It’s time for the Never Seen It Holiday Special!
Toby Sells is Associate Editor for the Memphis Flyer, responsible for breaking news of great civic import and, more importantly, craft beer coverage. He had somehow managed to miss the 1988 action film classic Die Hard. True to his penetrating journalistic brain, he sought answers to the most important question: Is it a Christmas movie? Here’s how it went.
Chris McCoy: Toby Sells, tell me what you know about Die Hard.
Toby Sells: Not much. I know that Bruce Willis plays a guy named John McClane. This is from years of just hearing about this movie when I would bring it up and say I’ve never seen it. People would say, “I can’t believe you’ve never seen Die Hard!” And I’ve never seen a single one of ’em. John McClane wears the white wife beater shirt, and for some reason, he doesn’t have any shoes on. He’s trying to crawl around in a building to kill Snape. And people argue about whether or not this is a Christmas movie. I have no idea what that’s about.
132 minutes later …
Chris McCoy: Toby Sells, you are now a person who has seen Die Hard. What did you think?
Toby Sells: Well, I get 10 or 12 pop culture references that I did not get before.
CM: Like what?
TS: Well, the “Yippee ki yay yay, motherfucker!” is one I’d heard people say, I didn’t know where that was from. As I was watching it, I was trying to — ’cause I really admire the way that you write about film — I was trying to come up with some ways to go deeper into the movie somehow, but it was a lot of explosions and gunfire and glass everywhere, and a guy trying to save the day. And it was just a whole lot of fun.
CM: I think it’s tons of fun! They teach this movie in film writing classes, because it’s so efficient and well structured. By the time the credits are over, you know who John McClane is, you know what his problems are, and what his life is like. You know he’s coming from New York and he’s going to L.A., and you know that he doesn’t fit in in L.A., because he’s a New York guy. And he really doesn’t change through the rest of the movie.
TS: No, he does change in one key way! There’s the bathroom scene, where he’s cut his foot, and he doesn’t have a shirt on anymore. John McClane is thinking things are looking pretty grim, and he’s been talking to his buddy Al outside on the radio. He’s had this revelation about his relationship with his wife who is kind of not his wife, at this point. It takes a terrorist, threats on his life over dozens of times, and many, many rounds of gunfire to realize that maybe he should have told his wife that he loved her and supported her and gone with her to Los Angeles when she took the job and moved out. It took all of that for this man to become vulnerable and decide, “Hey, you know what? It’s time I supported my wife.”
CM: As you said, it should be called Die Hard, or How Hans Gruber Saved My Marriage.
CM: When this came out, Bruce Willis was on Moonlighting. He’d never done action before. Now, he’s Mr. Action Guy. But in Moonlighting, he solved mysteries with Cybill Shepherd, and cracked wise.
TS: I thought he went the other way around. I thought he did action, but he’s also funny.
CM: There’s some kind of rights issue with Moonlighting, so it’s not on streaming or anything. But it was such a good show. I was devoted to that show. But he was a comedy actor, and now, because of Die Hard, he’s Mr. Action all the time. He became a huge star and quit Moonlighting. Then he had a blues band where he played harmonica.
TS: Yeah, he started Planet Hollywood back in the day with Schwarzenegger and all those other guys.
CM: What did you think about him in the film?
TS: He was pitch perfect. That’s John McClane, that’s not just Bruce Willis. He’s the guy in the air duct. That’s who you think of when you think about Bruce Willis.
CM: “Come out to the coast, we’ll have a few laughs!”
TS: That’s him. The other thing is, I knew going into it that he didn’t have shoes on, for some reason. Figured it out!
CM: It’s literally set up in the credit sequence, when some guy tells him to take his shoes off and make fists with your toes — which I always do! Seriously, to this day, I do that. I had forgotten why I did that until today, because I haven’t seen this movie in years and years.
TS: It is a bit of a cowboy movie, and it’s also a big heist movie. It’s kinda like Oceans 11, when they’re trying to drill into the vault, and Hans Gruber’s got this whole thing planned very well. He knows they’re gonna have to come in and cut the power, and then that’s when the vault opens. It’s got the heist vibe, which is great.
CM: They talk about the cowboy motif throughout the movie.
TS: He said he was a big Roy Rogers fan and all that, and it’s like one guy saving the day against all odds. He’s cut his foot. He’s been shot at a dozen times. And somehow, you know, this gritty New York cop sees through all of it, and figures it all out enough to win the day, get the girl, ride off into the sunset, and crack jokes along the way.
CM: He’s also the cop who won’t follow the rules, which is so Reagan Eighties. All the guys who are FBI, and the police Lieutenant that takes over at the scene, are so ineffectual. The Lieutenant [Paul Gleason] is the same actor who was the coach in The Breakfast Club in charge of detention. This guy made a career in the ’80s of being ineffectual authority figures that were meant to be ridiculed.
TS: I thought the characters were perfectly all ’80s. They fit all the molds.
CM: Everybody was an archetype.
TS: But then I’m wondering if the archetypes didn’t come from this movie?
CM: I think the hero cop who won’t follow the rules thing goes back to Dirty Harry in the ’70s, which was a reaction against the counterculture. This is a deeply conservative movie. Like, we were talking about Al the, the cop, and you’re like “What’s Al’s problem?” Oh, I killed a 13-year-old kid is the problem. And then his redemption arc is, he gets to use violence again!
TS: He gets to shoot the big zombie German at the end.
CM: That’s Alexander Gudnov, who was a ballet dancer with the Bolshoi and had a second career in America playing vaguely foreign bad guys. You know, the bad guys, Hans Gruber and his people, they set you up to think that they’re leftist revolutionaries.
TS: And apparently, Hans Gruber was one, at one point. They disavowed him, but he used to be like an actual terrorist.
CM: It was like the Baader-Meinhof Group, West German communists, but they had a fake name.
TS: But now, he’s gone rogue, so he’s just a thief.
CM: Right, just a criminal. And when he calls out these other revolutionaries, it kind of dismisses them. They’re all just thieves at heart. That’s the subtext.
TS: He can’t fight for a cause anymore, so he’s like, okay, well, if they don’t think I’m good enough for that, then screw it. I’m just gonna go for the money. And I’m gonna steal from the guy who’s got a whole lot of money. That’s gonna be my redemption. Since I can’t have the glory of saying that I helped change the world, I’m gonna get mine. I’m gonna sit on a beach and earn 20 percent interest. There are no values, you know, it’s just greed at that point. He even says so at the beginning. He talks about the Nakatomi group and says that they’re just these greedy people with all this money.
CM: But he’s greedy, too. The movie says, everybody is greedy, no one has ideology — but that’s an ideology in itself. And by the way, the Nakatomi corp. is explicitly a fossil fuel company. They’re drilling for oil in Indonesia.
TS: They have got those models of the drilling rigs and stuff. As a bad guy, the only thing he’s fighting for now is just an easy life, where John McClane has got everything to fight for. His wife is in there, and they put his kids on television. It really is that story of having principles and overcoming somebody with no principles. All that stuff and all the violence does make this a deeply conservative movie. You look at the way people think about the world and how things are black and white, and it’s all right there.
CM: Here’s the bad guys: Hans Gruber’s group, who are sellout leftist terrorist or whatever, and are now like super thieves. And then there is the, the rules-following LAPD guys.
TS: There’s the FBI following the FBI playbook, which leads to disaster and everybody gets killed.
CM: And finally, the worst of all, the news media.
TS: That’s us! [laugh]. Yeah, I have thoughts on that. Of course it’s a movie and I’m not gonna hold anybody to standards or whatever. But this guy, he’s getting ready to leave, it’s Christmas Eve and he’s gonna go to some restaurant with his wife or something. Then here’s his thing on the radio. He decides he’s gonna go get glory for himself and get this crew together, go over to Nakatomi Plaza and check it out. So as it’s going along now, that can happen. Something on the scanner, head out.
CM: That happens all the time. Not to me personally, but it happens.
TS: Right. But as it’s going on — and remember, this is the evening of Christmas Eve — the station has somehow gotten the author of a book on terrorism to come in on a moment’s notice and go on the air. So then, they figured out it was Hans Gruber, and somehow his group had issued this statement, they communicate somehow that they disavowed him. And they had a file photo of Hans Gruber somehow there at the station and put it all together in no time.
CM: While we were watching, you were like, “How did they put out statements that quick before Twitter?” They called Der Spiegel and said, “Yo, that’s not our dude.”
TS: When the TV station shows up, when the press shows up, the cops have the reaction that you would think they would. “Oh great, here comes the press.” You know, that’s what we think the cops do every single time the press is involved in anything. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. But the press crossed the line right?
CM: When they dug it up and found out where McClane’s kids live and they wanted to put them on air. Right.
TS: They put them in danger and all that kind of stuff. Then it became okay to punch the guy in the face at the end.
CM: I thought about that too, which is something I probably wouldn’t have thought about years ago. That actor [William Atherton] is the EPA guy from Ghostbusters. He’s another person who made a career in the ’80s out of being ineffectual authority figures. He goes to the house where we’ve established that John and Holly’s kids are, and threatens to have the housekeeper deported, because he just racistly assumes she’s an illegal alien, and then says, manipulatively, that this is the last time these kids are ever going to be able to talk to their parent. And I was like, who the hell does that? It’s never occurred to me to do anything like that. You’ve done a lot of beat reporting. Have you ever done anything like that?
TS: Absolutely not. I mean, that’s not good professional ethics.
CM: I guess people do it?
TS: You know, it’s meant to be over the top. It’s set up in a way that this guy who he was really just trying to beat channel five, as he says in the movie. But it set up this kind of emotional pivot in the movie where it then became really personal. But I’ve never, never dreamed of going to anybody’s house like that.
CM: Alan Rickman!
TS: Yeah!
CM: How amazing is he?
TS: At the beginning of this, I said, “He’s trying to get Snape.” Of course, because I’m a huge Harry Potter fan. I’ve completely rethought Alan Rickman after this performance. He was incredible, such a great bad guy.
CM: You know, he is kind of a bad guy in Harry Potter, too.
TS: Yeah, but you love him.
CM: He steals every screen that he’s in.
TS: There was that scene where he’s off looking for the detonators, and then John catches him, so he pretends to be one of the hostages. He puts on that kind of fake American accent, which was great. Still sounds like Alan Rickman with an American accent, but John kind of falls for it just enough.
CM: That scene is so great. At that point, Rickman is playing Hans Gruber, who is playing what he thinks will be a believable accent to an American. You can see the wheels turning as he fakes his way through it. That’s what makes that scene work. It’s not the accent, it’s that you can see him improvising. And that is just a stunning, stunning piece of acting. He was always, low-key, the best thing in any movie he’s in. And by the way, Bruce Willis plays that scene really well, too. That’s also really hard, ’cause he’s kind of the straight guy, and you don’t know who’s fooling who.
TS: So good. And then the fall there at the end, from the top of the tower, that was iconic too. I think I’d seen that before somewhere also.
CM: That’s been copied a lot.
TS: We talked about this being a Christmas movie.
CM: That was my next question. People argue about that.
TS: Right. I think absolutely it is a Christmas movie. They set it at Christmas time. They’re having a Christmas party. And I love the way the music just kind of peppers in little references to Christmas carols here and there. There’s kind of an ominous “Jingle Bells.”
CM: At one point, they used jingle bells in the same rhythm as the Psycho theme. Jing Jing Jing Jing …
[Laughter]
CM: You know, I think this is a perfect movie, because everything works together. Everybody’s good in it. The screenplay is well structured. We were talking about the motivations of minor characters a minute ago. Well, it’s a credit to the screenwriting that you think that these people have motivations and you can identify them. Nowadays, a lot of times, I don’t even know what the motivation of the protagonist is.
TS: They are just out there wielding weapons for some reason, and you hope they turn out okay. And that guy they’re shooting is probably bad.
CM: All the action scenes in this, I was just noticing how good they are. And that is really difficult to do, to make action scenes that work. You have a sense of what the space is like. How does this guy relate to that guy? How far away are they? For example, when they shoot the glass.
TS: You know he’s barefoot.
CM: Exactly. You know he’s been barefoot from the beginning. They show you the glass, and then show you Hans Gruber having the idea to shoot the glass.
TS: Yeah. So you’ve already had the idea and it’s like, “Oh look at this guy. He knows what’s up.”
CM: Obviously, this movie inspired so many action movies. But today, it seems like nobody can do this kind of craftsmanship.
CM: So, bottom line.
TS: Bottom line is, I’m glad I’ve seen Die Hard.
CM: Would you recommend it to others?
TS: I would recommend it to others, just for a great action movie. Unplug your brain, go check it out.
