Old Discourse Dies Hard

Stripping the Memetics from ‘Die Hard’

By guest contributor Ryan Howard.

One of the most polarizing discourses that seems to come around every Holiday season is the status of the 1988 Bruce Willis film Die Hard as a Christmas movie. This discussion seems to stem from a Slate article from 2007, but has since evolved into a full-blown cottage industry. In much the same way that A Christmas Story, released five years earlier in 1983, morphed from a sleeper hit into a commercialized phenomenon through repeated airings on TBS and home video success, Die Hard has experienced its own memeification into a Christmas standard largely thanks to the Internet. There’s a particularly annoying flavor of hipster irony that comes along with the memes about Die Hard. This is best summed up by, of all things, a viral Tweet from 2017:

The backlash to the Die Hard phenomenon is understandable. It’s a smarmy hipster meme perpetrated by living wojaks who have no reverence for holy things, hate their families, and act like overgrown children at Christmastime. That being said, I think there’s a place for Die Hard within our Christmas movie canon and one that does not reek of irony and body odor. The Funko Pop American should no longer have custody of this movie because it is a perfect example of masculine heroism and self-sacrifice.

To understand Die Hard, we ought to examine the plot and content of a more traditional Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. Much like the events of Die Hard, George Bailey’s crisis occurs on Christmas Eve, but the story that unfolds has very little to do with Christmas. One of the common counter-arguments to Die Hard being a Christmas movie is that the takeover of Nakatomi Plaza could have happened during any kind of corporate party. The same can be said about Uncle Billy losing the deposit and Mr. Potter trying to take over Bailey Brothers Building and Loan. Still, we accept It’s a Wonderful Life as a Christmas movie because it takes place at Christmastime and it fits thematically with Christmas being a movie about sacrifice, charity, and love. It gained popularity as a Christmas movie in the mid-1970s when clerical errors prevented its copyright from being renewed, meaning that the film was essentially public domain until ownership by Republic Pictures was reestablished in the early ’90s. It’s odd how so many Christmas classics have such a similar origin story. Steady organic growth over time seems to be the model for a number of movies we now call Holiday classics.

What do we do with Die Hard, though? While It’s a Wonderful Life may not be explicitly about Christmas, it at the very least has at its core a heartwarming story about goodwill towards your fellow man. It feels like a Christmas movie. Can a gory shoot-’em-up like Die Hard evoke similar feelings? I would argue that yes, it can indeed — if one looks beyond the surface level and to the heart of the story. Why is John McClane, an NYPD detective, in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve? To spend Christmas with his estranged wife and children and hopefully to reconnect with them. Before the phone lines are cut and the gunfire starts, McClane’s primary concern is that his wife, Holly, has started using her maiden name again and that her creepy coworker Ellis might be a little too familiar with her. John McClane, the archetypal working-class Irish New Yorker, is a fish-out-of-water in the yuppie-infested LA of the late 1980s, but he is also making an effort to preserve his dissolving family. He doesn’t have time to come to terms with the different world that his wife now lives in when tragedy strikes. There are gunshots, people are killed, hostages are taken, and the weary warrior, reminiscent of Odysseus having discovered other men trying to usurp his life in his absence, must once again take up arms and fight.

The CinemaSins-style “critics” who have poisoned cultural discourse will often say the same things about Die Hard that they say about Raiders of the Lost Ark. “John McClane only made things worse. If he had just let Hans steal from the Nakatomi Corporation, everyone would have gone home alive.” Leaving aside the fact that Hans Gruber and his men would have had zero compunction about killing everyone in the building, McClane does what he does because it’s his duty. He’s an officer of the law, but he’s also a man. People are in danger, including his wife, so the man does what he is made by God to do, protecting the sheep from the wolves in an unrelenting manner.

One of the things that makes McClane so heroic in my mind is the fact that he’s never portrayed as anything other than a normal man. He’s not some kind of decorated ex-Special Forces one-man army. He’s a balding, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed Detective Lieutenant who probably worked his way up from patrol officer like his unlikely partner Sgt. Al Powell. McClane is what comic book writer Chuck Dixon calls a “slob hero,” capped off by the casting choice of Bruce Willis, who was very much not an action star before Die Hard. John McClane is thoroughly unequipped to take on heavily armed terrorists by himself, armed only with a Beretta 92 and a Zippo lighter, and also lacking shoes, much less a Kevlar vest or any other armaments. Yet, that’s exactly what he does.

Where does this leave us, though? What does any of that have to do with Christmas? Christmas is about family, and Die Hard certainly celebrates the idea of a man going to Hell and back for the sake of his family. Christmas is a celebration of Christ’s birth, and He would go on to sacrifice Himself to subdue death and allow us to be reunited eternally with God. This sacrifice is a redemptive one, too, which is what happens to Sgt. Powell as his bravery standing alongside McClane allows him a redemption from his past mistake of shooting a child. Even McClane himself seems to need this ordeal of redemption, overcoming whatever vice it was that pushed his family all the way across the country. Does this mean that John McClane is an allegorical Christ-like Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia? Of course not, but the spirit of redemptive sacrifice is present in both stories and can serve as a reminder of just what we celebrate this time of year. In summary, yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and no, it’s not subversive or edgy to believe this. Die Hard certainly shows a different angle of love for family, sacrificial love, and redemption, but these are values to be celebrated at Christmas. Merry Christmas to all, and, lest we forget, yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!