Hallmark Presents A Nakatomi Christmas:
If Die Hard isn’t a Christmas Movie, What Is?
Where I live, it took barely more than a week after Halloween for Christmas music to appear on the FM dial. This was just a concession to reality, though. Christmas ornaments had already been spotted on display for sale at chain department stores in my area as early as September; ugly sweaters, stocking stuffers, and hard liquor gift sets followed them in over the intervening weeks. And then, of course, the movies entered the cable TV lineup. No, not the good Christmas movies. Rather, I mean the bad ones. If your mother is like my mother, or if you yourself are like my mother, you surely are familiar with them. Hallmark was actually airing them before the Trick-or-Treaters went out. Never to be outdone in the production of cheap schlock, Lifetime has taken to reorienting their entire brand around them for the duration of the holiday season — of late it has gone by “It’s a Wonderful Lifetime,” whereas in years past I seem to recall “Fa La La La Lifetime” being the nom de guerre.
The corny Christmas movie truly is one of the more interesting aspects of the same general commercialization of Christmas that drove Frank Costanza to invent the alternative holiday Festivus on Seinfeld. Defying the notion of cinema as a medium for discrete storytelling that is meant to stand out on the merits of its limited scope, these formulaic, derivative works are mass-produced to the end of being consumed in volume, as an endless stream of vaguely similar schlock. (I was deeply amused to learn Hallmark has even produced one picture literally called A Cookie Cutter Christmas (2014).) The Hallmark Channel and its secondary network, Hallmark Movies and Mysteries, pride themselves on airing daily marathons for the long haul of the holiday season, making a point to emphasize the number of new productions that will premier by the time Christmas actually arrives. That their casts are dominated by soap opera leads, sitcom regulars, and country singers only inflates the sense of uncanny familiarity from one of these generic, paint-by-the-numbers films to the next. Whether these films will be of quality or bear artistic originality is beside the point; all that matters is that the back-catalog continues to grow — Hallmark has even offered a smartphone “countdown checklist” app through which users can keep track of which new films they have seen, a practical reflection of this.
Their titles reliably tell you everything distinct about the film, narratively and thematically. You will learn from those few words the nature of either the setting or the central characters, and of course that it will all revolve around the celebration of Christmas. Take for example A Christmas Cruise, a 2017 production of the broadcast network Ion Television featuring Vivica A. Fox. The film depicts its central characters taking a festive cruise to a festive tropical resort around the Christmas holiday, along the way stumbling upon fulfilling love, affirming friendship, and a revitalizing respite from everyday rat-race life, because this is Christmas, and Christmas exists in the Christian tradition of Jesus Christ, whose birth in the world it celebrates, and who came to bring humanity peace and forgiveness. So it was, and so it shall be in made-for-TV Christmas movies. (Would they deserve to be called cinema?) Of course there are other details; Fox plays a woman of a certain age who is a writer, who meets a man of a a certain age who plays a directory role on the cruise, and obstacles appear along the way nominally delaying her ability to unwind or to strike up a true romance, but these are only means to half-amuse whilst stringing out the inevitable — 90 minutes later, they are an item living happily ever after, all thanks to the proverbial magic of Christmas. There is nothing particularly memorable to this, however, because there is almost no such thing as a cheap television Christmas romance that has the cinematic guts to give you anything else. The corny Christmas movie is memorable in the same sense that a McDouble is memorable: if you have had it even just once (and how only once?), you recall eating two beef patties and a slice of cheese with pickles, onions, and ketchup on a warm bun, and you probably recall about what it normally tastes like. Unless, for reasons one would rather not ponder, your McDouble was of unusually poor quality, there is likely little to the experience worth remembering. In that same spirit, the only thing memorable about A Christmas Cruise is that it takes place on a vacation cruise.
And, crucially, no one disputes the purchase these films have claimed on Christmas. After all, because they revolve around the Christmas holiday, most often in a wintry northern setting, and generically invoke the values of Christmas, they must prima facie be Christmas films. That brings us to the crux of what motivates this conversation. There is another film — a great film at that, distinctively so — which has become a part of my Christmas tradition, as it has for many others. And yet, this film’s Christmas classification is vigorously disputed, subject to contrasting ritual denunciations and celebrations as Yuletide fare every year around this time. I’m referring, of course, to Die Hard.
To honor the 1988 original’s 30th Christmas, my purpose in this space is to prove that Die Hard is, by all means and in light of all facts, a Christmas movie. And the proof runs strong through those schlocky Christmas romance marathons on basic cable. There are many of those among us who would deny this reality out of hand. It is true that Die Hard was released in July, as some will be quick to point out. But recall that Miracle on 34th Street was released in June of 1947, and I have yet to notice anyone question its Christmas credentials on the basis of coming to theaters six months early. Others will attempt to convince you that just because the plot of a film is concurrent with Christmas (the technical cinematic term for this is “Christmas-adjacent”) does not mean the film is a Christmas movie; they will tell you that director John McTiernan and co-screenwriters Steven de Souza and Jeb Stuart could not seriously have had Christmas themes at the forefront of their mind when they made Die Hard. But this is a bupkis. The entire film takes place on Christmas Eve, in and around an office Christmas party, which is replete with imagery evocative of the holiday. Christmas may have been low-hanging fruit as a plot device to set events in motion, but it could not have been the only option for the purpose. And more importantly, McTiernan and company make the most of it. The Die Hard soundtrack features Christmas carols early and late, plus the sound of sleighbells as a recurring motif, and additionally a decidedly festive rendition of “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Christmas décor is scattered all across the setting, most memorably utilized when our hero, John McClane, sends a message to Hans Gruber and his gang of German terrorists in the form of a dead henchman wearing a Santa Claus hat and a sweater with the words “NOW I HAVE A MACHINE GUN HO-HO-HO” (emphasis mine) painted on (the runner-up would have to be McClane cunningly affixing a gun to his back with “SEASON’S GREETINGS” gift-wrap tape ahead of his final confrontation with Gruber). The film also draws upon Christmas to establish its emotional core when McClane’s estranged wife Holly is asked over the phone by their daughter if John will be coming home with her, and responds “we’ll see what Santa and Mommy can do, okay?” Moreover, screenwriter de Souza has gone so far as to say in recent interviews that he is “offended” by the idea that Die Hard does not qualify as a Christmas movie, making clear that he did not mean for audiences to disregard the Christmas imagery he and Stuart framed the film in so explicitly. He has also related a noteworthy story of visiting the set with producer Joel Silver, who, he says, “predicted it would play perennially on television during Christmas” after taking in the festive decoration of the scenery.
But these are hardly original thoughts, and therefore we must now revisit what brings us here: the corny Christmas television movies. It is thanks to these films that we can establish a bare-minimum baseline for what makes a film a Christmas movie. As a consequence of their mass-production, we can observe certain trends in plot devices repeatedly frequently across these films. Therefore, if multiple familiar Christmas movie tropes appear in a given film, against the background of the holiday season, then we must conclude ipso facto that the production can reasonably be classified as a Christmas movie. After doing the hard work of conducting exhaustive cinematic research, I have identified for the public benefit four Christmas movie tropes, among others, of particular interest to this subject. They are as follows:
- The protagonist, usually a woman, feels trapped in the rat-race lifestyle of their career, frequently depicted as a soulless corporate occupation, and/or is disappointed in the current state of their love life. The iron-clad framework onto which any corny Christmas movie is built is a pretty working woman about to unexpectedly be blown away by romance. If she is from the city, she is probably something like a banker, or magazine writer, or maybe a property manager; in the case she hails from more rural environs, she is more likely a baker, or boutique shopkeeper, or maybe a elementary school teacher by trade. This is Kellie Pickler’s character in Christmas at Graceland (2018), a one-time aspiring singer (shockingly) who gave up her dreams to settle down and take a 9-to-5 to make ends meet, only to find herself years later divorced and realizing that she’s been holding back her true talents and ambitions. Or the protagonist of The Christmas Secret (2014), who struggles to make ends meet with her salary from the local bakery after her ex-husband stops paying child support and challenges the custody agreement for their child (somehow that bit is supposed to make sense). The protagonist’s sister in Operation Christmas (2016) offers about the closest thing there is to a universal exposition for corny Christmas films when she asks of herself “look at me, how did this drama queen end up working a life insurance company?”
- Christmas is spent in an exotic and/or unusual location for the protagonist; one version of this is the protagonist “going home” for Christmas the first time in many years, or for one last anticipated time, in which case “home” is almost exclusively a wintry northwoods environ. This trope can run in wildly different directions from one film to the next, but whatever the form it takes, it near-always appears. The aforementioned A Christmas Cruise of course takes place on a tropical holiday cruise, without question an exotic subversion of the stereotypical Christmas mise-en-scène. But there is no single approach to this concept. A Christmas to Remember (2016) is about a frustrated celebrity chef from New York City who drives off the road in the middle of a blizzard on the way to a remote Colorado mountain holiday; she wakes up out in the boonies suffering from amnesia, which naturally proves to be the perfect recipe for true love to strike. In A Christmas Detour (2015), Candace Cameron Bure’s plans for a Christmas in New York City are diverted, along with her flight, to Buffalo, and she spends the holiday in the festive taverns of upstate New York; if all the footage of Buffalo Bills tailgates I’ve ever seen are any indication, “exotic” might be an accurate description. And then there is Journey Back to Christmas (2016), featuring a nurse who manages to time-travel from 1945 to 2016 on the way to finding her true love, which may or may not fit your definition of “exotic,” but certainly would be one weird Christmas in my book. Meanwhile, we have related the sub-genre of “back home at the holiday for the first time in a while,” in which our protagonist returns to her (invariably small-town) childhood home to spend Christmas there for the first time in a long while. The trip tends to be quite fruitful, as she finds something that she was missing out on all along (by “something” I obviously mean “some generically-handsome man and a kitschy Christmas festival”), and ends up sticking around permanently. We might take as our text here Last Vermont Christmas (2018), where the lead comes back home for one last Christmas in Vermont after her parents decide to sell the old family home there; she discovers that the house is being bought by her one-time teenage sweetheart, however, and allow me to say without spoiling the ending that the prospect of many Christmases in Vermont yet to come opens up after they reconnect.
- An antagonistic character, often one of the sort who might be defined as a “city slicker,” tries to stomp out the joy at a festive establishment of central importance to the main characters and to the plot. The endangered locus of festivity here can be anything from an enchanting little inn, to a charming local bakery shop, to even true love itself. Kellie Pickler’s boss in Christmas at Graceland hassles her to convince a struggling bank in Memphis to accept significant layoffs as a condition for a financial bailout, and then (saying, in all apparent seriousness, “I don’t mean to be a Scrooge”) orders her back to home-base earlier than expected when the deal fails to materialize — thereby jeopardizing her opportunity return to the stage in a Christmas concert at Elvis’ Graceland mansion. The lead in A Majestic Christmas (2018) is a city-dwelling architect dispatched to her hometown, of all places, to oversee the renovation of the local playhouse into a generic multiscreen cineplex, on behalf of a client who we learn is quite candidly apathetic toward the Christmas holiday; inevitably, the project collides with her own reservations and the community’s deep objections, as the town’s beloved Christmas pageant has been staged there for six decades running, and conveniently there is no alternative home for the production. But the prime-actualization of this trope might be found in Let It Snow (2013), where Candace Cameron Bure’s boss, who also happens to be her father (and played by Alan Thicke), purchases a rustic ski lodge in Maine from its aging, but charming proprietors, under the false pretense of intending to preserve the establishment, while actually scheming to demolish it and build some kind of soulless, corporate, no-kids-allowed resort; when she is sent to scout out the property, she is swept off her feet by the locals, their lifestyle, and the lodge itself, which she finds herself working to rescue from its fate.
- A rugged man, who is often emotionally distant when we meet him, saves the day and gets the girl. I do not believe the essence of this archetype has ever been so finely distilled as when the male protagonist from Dashing Through the Snow (2015) decides he’s had enough of hearing the female lead reminisce about her days taking psychology courses in college, chiding her that “I told you I paint houses, and you start telling me about Freud or psychology and it’s over my head.” This role is so ubiquitous in the world of the corny Christmas film that it would almost be more distinctly noteworthy to discuss instances that do not adhere to the formula (another matter for another day perhaps). Close your eyes, and surely you can picture this character: doe-eyed, probably a bit tanned, likely darker haired, usually with a prominent chin, and almost certainly wearing a flannel shirt or ski sweater (with a flannel shirt under it, one would imagine, in that instance). There is a very good chance he drives an older pickup truck, like the fellow we meet in Return to Christmas Creek (2018). And you know, of course, he will make his living in some kind of brawny-man line of work, which has much to do with why you should not be surprised if he does not start off on the right foot with the female lead, because her busy-body, scramble-up-the-ladder, career-centric attitude just does not make sense in his world. But this initial distance never prevents these mixed-up pairs from falling for each other in the end, because she realizes that she has merely been working away the life she meant to build in the first place, and he realizes that her tenacious determination and work-ethic are exactly the qualities he has been looking for in a woman all this time. Or, something like that — when they kiss at the end and then unwrap some presents together it may just as well be simply because that is what is expected of attractive people in a basic-cable romance. In any event, we can find the essential exemplar of this, once again, in Let it Snow. The owners of the rustic ski lodge have a son who works his tail off at the holidays every year to provide his family’s guests with the merriest of Christmases, and he at first clashes with Candace, because he assumes from her all-about-the-business bearing that she will be a joyless burden on him. But the distance is closed in short-order, as she picks up on all the charms and wonders of a snowy northwoods Christmas in the course of working alongside him for the week, and they discover that they have each found in the other exactly what they have been in need of all along. With their newfound holiday cheer, together they prevent the lodge from being converted into some contrived, money-grubbing tourist-trap, preserving the joys of an authentic, family-style Christmas. With the spirit of the season saved, they kiss. Fin.
The list is, of course, not limited to the above tropes. A film could have fewer than all four, or even none at all, and still be a Christmas movie. One distinct genre of corny Yuletide film that comes to mind in this sense is any production centered on the romance of a commoner and some generic royal, usually against the obstacle of aristocratic parents who would prefer their child (generally their son) instead marry a fellow member of the nobility. Netflix became the talk of the internet last year when they released A Christmas Prince, a film some posited as itself the apogee of corny holiday television movies. But it would be difficult to deny the Christmas credentials of a film set at Christmas that checked all four of the boxes I have outlined; if Professor Joseph Campbell had developed a corny Christmas film counterpart to his Hero with a Thousand Faces “monomyth” framework, these surely would have been core elements of the cycle.
And those four stand out here especially because, in the context of it very obviously being set on Christmas Eve, all four apply to Die Hard. Allow me to now explain each in turn:
- The protagonist feels trapped in their corporate career and/or disappointed in their love life: Because Die Hard is so memorably about the resolution of a literal hostage crisis at the surface level, it is easy to overlook just how much it also is about two people being held emotionally hostage — by each other, no less — at the holidays, with career playing a large role in that. Our protagonist, New York cop John McClane, lives entirely across the country from his wife Holly, who works in Los Angeles for the Nakatomi Corporation. When she took the job, their children went with her, and the film is not terribly subtle about implying the marriage was in rough waters to begin with. This long-distance situation, a reflection of struggling to balance careers and family, has strained their relationship even further, and also been of some distress to the kids, hence John’s Christmas Eve flight to LA to reunite for the holiday (however one feels about such things, you will notice that both Die Hard and most corny Christmas films adopt vaguely conservative assumptions toward gender roles within the family). But neither John nor Holly expect to actually spend the night under the same roof, despite both hoping the other will agree to it, and their brief early reunion at the Nakatomi party devolves into the same sort of argument that one assumes affirmed Holly’s choice to move westward without her husband. Unable to dissociate totally, largely for the sake of the kids, but bungling their efforts to reconcile, their relationship is stuck at a precarious impasse when they are physically partitioned by the eruption of villainous calamity. Speaking of which, the first criteria of this trope also is elsewhere not even metaphoric in Die Hard: for most of the film, Holly Gennero-McClane does find herself literally trapped in her corporate workplace at Nakatomi Plaza, thanks to being held at gunpoint along with her coworkers by Hans Gruber and his gang of German terrorists.
- Christmas is spent in an exotic and/or unusual location for the protagonist; one version of this is the protagonist “going home” for Christmas: To begin with, John McClane is a New Yorker spending Christmas in Los Angeles hoping to repair a failing marriage; in other words, this is not a “normal” Christmas. A gruff police officer with a blue-collar ethic, he is especially out of his element in the film’s sunny setting — after a man at the Nakatomi party grabs John, says “hey! Merry Christmas,” and then kisses him on the cheek, John mutters to himself “Jesus…California.” For the few merry moments before the bullets begin flying, he is something of an odd-man-out at jubilant gathering of white-collar managerial types. And then John finds himself trapped, without shoes, in the upper floors of a high-rise building, taking on an entire gang of heavily-armed criminals by himself. Military-grade explosives come into play, and FBI snipers perched in a helicopter appear. The American headquarters of a triumphant transnational enterprise are utterly destroyed, and the distinguished president of the company’s emerging venture there is murdered, along with another executive and a some federal law-enforcement agents. Dozens of hostages narrowly escape being massacred when the villains deliberately detonate a rooftop rigged with C4. Die Hard unquestionably recounts a Christmas unlike any other — even if only in the most traumatic sense imaginable. (@Dick_Nixon, the playwright Justin Sherin’s uncanny impersonation of the 37th President on Twitter, recently wrote “[f]rom time to time in Los Angeles I meet people who were involved in the Nakatomi business. They always find this time of year difficult.” )
- An antagonistic character, who might be defined as a “city slicker,” tries to stomp out the joy at a festive establishment of central importance: Hans Gruber. Of course this is Hans Gruber. A man who patronizes the same London tailor as high-powered Japanese businessmen and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and waxes poetically about Alexander the Great, claiming this as just one benefit of “classical education.” Gruber also implies himself to be a close reader of Forbes, and shares that he would love nothing more than to spend the entire day discussing “industrialization and men’s fashions” if he were not so consumed with perpetrating a stick-up robbery. Furthermore, as portrayed by the late Alan Rickman, Gruber is somehow both German and English all at once, which in-and-of-itself makes him cold as ice on Christmas Eve at the North Pole. Naturally, he is the exactly the sort of character who would assemble a crew of ruthless mercenaries to crash a soirée positively bursting with holiday cheer (and by “holiday cheer” I of course mean flowing booze, even for the pregnant woman if she wants, and maybe a few lines of coke here and there to go with), all to snatch $600 million worth of bearer bonds. And much like the Grinch dressing in a Santa Claus suit, or Alan Thicke pretending he doesn’t plan to demolish the ski lodge in Let it Snow, the well-heeled Gruber does not even have the decency to be honest about what he is after. Gruber and his gang strike under the pretense they are terrorists holding up a representation of capitalism to seek the release of political radicals imprisoned around the world as ransom (he later dismissively claims he only learned their names from Time magazine), but in truth he is one of the few things more unsavory — a cynical grubber, with no qualms about gunning down anyone who might come between him and the fortune in the nestled away in the Nakatomi vault.
- A rugged man saves the day from the city slicker and gets the girl: Obviously this is John McClane. Spending most of the film shoeless, John literally runs across shattered glass barefoot, under a hail of machine gun fire, to save Christmas — and that is before he also dives off the side of a high-rise building, secured to the tower only by a firehose, to avoid the inferno of detonated C4 and of a crashing helicopter. When Gruber’s gang first arrives on the scene McClane is down to his undershirt in a bathroom washing up; his shoes and socks are also removed, because a seat-mate on the plane ride in had advised him that “making fists with your toes” barefoot on carpet is an inexplicably effective cure for jet lag. When he hears the commotion caused by Gruber’s entrance and sees from a distance what is happening, his police instincts to evade and regroup kick in before he can even think to grab his shoes, thus accounting for his state of undress when he flees to the relative safety of the floor above the Nakatomi party. The film could not draw a more marked visual contrast between the impeccably tailored and well-mannered Gruber and McClane in his humble attire, especially as our hero becomes increasingly soaked in sweat, blood, and assorted other grime over the long haul of his Yuletide struggle (as Mr. Plinkett of Red Letter Media would note: “you might not have noticed it — but your brain did”). The clashing imagery of hero and villain in Die Hard also tracks well with the logistics of McClane’s situation, as he finds himself dramatically out-manned and out-gunned against a highly-organized and professional criminal operation. If we would be so bold as to be totally honest with ourselves, we could even acknowledge that John McClane is quite possibly the absolute epitome of the rugged Christmas man archetype: rather than settling down for a long winter’s nap surrounded by kith and kin, he spends the night before Christmas taking a beating to point he can barely stand. But he successfully eliminates the band of murderous rogues one-by-one, until it comes down to John and the mastermind Gruber himself, with Holly literally hanging in the balance between them. It is at the moment of this perilous climax that John and Holly are finally reunited again, this time for good, and by nothing less than together embracing the true meaning of Christmas. After taking a bullet from John, Hans tumbles backward out a window, but manages to grab ahold of Holly; while bracing her inside the building, John recognizes that the sharp-dressed scoundrel is actually hanging on for dear life by only the Rolex wristwatch she was given by her coworkers as a testament to her successes in the occupation that nearly drove a stake through their marriage. Hurriedly, as Hans attempts to draw his gun and, at the very least, take the McClanes out with him, John unclasps the watch and Holly allows it to slip off her wrist, symbolically casting-off the soulless materialism that had upended the entire dynamic of her life, while they watch Gruber grapple with the surreal cognizance that he is plummeting to his demise. Having restored their connection, and their appreciation of what really matters, they vacate the scene at long last in each others’ arms to celebrate the holiday as a family, while the strains of “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” kick up in the background.
Taking all this in totality, one is hard-pressed to avoid the conclusion that, by another name, Die Hard could just as well be called The Hans Gruber Who Stole Christmas, or, perhaps more apropo for the context, “Hallmark presents: A Nakatomi Plaza Christmas.” And the film not only meets the bargain-basement criteria to qualify as authentic Christmas cinema, but frankly exceeds its chintzy peers in holiday spirit. Die Hard is no contrived melodrama between cardboard-cutout characters, but rather a multi-layered — and, yes, explosive — dramatic crisis testing the very limits of human spirit.
The greatest testament to this is its cinematic influence far beyond the realm of Christmas stories. The inverse of derivative filmmaking, Die Hard in fact established a framework from which countless blockbusters have cribbed their plot structure. A landmark in action-movie history, it gave birth to the “Die Hard on a ____________” school of popular filmmaking, an entire sub-genre of action films defined by retreading the formula of a trapped and hopelessly out-numbered hero defying impossible odds to spoil the foul designs of some wicked outlaw band (to wit: Under Siege (1992) is “Die Hard on a ship,” Air Force One (1997) is “Die Hard on the President’s plane,” Sudden Death (1995) is “Die Hard at a hockey game,” and so on).
Yet for all the copy-cats, including Did Hard’s own official sequels, astoundingly few manage to additionally appropriate what made the plight of John McClane at Nakatomi Plaza truly special: an authentic hero. The affliction of so many action films is to present as their hero an immense, unstoppable killing-machine who never seems to veritably be in grave danger, no matter what the surroundings. Among the many examples we could take as our text here, let us conjure Stallone as John Rambo, a character whose very name has become cinematic shorthand for any unstoppable force that manages to obliterate all unmovable objects in its way, or pretty much every role in Steven Seagal’s filmography, or Liam Neeson’s prolific post-Taken (2008) decade of throat-punching. But whereas this very same tendency has permeated a vast cross-section of its most notable knock-offs, Die Hard actually goes against the grain of this conceit. To be sure, John McClane’s backstory as a New York cop lends itself very well to the situation he finds himself in, and the mere fact just that he survives the ferocious licking he takes does test the limits of reasonability. But the faux-terror attack heist scenario is hardly absurd, especially looking back from a post-9/11 world, and McClane’s exploits in it are not generally preposterous; much the opposite, the film is frequently successful in giving the effect of our hero being quite vulnerable — this is why McClane’s early separation from his shoes matters so much (John reaches his lowest point, dramatically speaking, between his sprint across broken glass and the massive conflagration on the roof, when we find him in a bathroom, pulling shards from his feet and wrapping them in rags made from his undershirt, while relaying messages for his wife via walkie-talkie that heavily imply he does not expect to survive much longer). Casting matters much here too, or at least it would have to 1988 audiences: prior to Die Hard, Bruce Willis’ most prominent role was co-starring with Cybill Shepherd as a private detective on Moonlighting (1985–1989), a series that pioneered the genre of “dramedy” while it ran for six seasons on ABC — a reputation which would have lent him significant affability in the role of an action hero. Moreover, to borrow the words from Screen Junkies’ Honest Trailers, Willis brings to life a hero who “looks like your dad” in playing McClane, as opposed being built like a brick outhouse, in the vein of Schwarzenegger, or coming pre-packaged as a martial-arts badass, in the style of Jean-Claude Van Damme, providing the character yet another layer of gritty authenticity. (Looking back at this retrospectively, one is also tempted to consider whether the later Die Hard sequels, and frankly much the rest of Willis’ filmography sufficiently constitute “self-parody.”)
There is a pertinence to these things being so. The cinematic craftwork of Die Hard make it one of the richest pictures in the history of blockbuster filmmaking, and it arguably represents the high-water mark of action cinema. That being as it is, it ought to signify something, then, that Die Hard not merely works as Christmas fare, but that something about it is so much more special to so many people at the holiday. Those who cannot move past the notion that Die Hard is not a Christmas film because it does not relentlessly beat viewers over the head with explicitly-worded Christmas themes misses that point that the film has no need to, because the thematic import is relayed more than loudly enough for those who care to understand. The greatest triumph a Christmas movie can earn is to to effectively tell a story of what Christmas is while standing on its own cinematic merit, rather than passing off generic Christmas imagery in-and-of-itself as a justifiable substitute for having something interesting or original to say. In that sense, Die Hard rises to the occasion magnificently, just as John McClane does in the crisis at Nakatomi Plaza. The detractors may have a point in that it does not, strictly-speaking, tell us much about Christmas, but in John’s dualistic odyssey to save his wife from the schemes of Hans Gruber and his family from the specter of bitter estrangement becoming agonizingly permanent, it vividly shows us. If, as I have suggested, the corny basic-cable Christmas movie is the filmmaking equivalent to a McDouble, then it must follow that Die Hard would be a tremendous gourmet feast the likes of which most enjoy only sparingly. As such, if you and yours can’t make it out to the coast together to have a few laughs this holiday, do remember that there is always room to celebrate with the McClanes at Nakatomi Plaza — and don’t let any joyless Grubers give you humbug this season to the contrary. Yippie-ki-yay, merry Christmas.
-Mitch Carter is a substitute teacher from the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. He can be reached at CartersCornerPR@gmail.com.
