I am happy with the progress that I’m making on my comic project. Not a lot to really say beyond that. I think it’s going well, and I’ll be finished with it in the spring. It’s true that comics takes far more labor than most outsiders and beginners realize. Fair warning before you get in. I guess. To me, the amount of effort involved is what makes it worthwhile. I get time to connect to and understand my art, despite my delays in processing. I also get to analyze and learn and grow over the course of a single project, in a way that I can’t in other media, due to the time input and drafting stages. And in the end, I can look at a book and see how much of my life went into it, and that’s pretty cool.
This week, I find myself thinking about Die Hard again, as I do every year. I agree it’s silly to bring it up every Christmas, because I’m confident I’m correct in its definitive Christmas movie-ness. Yet somehow, I get worked up about it, and so I have no choice but to write about it in an attempt to find the core of my annoyance. I’ve been thinking lately, in relation to Christmas music as well, that a predominant view of the Christmas canon is social, i.e. it’s about what the list-maker thinks other people will accept as Christmas. It’s not an unjustifiable view, of course, because it’s a holiday, a social event, and traditions are borne of what people agree to do together. My perspective is based in wanting an objective definition of what constitutes Christmas for people to connect back to. There’s a wonderful CollegeHumor sketch about the conflict of these viewpoints, from a series about Christmas they did one year.
I think I may have come into view of something important to me about Die Hard in contemplating that distinction. In the past, I described the overall contours of the movie as a man learning to put aside his pride and accept that family is the most important thing. To me, that’s a very Christmas theme, because it’s ultimately a gift-giving holiday, and a proper gift-giving spirit is centered on selflessness and thoughtful consideration; pride can only get in the way of that, so by refocusing on his family, John McClane is moved closer to the true meaning of Christmas. There’s also the greed of Hans Gruber as the embodiment of selfishness, and his conflict with Karl over the death of his brother signifies his hollow and uncaring heart in this time where people gather with those they love. I also want to reiterate how the movie opens. John is coming in a prideful man, wanting to reconcile but not knowing how to. He’s a New York cop coming to socially liberated California, and the first thing he sees at the airport is a young couple disregarding traditional modesty, the sort of patriarchal value that John thinks family should be about. Soon after, he asks limo driver Argyle to play Christmas music, and Argyle says the rap song playing is Christmas music; indeed it is, which is probably something that white audiences in the late eighties hadn’t encountered before, given how young the genre was at the time. In other words, one of the first scenes in the movie is the director staring you right in the eyes and saying, “This isn’t what you expect a Christmas movie to be.”
All of which brings me to the obvious comparison between Hans Gruber and the Grinch. Hans is literally there to rob a Christmas party, and his whole deal is to play-act as a sophisticated terrorist condemning the unjust power and sins of multinational corporations like Nakatomi, not unlike the Grinch criticizing the materialism he observed in the holiday. However, I began focusing on a very important distinction between the two: Hans is bluffing the whole time, while the Grinch is fully sincere. While the Grinch can be seen as a misguided revenge against consumer capitalism by traditionalists, who discount the spirit that the Whos are maintaining, Hans is disingenuous from the start. He doesn’t care about any of the values Christmas represents, he doesn’t care about all those terrorists he may have gotten freed during his police negotiations. He is the consumerism and materialism that the Grinch was so infuriated by.
Viewed in that light, the robbery isn’t the Grinch stealing Christmas, so much as it is Christmas being attacked by the dark forces of capitalism. Not a traditionalist Christmas entirely about religion and family and whatnot, but a modern Christmas in America today. The one day where we give in to materialism while struggling to maintain the core social and personal functions of the holiday — like how the Nakatomi Corporation is celebrating a major business deal with their holiday party. It’s interesting to consider Hans’s posturing in that context, because of how often the systems that control us will co-opt our true and justified frustrations as a means of control. We’ve all seen and constantly reference the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits.” Nakatomi and other businesses like them shouldn’t be let off the hook, and it’s a fair shot to say that Die Hard does by making the villains outside criminals, even for ease of storytelling and “avoiding politics.” You can see a perhaps more nuanced framing in the movie Violent Night, where the thieves taking over the holiday party are working with people on the inside. But I digress.
By contrast, we still have John McClane’s character arc of facing his mortality and realizing that in the end, none of his pride compares to his wife and children. I think that’s still a solid read of what he’s going through, and it’s indeed a very Christmas-y story focused on traditional values and the real spirit of the holiday. That’s why an action movie makes so much sense here, right? It’s a literal battle between the abject greed that threatens to destroy Christmas and the core traditions that the holiday is meant to represent. What I think is pretty interesting about that conflict is that John’s arc isn’t about traditionalism winning out over evil. His values are in the stone age, as Holly points out. Holly has a wonderful career as a high-power businesswoman in New Age California, working for a Japanese company. That company is still ruled by traditional values, and Holly is having to fight tooth and nail against that to rise to her position, as evidenced by her going by her maiden name to avoid discrimination as a married woman. She is the rising force of modernity trying to birth something new and warm and inclusive in a stagnant world that is obsessed with masculine control. John’s arc is about finding his own place in all of that. His pride is wrapped up in traditional views of the relation of man and woman, where he should be in charge and his wife should serve him. While facing death across this tower, he’s constantly on the defensive in every respect, and has to find victory through cunning and scheming, going against his view of himself as the hammer pounding down nails. The final fight with Karl brings that into focus, with Karl’s overwhelming physical force beating John in a direct fight; his combat superiority even allows him to overcome weaponry when he easily knocks John’s gun out of his hand. John only wins by using tools that fully eschew physical ability; anyone could hang another person with a chain on a winch. By the end, John McClane has realized that there’s nothing to be ashamed about with giving up an obsessive view of macho masculinity, and indeed it’s a necessary condition to survive into the future. John’s arc is about modernizing traditions and accepting the present day in favor of holding ruthlessly onto the past. This change in traditional views is what can ultimately triumph over greed and heartlessness, which themselves rely on the force and aggression traditional to masculinity. It’s only by being present-minded and considering the feelings and experiences of others that you can connect to them and give of your love selflessly, while also recognizing and rejecting the emptiness of pure materialism.
What I find so compelling about this reading of the film is what I think draws me so close to it in the first place: This is an entirely secular view of Christmas, and a more modern and progressive one at that. Religious traditionalism isn’t what wins out over greed, and in fact the film doesn’t even attempt to touch on the role of religion. I grew up an atheist, and I also grew up celebrating Christmas. It’s a consumer holiday, after all, an unsurprising form given how it was used to colonize European religion and culture. Which is to say, much like how Hans’s disingenuous criticisms of capitalism are on the money, I grew up attracted to the spirit of selflessness and do-goodery of Santa Claus, a Coca-Cola mascot. I do believe in the values Christmas is supposed to represent, which is why working a retail Christmas is so grating. It’s why I get fired up about the veneration of the paint-by-numbers Christian nationalist propaganda on Hallmark being framed as Christmas-y despite only using the holiday as a setting, the exact thing people say about Die Hard. This movie is both a celebration of human values no matter their source in your life and a repudiation of the nostalgia and traditionalism that bind the holiday to regressive religiosity (without being anti-religion). And it does so while being a totally rad action movie, which shouldn’t be such a deal-breaker for people who unquestioningly accept Gremlins and Home Alone as Christmas movies.
So, yeah, Die Hard is a great Christmas movie, and I’m not saying that to be edgy and different. Christmas, like any holiday, is defined by the things you did growing up with your family. I grew up in one that shared these wonderful values, and that would gladly watch Die Hard for Christmas.
Weekly Art Blog 12/14-12/21/2025
Life in the Gutters 