamilton”

While Lin-Manuel Miranda’s revolutionary masterpiece certainly challenges us to appreciate anew the value and purpose of democracy—a timely reminder if ever there was one—it somewhat less conspicuously does the same for an equally imperiled institution:  narrative itself.

Hamilton has been described by its creator as “a story about America then, told by America now” (Edward Delman, “How Lin-Manuel Miranda Shapes History,” The Atlantic, September 29, 2015).  But if the musical’s creative approach to its subject matter is unorthodox, its narrative structure is very much a conventional hero’s journey.  (For my Save the Cat! scholars, it’s a “Real-Life Superhero” tale, and not, as some “experts” would have you believe, Golden Fleece.)  The power in and of narrative is a central preoccupation of Hamilton; the show literally opens with a dramatic question posed to the audience:

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a
Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten
Spot in the Caribbean by providence, impoverished, in squalor,
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

Alexander Hamilton is a man who imagines—who writes—his way out of poverty, and, in turn, “rewrote the game,” by “Poppin’ a squat on conventional wisdom”—meaning, the institutionalized “divine right of kings” narrative.

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A 2020 Vision of Hope

January 21, 2020 / / 16 Comments

“The good news is that the impacts of climate change are no longer deniable,” Penn State climate scientist Michael E. Mann said recently.  “The bad news is that the impacts of climate change are no longer deniable.”  Over the two decades preceding Dr. Mann’s good-news/bad-news pronouncement, when what reasonably seemed like a dire existential threat wasn’t quite getting the public attention it arguably merited (on account of, we later learned, orchestrated misinformation campaigns by Exxon and others), I was doing whatever I thought I could for the cause:  swapping out my lightbulbs, carrying reusable grocery bags, voluntarily opting for a greater percentage of renewable energy sources from my local utility.  And I looked to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, having voted for him in 2000 and been inspired anew by An Inconvenient Truth, for direction—and certainly for hope.

So, when I decided to do more than simply recycle and make the occasional donation to a green group—when I sought to become an environmental activist—I knew instantly the organization I wanted to join:  Vice President Gore’s Climate Reality Project.  I applied to the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, and was trained by Mr. Gore in 2018.

Since that time, I’ve had no shortage of opportunities to participate in climate rallies hundreds of thousands strong (in Downtown L.A. and New York), take meetings with elected officials (also in both L.A. and New York), give public presentations, and directly help to bring U.S. counties—including our most populous—into the County Climate Coalition, a nationwide alliance of jurisdictions committed to upholding the standards of the Paris Accord.  The Climate Reality Leadership Corps has opened a world of opportunities—of hope—for me.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore (Paramount Pictures)

And along the way something unexpected began to happen:  Just as I had looked to Mr. Gore for hope—and still do—people in my life started looking to me for reasons to be hopeful.  They’ve seen the coverage of climate change–caused catastrophes that have been (at long last) dominating the headlines, heard repeatedly about something called a “Green New Deal,” and—right here in L.A.—choked on the acrid, ember-speckled smoke literally right outside their front door.  Friends and relatives have contacted me asking what can be done about climate change (a lot), or where they might move to avoid the worst effects of it (alas, we are all in the sacrifice zone now), and—most tellingly—if there’s any cause left for optimism on this crisis.

There is.

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Naomi Klein’s “On Fire” (Book Review)

October 18, 2019 / / 20 Comments

Since I trained under former vice president Al Gore to serve in his Climate Reality Leadership Corps just over a year ago—a period in which no fewer than eighty-five federal environmental regulations have been rolled back, greenhouse-gas emissions have spiked (after leveling off in years prior), polar-ice melt is outpacing predictive modeling, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has strenuously warned us we have a mere decade to halve our current rate of carbon-burning if we hope to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change—there is one distinct emotional state that has been entirely absent from my life.

Despair.

I might, in fact, be happier and more optimistic than at any other point in my adult life.

Activism, I’ve discovered, is the antidote to despair, to doomism.  Over the past year, I’ve given public presentations on the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, a bipartisan bill in Congress that would charge fossil-fuel extractors for the privilege of pollution—of treating the public commons of our atmosphere like an open sewer—they’ve thus far enjoyed free of charge.

This past March, my Climate Reality chapter was proud to enlist Los Angeles into the County Climate Coalition, an alliance of jurisdictions across the United States, formed by Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese, that have formally pledged to uphold the standards of the Paris Accord.  Less than six months later, we were in attendance as the L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted to adopt the OurCounty sustainability plan, one of the most ambitious green initiatives in the United States.

And just last month, I joined 300,000 activists in Lower Manhattan for the Global Climate Strike as we swarmed the streets of City Hall, marched down Broadway, and rallied at Battery Park—where no less than Greta Thunberg addressed the crowd.  None of that, as it happens, has left much time to actually worry about the climate breakdown.

Greta Thunberg at the Global Climate Strike in New York City on September 20, 2019 (photo credit: Sean P. Carlin)

But that level of activism, I acknowledge, isn’t something to which everyone can readily commit.  So, if you want to share my profound hopefulness about the solutions to the climate crisis—if you want to appreciate the world-changing opportunity humanity has been handed by history—do yourself a favor and read a book that might admittedly be outside your comfort zone:  Naomi Klein’s On Fire:  The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal.

Naomi Klein’s “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal”

I promise:  You won’t be inundated with scientific facts and figures; if you want to understand the basic science of global warming, Mr. Gore’s documentaries An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and An Inconvenient Sequel:  Truth to Power (2017) are both excellent primers.  Naomi Klein’s On Fire is a recently published collection of her essays and lectures from the past decade, bookended by all-new opening and closing statements on why a Global Green New Deal is the blueprint for an ecologically sustainable and socially equitable twenty-first century:

The idea is a simple one:  in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts.  Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s quality of life in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to the breakdown of any semblance of social cohesion.  Challenging these underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once. . . .

. . . In scale if not specifics, the Green New Deal proposal takes its inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal, which responded to the misery and breakdown of the Great Depression with a flurry of policies and public investments, from introducing Social Security and minimum wage laws, to breaking up the banks, to electrifying rural America and building a wave of low-cost housing in cities, to planting more than two billion trees and launching soil protection programs in regions ravaged by the Dust Bowl.

Naomi Klein, On Fire:  The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2019), 26
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Maybe It’s Time: Here’s to Making 2019 the First Official Year of the 21st Century

December 28, 2018 / / 28 Comments

“Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die.”  How ironically apropos that in a world led by a reality-show president, where facts are subjective and everything from our energy sources to our economic policies to our pop culture are the antiquated vestiges of a previous century, that a lyric by a fictitious rock star from a remake of a remake of a remake of a movie from 1937 should emerge as the perfect, hopeful mantra of an impending (if belated) new millennial era.  I propose officially adopting it as such; it might make what comes next a little easier to accept for those of us still clinging nostalgically to the 1950s (Baby boomers) and the 1980s (Gen X).

If you belong to one of those analog generations—I’m an Xer myself—and you’ve ever had the frustrating experience of working with a Millennial, you know their nonlinear minds interpret the world in an entirely different manner than those that came before them.  The first wave arrived in the workforce a decade ago, expecting a seat at the table before they’d earned one, demanding their voices be heard before their opinions were informed by practical experience.  Their operating philosophy seemed to be:  Yeah, but just because we’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try it… this way.  In their view, the arduous, incremental, straight-line path of our institutionalized practices and protocols didn’t square with their hyperlinked grasp of our new Digital Age reality.  Thusly, conventional (read:  linear) thinking was to be openly challenged, not obediently emulated.

Like many of my fellow Xers that came up the hard way—those of us that knew our place, paid our dues (there’s that pesky sense of linearity again), never assumed we had all the answers—that worldview has often left me bewildered at best, infuriated at worst.  And the sense of entitlement so endemic to Millennials is only compounded by their corresponding characteristic of impatience:

“They’ve grown up in a world of instant gratification.  You want to buy something—you go on Amazon, it arrives the next day.  You want to watch a movie?  Log on and watch a movie—you don’t check movie times.  You want to watch a TV show?  Binge!  You don’t even have to wait week to week to week.  Right?  I know people who skip seasons just so they can binge at the end of the season.  Right?  Instant gratification.”

Simon Sinek, “Simon Sinek,” Inside Quest with Tom Bilyeu, August 7, 2016

Now, to a middle-aged generation still trying (without success) to take the seat at the head of the table from the unyielding occupancy of the Boomers, the Millennials’ impulse—their self-ordained imperative—to grab the wheel and make “meaningful impact” is their most vexing attribute.

And—Christ help me for saying this—it just might change everything for the better.

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