Die Hard's mythic power
Die Hard is film as Myth. Totally incredible and ridiculous and soppy ending and easy to mock (doctors who saw the movie estimated that John McClane suffered at least four life-ending injuries), but it transcends conventional critical apparatus. It’s ridiculousness is irrelevant because it is true at a deeper level: one guy standing up against impossible odds, love triumphant. We want to believe this. We know the world is not like this, but we would love it to be so.
There is a strain in American film-making which is mythic. High Noon, The Magnificent Seven, Casablanca are all mythic films. They embody something more than mere plot and action. They create their own mythos. They are the filmic equivalent of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. They become embedded in our psyche; other films reference them; they become foundational.
I adore Westerns, and Westerns are particularly good at this mythologising – The Searchers (with John Wayne), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the John Ford trilogy (again with Wayne) of the 1940s. It is not accidental that Die Hard name-checks Wayne. Die Hard has been called “a cowboys and Indians film set in the Towering Inferno”. Bruce Willis is the loner facing impossible odds – like Gary Cooper in High Noon and Wayne in so many films. American movies feed on such movies and such myths.
Westerns, the lone hero facing (alleged) barbarians, America’s great “civilising” mission, bringing peace and progress to the “Wild West” – these are all key to American myth-making, and Hollywood feeds on them. The slaughter of the Native Americans was of course a genocide, as some Americans now recognise, but mostly the myth of America’s “manifest destiny” remains steadfast. Print (or better still film) the legend.
European cinematic tradition is much less interested in such myth-making. I make an exception of Hitchcock, who was a supreme mythmaker, but maybe that’s why he had to leave Britain after his great 1930s films and make his career in America. Powell and Pressburger and David Lean are other Europeans capable of rising to mythic movie-making, but they are exceptions.
Generally, European movie-making is more realistic, more rooted, stagier, boxier, more earnest, less inherently cinematic. That is its strength and its weakness. It thinks small. American movie-makers – some anyway – think big; dream dreams; create myths (if they are lucky). Spielberg would like to create myths, but actually just makes bad films (discuss). Tarantino would like to create myths, but just makes very violent films (though I accept he is in many ways a genius, with a sure grasp of kinetic film-making; his films have unforgettable drive and energy).
Frank Capra could create myths – It’s A Wonderful Life is a mythic film par excellence. Disney’s whole shtick is myth-creation and in the great Disney films – Snow White, Bambi – it works. Mythic films are greater than conventionally “great” films because they create their own memories and associations. That’s why Die Hard has somehow become a Christmas movie. It has created its own language. Critics back in 1988 were at best lukewarm about the film. Audiences were more enthusiastic – and they were right. It is ridiculous, unbelievable, manipulative movie, but it is a great (because mythic) film. The most memorable films are not dramas but dreams – or nightmares. Realism is for pernickety Europeans – myopic rather than mythic movie-makers.
Seeing the film (for the first time, amazingly) this Christmas also made me wonder whether perceptions of it changed after 9/11. People trapped in a tall, burning building; bodies falling from windows. How did post-2011 audiences process that? Was it that the myth was now so encoded in the public mind that 9/11 couldn’t shift it? Audiences must see that association and yet be able to deal with it. Die Hard has become an imperishable classic – and bizarrely a Christmas classic – because it defies attempts to rationalise it. By becoming mythic, it becomes unchallengeable and uncategorisable. It just is.
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