![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Sometime early in the second decade of the 21st Century, many people began taking to their holiday Facebook statuses, dating app profiles and other social media to make would-be clever remarks about 1988 summer blockbuster action film Die Hard (McTiernan, Citation1988) being a Christmas movie. Indeed, Die Hard has now become a mainstay of late-December American television programming and repertory screenings. In other words, Die Hard has become a Christmas movie simply because enough of an audience and marketplace deem it so. An application of Rick Altman’s ‘A Semantic/Syntactic/Pragmatic Approach to Genre’ theory demonstrates rather authoritatively that regardless of initial intent and marketing, Die Hard has now been cemented as equal parts Christmas movie and action blockbuster. This article uses Altman’s methodology to explore both how and why Die Hard might be defined in scholarly terms as a Christmas movie and provides an exploration of the film’s patently American approach to Christmas traditions, celebrations and the repertory Yuletide media exploited and marketed in conjunction therewith. My analysis also demonstrates that, while Die Hard may be a Christmas movie, the myriad films which have slavishly replicated the 1988 film fail to obtain similar Christmastime genre affiliations and discussions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. A Google trends search of “Die Hard Christmas Movie (Citation2004-2023)” indicates that since 2015, ‘Die Hard Christmas Movie’ has spiked in trending every November and December.
2. Los Angeles’ New Beverly Cinema has been screening the film during the holiday season for many years, often as a double bill with ‘Canucksploitation’ Christmas season heist film The Silent Partner (Duke, 1978).
3. All accessed via print anthology Film Review Annual 1989 (Ozer Citation1989), 448–458 as many contemporary reviews are not easily available in digital form.
4. Postwar trauma inflects another film that has become a Christmas classic based on repertory screening and popular reassessment rather than initial intent and release strategy: It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra, Citation1946). In 2000 anthology Christmas at the Movies: Images of Christmas in American, British, and European Cinema Jonathan Munby outlines how Frank Capra reworks and Americanizes many elements of A Christmas Carol in It’s a Wonderful Life. While Die Hard does not, note how Munby’s description of the Capra film and its reclamation often describe key facets of Die Hard as well: ‘Renowned for purveying uplifting visions of the common folk’s triumph against the sinister agents of power … telling a tale of a small man’s virtuous struggle against the machinations of the miserly, greedy and powerful’ villain, and noting that, while ‘set on Christmas Eve, the film had not been conceived as a Christmastime film … ’ (Munby Citation2000, 39–40). Munby concludes his essay averring that It’s a Wonderful Life, ‘in an almost miraculous twist of fate, as a now rarefied staple of Yuletide television programming … has experienced a resurrection as an ontological guarantee of Christmas itself’. (56) The same may increasingly be said of Die Hard, while the overlap of the two films prefigures an approach in which Die Hard may be likewise increasingly defined predominantly as a Christmas movie. Thus, while Die Hard may not parrot conventional tenets of the traditional Christmas movies of the Dickens or 1940s and 1950s postwar American iterations, it may sufficiently constitute a non-traditional form.
5. Among the initial batch were Richard Combs in Monthly Film Bulletin in February,1989 Maurice Yacowar’s Jump Cut article in March of the same year (Ozer Citation1989).
6. Given the self-aware discussions of screen cowboy heroes John Wayne and Roy Rogers and Western plots within the film, not to mention McClane’s ‘Yippee-Ki-yay … ’ catchphrase, it is notable that none of the original reviews I read spoke of the film in Western terms, while most academic writing on the film focuses extensively on Westerns. In addition to Western tropes of simple ‘white hats vs black hats’ schematics, the civilizing, domesticating, and subordinate status of women, I would add that the film follows all of the Western templates and primary syntax argued in Richard Slotkin’s (Citation1992) book Gunfighter Nation, especially the centrality of an American protagonist’s ‘regeneration through violence’ as central features of both John McClane and Al Powell’s respective character arcs. See Tasker (Citation1993) and Pfeil (Citation1995) for specific further analysis.
7. Bogle repeats this approach regarding John Amos’ character in Die Hard 2 (Harlin, Citation1990) and Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Citation1995’s Die Hard with a Vengeance (McTeirnan, 1995) in Bogle’s subsequent editions of the book.
8. Tasker, Bogle, and Pfeil all write as much or more about the Lethal Weapon films as they do Die Hard and any of its sequels. Only Pfeil delves into any Christmas elements of the film with any depth.
9. Rowana Agajanian’s ‘“Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All Men”: The Depiction of Christmas in Modern Hollywood Films’ the primary exception, although, again, she defines the genres of the films as action-adventure films with Christmas narratives (Agajanian Citation2000, 143).
10. In possible ignorance of Shane Black’s authorship of so many of these titles, Yvonne Tasker refers to the phenomenon of action films set at Christmastime not as anything specifically relevant to the semantic of syntactic elements of the Christmas movie; ‘As in Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, the Christmas setting of The Long Kiss Goodnight operates as an ironic counterpoint to the film’s familial themes’. She builds this conclusion in continuance of Fred Pfeil’s White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference, noting ‘An ambivalent relationship to domesticity is reinforced by the recurrent Christmas setting – “the time, symbolically, mythologically, of maximally happy domesticity” notes Pfeil – allowing corny old tunes to be set against scenes of carnage and destruction’. (Tasker Citation2004, ‘The Family in Action’, 261)
11. These include sweaters emblazoned with ‘Now I Have a Machine Gun Ho-Ho-Ho’, a surprising variety of Die Hard holiday ornaments, and even an advent calendar wherein a falling Hans Gruber figure is moved incrementally down 25 levels of an ersatz Nakatomi Plaza terminating on Christmas day.
12. He employs Jean Mitry’s definition of the Western as a case study. See (Altman Citation1999, 219–20).
13. Altman asserts that science fiction ‘first began borrowing the syntactic relationships previously established by the horror film, only to move in recent years increasingly towards the syntax of the Western. By maintaining simultaneous descriptions according to both parameters, we are not likely to fall into the trap of equating Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) with the Western (as numerous critics have done), even though it shares certain syntactic patterns with that genre’. (222) Despite Altman’s skepticism of its Western bona fides when writing that in 1984, Star Wars has, of course, subsequently been described as a ‘space opera’ as often as a ‘space Western’. In addition, the influence of Samurai films such as Kurasawa’s The Hidden Fortress (Kurasawa, 1958) has since been as remarked upon as much as the influence of The Searchers (Ford, 1956). Star Wars therefore provides a less-explicit example of the evolving genre perceptions of a replicable, template blockbuster film (from the same studio, at that) prior to Die Hard’s release over a decade later.
14. Indeed, inasmuch as Altman understood the pragmatic category to deal with marketing and marketplace concerns of the pre-streaming, pre-day-and-date era, these internet innovations might eventually beg an additional category of, say, a semantic/syntactic/pragmatic/viral approach to genre. For instance, as The Babadook (Kent, 2014) increasingly becomes queer canon in terms of its social media, meme, and other convergence categories, this type of internet-dominated categorical approach may be that much more warranted for specific titles and the genres with which they comingle. Regarding evolving media forms and technology, the evolving production and distribution models of streaming services will likely soon have effects on generic categorization as well, especially in the pragmatic context of Altman’s approach. While the genre-tagging and categorical organization of a given service are particulars for which Altman’s existing pragmatic category accounts, the generation or procurement of so much original content posits a potential expansion of categorization based on the interface of content and platform beyond supplier dictates akin to what can occasionally complicate the generic definitions of the TV movie, cable original feature, and direct-to-video films from first-run theatrically released fare.
15. Richard Donner’s directorial follow up to Lethal Weapon, itself containing the Holiday action extravaganza in the vignette The Night the Reindeer Died as proof of the craven and cynical ‘bah, humbug’ attitude of protagonist Bill Murray’s Joel Silver-esque producer which, notably, is another example of Christmas action film neglected in discussions of Die Hard.
16. Rowana Abajanian adds of the watch, ‘It is a symbol of her split from McClane, just as his wedding ring, which provides the film with one of its opening shots, is a symbol of his desire to remain married’. (Abajanian, 161).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nathan Scoll
Nathan Scoll holds a Ph.D in English (American Studies) and an MFA in Film from the University of Utah and an MA in Cinema Studies from San Francisco State University. He has taught at assorted colleges and universities in California, Utah, New York, and Pennsylvania, where he is currently a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh. A scholar-practitioner, his research often combines genre theory, formal analysis, and industrial practice within a socio-historical and often international framework, while his production and screenwriting credits are usually within horror and American independent contexts.