The Christmas movie: Die Hard (1988) part 3

John McClane is about to crawl and fight his way through the bowels of a strange new world to save his family's Christmas from late-modern hypercapitalism. But with every move he makes the structures of power, both internal and external, are standing in his way.

A Hyperreal City Held Hostage:

There is a moment (a cut away, really) early on in the takeover of Nakatomi Plaza that continues to vex me. John McClane has evaded capture and has taken refuge on a floor still under construction.
It seems to be the only honest work space in the building that reveals Nakatomi Plaza for what it really is --a construct. After initially defending the space by maintaining his virtuous code ("You won't hurt me ... you're a police man. There are rules for police men.") it is a floor that will remain a hero's sanctuary throughout the course of the film. However, in a moment of initial panic, John looks out the window and sees a scantily clad woman who is on the phone in another building.

It's a terrible second unit shot that isn't even framed well. The shot is probably meant to emphasize the simple fact that John doesn't have a phone to call for help. Or maybe it is a moment where the film is taking advantage of the opportunity to show yet another half naked woman. But these throw away options are so unusual and out of form for a usually very disciplined film (nominated for an Academy award for Film Editing) that it has continued to make me wonder: just possibly, in this moment of panic, does John realize that this whole city is held 'hostage' and its residents live in their own state of oblivion to the true dangers lurking?

In Simulacra & Simulation, Jean Baudrillard calls Los Angeles the first hyperreal city. Hyperreality, simply put, is a unique social construct that distracts daily encounter and concerns with everyday living with hyper-concerns (more vivid) generated by consumer values and propagated through mass communication. Los Angeles is a space whose sense of reality is dependent on fantastic image-making machines like Disneyland and Hollywood movie studios. The city feeds on reality, like from a power station, from these places to make us believe that the rest is real. However, says Baudrillard, all of Los Angeles (and late-capitalist America for that matter) is no longer real but part of the hyperreal order of simulation. We might call this transformation into a technologically driven consumer society the Disneyfication of America.

This 'wild' reading into this frame, then, is what Gilles Deleuze calls a product of the rarification of the movie frame. This act of limitation of the movie frame actually expands the boundaries of the frame because is always sharing in the meaning of one frame to the next; it produces an out-of-field element that invokes (summons to the frame) more than what is seen or even understood. Such an element extends the SAS' action-image beyond its indirect representations of time into a direct time-image.

What is the point of all of this? Well, it is from this same hero's sanctuary where John McClane will realize that he is all alone in his endeavour. In what continues to grow in my mind a brilliant cinematic example of everyday meaning being undermined by editing and camera movement John 'pulls the alarm'. But a call for help in this new world (as we will see 11 years later in another Joel Silver produced film, The Matrix) is a call that is undermined by a web of technological mediation:

Notice how the signifiers of John's act of resistance (an appeal to another authority) are reduced to digital blips which will then be intercepted, monitored and absorbed by the larger machinery:

So John is tenderfooted and essentially alone. His only ally is the castrated police sgt. Al Powell. He is not only trapped in this brave new world of late-modern hyper-capitalism, signified by Nakatomi Plaza, but he is also trapped in the much larger web of hyperreality signified by Los Angeles' inept cast of characters. The oblivious Argyle in the parking garage, the out of touch police dispatcher, ratings-driven pseudo-event spinner Richard Thornburg, the bumbling bureaucrat Dept. Chief of Police Dwayne T. Robinson, and the hyper-oblivious Agents Smith.

Becoming the Gift To Save Christmas:

It probably goes without saying that this is only a preliminary sketch into a far more comprehensive investigation of Die Hard as a Christmas movie, or Christmas movies in general for that matter. In order to bring this 3 part post to a close the fundamental question as to what is at stake for us in this Christmas movie needs to be resolved.

In the States Christmas is a generally misunderstood religious festival because no one really understands (or remembers) the history of its celebration. The festival of the birth of Christ is understood in the context of John 1. The darkness cannot overcome the light of the eternal order (logos) taking flesh and dwelling on Earth. The ancients already understood and celebrated the festival of Sol Invictus, the unconquerable light/Sun, in Zoroastrianism and Mithraism. Indeed, Mithraism, contemporary to the founding of the Christian Church, celebrated the Winter solstice to honor Mithra, born in a grotto, defeating the bull and the seasonal journey into midwinter darkness making its turn to the light.

The truthfulness of this festival was baptised by Constantine and became Christmastide. Through the ages St. Nicholas the wonder worker became the patron saint of children. According to one gruesome legend retold at the St. Nicholas Center, a terrible famine struck the island of Myra and a malicious butcher lured three little children into his house, where he slaughtered and butchered them, placing their remains in a barrel to cure, planning to sell them off as ham. Saint Nicholas, visiting the region to care for the hungry, not only saw through the butcher's horrific crime but also resurrected the three boys from the barrel by his prayers. That's how you get immortalized as Santa Claus, friends.

The piety of the Protestant reformation brought confusion and (un)intended secularization. The Christ Child (Kris Kringle) was to be celebrated not the works of his servants. But that too was assumed in the myth. An epic struggle emerged in the West between piety, secular consumerism, and the mythic adherence to the ancient ways.

The Victorians, struggling at the epicenter of Western industrialism and capitalism, attempted to reclaim these ancient meanings. Read Charles Dickens ... it's all there. We are heirs of that struggle.

We taste that struggle in Holly Genaro's "Rolex". We taste that struggle in the marginalization of Christmas and virtue in Nakatomi Plaza. We taste that struggle in John McClanes resistance to Hans Gruber's reduction of Christmas Joy to materialism.

The first conversation between Hans Gruber and John McClane doesn't happen until minute 58:

Hans Gruber: Mr. Mystery Guest? Are you still there?
John McClane: Yeah, I'm still here. Unless you wanna open the front door for me.
Hans Gruber: Uh, no, I'm afraid not. But, you have me at a loss. You know my name but who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he's John Wayne? Rambo? Marshal Dillon?
John McClane:Was always kinda partial to Roy Rogers actually. I really like those sequined shirts.
Hans Gruber: Do you really think you have a chance against us, Mr. Cowboy?
John McClane: Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.

Yes, John McClane is an orphan of a bankrupt culture. This is surly what we can read into the fact that he goes without shoes for almost the entire movie. He is not Rambo or John Wayne. He is the virtuous everyman, Roy Rogers. Resistance does not come in the form of words. There is no yes or no to Hans Gruber's question. John McClane will become resistance. He will become the Christmas gift, and the cost is apocalyptic. The Christmas narrative is not about a Rankin & Bass marshmellow world but about a child born in dung and straw. A child born with a bounty on his head. A child born to die. Embracing and embodying this apocalyptic element is the resistance so many people seek in the midst of Christmas excess.

And so, in the final sequence of the film, John has finally defeated the demon of the ancient world (Karl, played by the late Alexander Godunov) and has passed into an apocalyptic landscape.

The hyperreal world represented in Nakatomi Plaza is in turmoil because of John's resistance that is ultimately signaled in a yuletide triple cut. John is out of ammo and must still rescue Holly. The hero finally embraces his destiny. He is not coming to bring Christmas gifts to his family but will become the Christmas gift:

It is only when John finally embraces this reality that something greater is recognized in him. Holly's reaction to seeing John emerge from the apocalyptic rubble her hyperreal world is a generic but substantive expression, "Jesus".

No, John isn't 'Jesus' or even a Christ figure but is just a man through whom the reality of the Christmas story is revealed. The gift is not the thing but the love. This is the act of resistance that effracts the hyperreal order.

Jacques Derrida tried to argue that givenness cannot be experienced. “The paradox of the gift” essentially says, that which we define as gift is, in reality, an economy of exchange. The problem, Derrida argues, is that when a gift is present it no longer belongs to givenness, but rather, becomes a commodity. The giver, the gift, and the gift-recipient participate in a system of reciprocity which, through the consciousness of gift giving, transforms givenness into something other than the phenomenology of givenness –it becomes an economy.

However, we should side with the Roman Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion. Marion argues that givennes is something that we find ourselves in the midst of. The giver is moved by givenness. Gift is released from the giver because the giver does not and cannot decide the gift; the giver can only find himself in the midst of givenness and act on it.

This is the work of the Christmas story; this is the work of grace. God comes to creation motivated by the outpouring of love in the being of God to be for creation. John says that, “God is love”. God does not decide love for creation but is that love for creation and acts on that love. God does not act for creation in the expectation of getting something in return (i.e. moralism, fear, reciprocity)

Creation can only receive the Grace of God in the same way. Only when the believer finds herself in the midst of participating in God’s love for God and creation can we experience true Grace. When we treat God’s grace with suspicion, fear or disdain we destroy true grace and validate Derrida’s “paradox of gift”. If we move and live in the Christian life out of fear, repayment or thanks for not going to hell then we turn God’s love into a commodity . . . something other than the Grace of God.

Holly is freed of her Rolex and her ties to the hyperreal existence at Nakatomi Plaza. Hans Gruber plummets into perdition and LA is treated to a Christmas apocalypse. The only way Christmas should ever be celebrated.