On The Prescience Of Die Hard

My wife and I normally record each night's TV schedule to watch the following night so we can fast-forward through the commercials, but if there's not enough history or animal or true crime stuff, I go looking for a film. The other night, I settled on Die Hard (1988), which neither of us had seen, and for which my expectations were low. After all, it's the dregs of summer season. It turned out not to be High Noon, but it was actually watchable, and remarkably insightful into modern culture very much like the Jason Bourne films that I've already discussed here.

The Bourne films carried the strong subtext that the CIA of Allen Dulles, North by Northwest, and Topaz isn't the CIA we have. But I made the point that the Bourne trilogy appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Remarkably, Die Hard makes a similar point, that the FBI is no longer the FBI of G-men and J Edgar Hoover. And it said it in 1988, long before Ruby Ridge, Waco, the bungling of 9/11, and conspiracies to kidnap Gov Whitmer.

Indeeed, the latest scandal over Richard Trask, the agent who led the undercover team that appears to have been the leadership and most of the co-conspirators in that plot, who was arrested for slamming his wife's head into the night table after a swingers' party, seems the best possible illustration that this is not your grandfather's FBI. Forget the night table, Mr Hoover would have thrown the guy out if there was even a whiff about swingers' parties. Seems like the FBI would be having a better time lately if it paid more attention in general to who's a horndog, but as they say in the government, that's above my pay grade. (By the way, who would want to go to a swingers' party with that guy?)

According to Wikipedia, expectations for the film weren't high. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone had already turned down the lead role, and Bruce Willis was definitely Plan C or worse. But the film was an unintentional success, in part due to Willis's portrayal of the character as an uncertain, conflicted hero forced into his situation.

But I think an unacknowledged factor is the film's depiction of both the Los Angeles Police Department (which had yet to disgrace itself in its handling of the 1992 Rodney King riots) and the FBI, whose failings were still in the future. Somehow, I think the public sensed an authenticity in the film's portrayal of official hot-dogging, cowardice, and careerism that were yet to be fully visible in events.

The broad outlines of the plot are that a New York cop, John McClane (Willis), travels to Los Angeles to reconcile with his estranged wife, who is an executive. He meets her at her company's Christmas party in a high rise. However, a terrorist gang suddenly arrives to seize the building and rob the vault that holds the company's valuables. When it becomes plain that the terrorists intend to kill people, McClane escapes and uses his law enforcement skills to begin killing each of the terrorists, one by one.

The police, despite McClane's efforts to contact them, refuse to take his alarms seriously. Once the terrorist attack becomes impossible to discount or ignore, the LAPD brass arrives, but it decides it can't decide who's the bad guy, and it decides McClane could well be a terrorist himself, what with all the shooting and stuff. Amid LAPD's dithering, the FBI arrives and takes command, but they agree with LAPD that McClane is a terrorist. It's plain by then that no matter any other outcome, McClane is destined for a cell at the Colorado supermax, just down the corridor from the likes of Ted Kaczynski.

The climactic scene has the terrorists shepherding the remaining hostages onto the high-rise's roof, on the pretext that helicopters will be sent to rescue them in accordance with their demands. However, McClane suddently realizes that in fact, the terrorists mean to blow up the roof once the hostages assemble there, so he has no choice but to get to the roof himself and, with no other option, he fires his weapon over their heads to get them to go back downstairs.

Just at that moment, the FBI helicopters arrive and see McClane firing his weapon over the hostages' heads, which only confirms their view that he's a terrorist. A couple of hot-dogging FBI agents in the helicopter congratulate each other that they've caught the bad guy in the act. However, the terrorists then blow up the high rise roof, although the hostages have barely escaped due to McClane's quick action, but the explosion catches the FBI helicopter, which crashes, and the hot-dogging agents are killed.

There's more action to go, but the key event is that at least the agents who could have testified against McClane and put him in the supermax are out of the picture, which strikes me as perhaps the unintended moral of the whole film.

According to Wikipedia, "Deemed 'culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant' by the United States Library of Congress, Die Hard was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2017." Along, I might remind the reader, with Animal House.