This post is a straight-up copy-and-paste repost from last year, because I’m already seeing the “DIE HARD Christmas movie” debate firing up on social media.
It’s that time of year again: the annual debate over whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie!
My personal opinion is that this one’s easy: yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie. But a friend on Facebook made an interesting argument against Die Hard‘s Christmas status the other day, and I want to tease it out a little more. Basically his view is that there is nothing intrinsically Christmas to Die Hard, at least not in the same way that Christmas is intrinsic to Miracle on 34th Street (his example). Basically, my friend argues that you can’t have Miracle on 34th Street take place any other time of year, where Die Hard actually can take any time of year.
Now, I’m honestly not sure about my friend’s argument. I mean, Miracle on 34th Street does seem to require Christmas, but I’m sure you could tell pretty much the same story at some other time of year, though it would definitely require quite a bit of heavy lifting in the writing department to make it work. And could Die Hard take place any other time? Sure. Obviously it could. Hans Gruber and friends could just take over the building on Easter Sunday, or July 4. As I noted to my friend, I’ve seen Die Hard set at another time of year. It’s called Die Hard With a Vengeance.
My problem with my friend’s argument is that it’s deeply limiting as to what constitutes a “Christmas movie”. Does a Christmas movie have to involve Christmas to such a degree that it literally can’t take place any other time? I don’t think so. Die Hard isn’t just set at Christmastime; it intrinsically involves a lot of emotions that come to the fore at that time. Family concerns. Redemption. Getting home for the holidays, safe and sound. Are those ideas unique to Christmas? No, but they are most certainly central to Christmas. So, could Die Hard take place at some other time? Sure. But the Christmastime setting gives it a subtext that engages the emotions, doesn’t it? Die Hard has a lot going for it as a movie: it’s extremely well-made, a virtual masterpiece in its genre, but a lot of action movies are well-made. It’s the emotions that keep it so re-watchable now, 35 years or so after it came out; the Christmas setting is part of how Die Hard gets us to care about its characters.
So I would argue that yes, Die Hard is most definitely a Christmas movie. I also argue that the first Lethal Weapon movie, also set at Christmas, is a Christmas movie, for similar reasons, even though LW doesn’t push the Christmas subtext quite as hard as Die Hard. Still, LW makes Martin Riggs’s redemption and his finding meaning after his wife’s death one of the major emotional subplots, and that is very much informed by Christmas.
Now, how about Die Hard 2? It also takes place at Christmas! It’s also about getting home, and all the other stuff, isn’t it? Well, that one I think has less of a claim as a Christmas movie than the original, but for me that’s more because in that respect it doesn’t do much new with the Christmas theme from the first film. And that’s interesting to me, given how inventive and fresh Die Hard 2 actually is. That movie does not get enough credit for not repeating the first movie.
There’s another way for a movie to be a Christmas movie, but it’s a more nebulous one: it’s our own associations. Ultimately it’s up to us to decide what’s a Christmas movie, isn’t it? The Sound of Music has become a Christmas tradition, even though its story has nothing to do with Christmas at all. (On a more limited note, “My Favorite Things” has become a staple of Christmas songs, and there’s nothing about it at all that’s intrinsic to Christmas.) For me, My Fair Lady is a Christmas movie, because I watched it the first time right around Christmas and that’s just the association I have with it. And my beloved On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which takes place at Christmas, is absolutely a Christmas movie. And I’ll bet there are a lot of families who always watch some completely non-Christmas movie every year at Christmas, because of one tradition or another, so for them, that movie is a Christmas movie.
There are many ways to be a Christmas movie, and I think that’s a good thing. So: in conclusion Your Honor, I insist that Die Hard most certainly is a Christmas movie, and that therefore the score to Die Hard, composed by the wonderful and dearly-missed Michael Kamen, is by extension Christmas music. That being the case, I close with this suite.
A few tabs to close….
Here’s some stuff that’s been languishing in open tabs on my browser:
:: Matt Zoller Seitz on Clint Eastwood’s current movie, both as a movie and as a data point in how movies are exhibited and marketed these days. The movie biz has always been a cynical one run by people who would steal the coins from a dead man’s eyes, but sheesh. Read the article for more. (The article has spoilers for the actual movie, but they’re forewarned and they come pretty late in the piece.)
:: There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of buzz in the fact that Americans are currently slated to launch a crewed mission to the Moon in less than two years, does there? But Swapna Krishna has thoughts on the likelihood of that mission launching as scheduled. Spoiler: she is not optimistic. (I highly recommend Ms. Krishna as a source for space science news. She’s excellent.)
:: I remember years ago when my mother had me read Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World (still a favorite of mine), and one detail in that story (set in rural England sometime in the mid-20th century) that always stuck with me was when Danny and his father eat a couple of apples. The apple they eat is called a “Cox’s Orange Pippin”, which is apparently a very special variety of apple indeed. (To this day I’ve never had one.) See, at the time, the whole idea of special varieties of apples was alien to me: you had Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, and Granny Smith. That was it. Nowadays, the apple is an astonishing source of variety and joy. Here’s why.
:: Sometimes I have a tab open so long that I can’t remember why on Earth I had it open in the first place. Here’s one such thing: 11 places that have the same name in Britain and America. I assume this topic came up on one of the social media sites, but damned if I can remember the context.
:: Here’s a video. I’ve written on the subject of roundabouts before, but this video goes a bit into why Americans have been so slow to adopt what is clearly and objectively a superior way of managing traffic at intersections. I’ve come to rather cynically view roundabouts, train travel, gun control, and universal healthcare as my main Exhibits for the Prosecution when making my case that Americans are stubbornly resistant to obviously good ideas that clearly work better than what we’re doing.
:: I hate to close with a bitter pill about this past election, but here we are. Roxane Gay writes in the New York Times (I think this piece is unlocked, but it might be paywalled now, I’m not really sure how that works) about what the odious results of this election say about us. Spoiler: it’s nothing good.
I have nothing to add to this, other than to note my view that this election represents a collective failure of citizenship in this country. My thoughts are now increasingly tilted toward the possibility that America has entered her inevitable and irreversible decline.
(Comments off for this post.)