GROSS DISTRACTION - a (partial) Die Hard alphabet

A city within the City of Quartz.

DIE HARD, director JOHN McTIERNAN, screenplay JEB STUART and STEVEN E. De SOUZA, cast BRUCE WILLIS, ALAN RICKMAN, ALEXANDER GODUNOV, BONNIE BEDELIA, REGINALD VELJOHNSON, production GORDON COMPANY/SILVER PICTURES/20th CENTURY FOX, 1988, 132 MINUTES.

I decided I’d provide my splendid subscribers with a Christmas special edition of GROSS but now it’s practically 2025 and I feel like an idiot. Anyway, here it is, about half of a Die Hard alphabet.

Assholes. Despicable individuals aren’t necessarily villains. Sometimes they’re thoroughly entertaining. And sometimes they’re just waiting for their fate, set up for a grizzly end. Die Hard has a profusion of assholes - there’s at least one in every level of the police response, one spectacular example in the on-site broadcast media and two or three amongst the violent criminals. The movie’s primary asshole, though, is Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner), the insufferable Nakatomi sales guy who digs his own grave by trying to sell our hero John McClane (Bruce Willis) to the murderous gang. McClane almost gleefully punches Richard Thornburg (William Atherton), the shitty TV reporter, at the end of the movie but if he hadn’t already been shot in the head it would have been Ellis.

Bonds. This is the nub of the operation. Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), the movie’s villain, is after the big stack of bearer bonds in the Nakatomi vault. Wise choice. Bearer bonds are the bitcoin of their day: a security that could be held anonymously and swapped for cash, no questions asked. The last one was issued in the USA in 1982, though, so you might wonder why they’d still be of interest to a gang of Euro-criminals in 1988, but two years after that, a City of London courier was mugged and his briefcase containing £291M of bearer bonds stolen. That’s more than half the value of the Nakatomi heist in a single briefcase, no explosives or guided missiles necessary - the biggest single robbery in modern British history. Issuers were still obliged to redeem these older bonds and they continued to circulate but in 2010 even that stopped. What’s not clear is why a company like Nakatomi Industries - apparently in the global infrastructure business - would need to hold so many anonymous, untraceable paper assets. Fishy, right?

Christmas. Of course it’s a Christmas film. It takes place on Christmas Eve. There’s no virgin birth but there’s a Christ figure; wronged and ultimately redeemed. And he’s God-like, looking down on the events in the tower and in the city around it, laconically dispensing wisdom over his walkie-talkie, protected by his anonymity, until he is revealed and punished - forced to walk barefoot across broken glass, martyred.

Drugs. In Los Angeles at the time the movie is being made, Chief Gates and his hyped-up, showbiz LAPD are in the midst of a huge and divisive gang crackdown aimed at stifling the drug trade in the city. Gates and his proxies have dialed up the hysteria, calling the streets of LA ‘Vietnam’ and comparing the gangs to the ‘murderous militias of Beirut’. Gates is the prototype for subsequent vain and self-serving police chiefs. He turns mass raids into grim TV moments - bringing Nancy Reagan down to watch one. It’s not fancy powdered cocaine they’re trying to suppress, though, it’s the crack variant, prevalent in poorer and black communities. Here in the towers of Century City cocaine use continues. It’s the 1980s. It’s the elite drug of choice - and very popular in the movie business: this may explain the profusion of cocaine movies from the period (and plenty more recent movies that look back on the period nostalgically). I think I count four scenes featuring coke in this film. The cocaine is a convenient shorthand for glamour and hedonism but also for decadence, immorality and vapidity. Gruber’s gang, conspicuously, aren’t using.

Fox. Nakatomi Plaza in the exterior shots is actually 20th Century Fox’s brand new Century City headquarters, finished in the previous year on the corner of the studio’s lot. Studios and producers love this kind of in-joke: part of the real-world segment of the Barbie movie is set in Century City and Mattel’s headquarters is moved from El Segundo in the story. By the time of Die Hard all the important Fox properties already belong to News Corp. Your favourite Christmas movie is a Rupert Murdoch production.

Godunov. The cast of Die Hard is full of bold choices, barely tested wannabes. It’s Alan Rickman’s first studio job, Bruce Willis has had one big TV role but this is his first major movie. Most of the criminal gang are here for their height rather than their acting abilities, but one of them is already a star in another business. Karl, Gruber’s second-in-command, is played by Alexander Godunov who looks like a ballet dancer and is, in fact, literally a ballet dancer. And no ordinary ballet dancer. Before his defection from the Soviet Union in 1979 he’d been principal dancer at the Bolshoi Ballet and was an Honored Artist of the RSFSR. He and Baryshnikov were contemporaries and friends. He died a thoroughly Hollywood death before he was forty, though.

Hostages. This is the era of taking hostages. The preferred action of liberation armies and revolutionaries before 9/11, a period that now seems somehow quite innocent. Planes, trains, cruise ships; heirs and heiresses, politicians, church emissaries. All were targets. At its peak hardly a week passed without a plane being hijacked and flown to Cuba or Yemen or wherever. Late eighties audiences would have been quite comfortable with the idea of a mass hostage-taking - a routine device in the politics of the subaltern and the outsider with a grievance.

Location. Early on we learn that Nakatomi Plaza is in Century City, a real district marketed by its developers as an alternative to LA’s historic downtown. Ownership of the land under Nakatomi Plaza went from Tom Mix, Western movie star who had a ranch there in the 1920s, via Walt Disney and 20th Century Fox and then to aluminium conglomerate Alcoa. They bought the land in the 1960s and began the (real) speculative redevelopment that made (fictional) Nakatomi Plaza possible. The politics of Century City is as complicated and brutal as you’d expect in LA. The story has all the opportunism and cynicism of Chinatown’s grim water war. Mike Davis covers Century City and the expansion of LA in his definitive book about the city’s politics City of Quartz.

Management. Die Hard is full of managers. It’s a festival of dysfunctional management. There’s Nakatomi’s CEO, Joseph Takagi (James Shigeta), a man who looks like the real thing: competent, open (big, generous handshake), humane… but he almost immediately lets us down, brushing off cocaine use in his own office and then, unbelievably, getting himself killed because he won’t give up the security code for his employer’s dodgy bond stash. Never trust a manager who would give up his life for the firm (for he would surely also give up yours). Obviously every senior police officer in the plaza is stupid and self-serving, shouting pointless orders into their radios, bitching about their colleagues, wildly misreading the situation and sending officers to their deaths. That’s a given. McClane’s wife is a top manager at Nakatomi and seems at least competent; diligently securing signatures for the big new contract while everyone else is shagging on their desks and snorting coke at the Christmas party. She’s a grown-up and Takagi’s deputy so we expect her to step up once he’s been killed but tbh she’s not given much to do - she secures a sofa for a pregnant colleague and toilet breaks for the rest. The only genuinely effective manager in the place is Hans Gruber. Smooth, disciplined, brutal. No one challenges him. He has a grasp of the details but also understands the big picture. He’s adaptable and he’s a risk-taker who plays the probabilities. On this occasion it doesn’t work out for him. Those are the breaks.

Policing. All the elements of Hollywood law enforcement are here. We’ve got a single, enterprising hero, isolated and in peril - moral, worldly and practical. We’ve got slow-witted and vain local cops ultimately over-ruled by spoilt, venal, over-armed feds. This version of law enforcement is almost universal in Hollywood. It sets up the state as ridiculous, decadent, beyond redemption and the individual enforcer as the ultimate resource. You’ll find these archetypes - the stupid, corruptible cops alongside honorable, risk-taking lone-operators - in the very first film reviewed here, Traffic in Souls from 1913, and you’ll find two or three releases this year alone that re-use some or all of these elements (I wrote about Rebel Ridge which has all of them plus a lot of paperwork). In this case, though - one of the movie’s real differentiators - there’s also a vital narrative hinge in Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), a sympathetic, disenchanted agent of the state, providing information and encouragement to our hero. His character works because he’s neither state nor outsider, neither rugged individual nor police department drone. Good work Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza.

Skyscrapers. This is a West coast movie, a Los Angeles movie (a San Andreas fault movie). As everybody knows, the economy of Los Angeles, its whole dynamic, is based on constant, ruthless linear expansion, out into the desert and the farmland around it, unlike Manhattan, which could only expand, well, upwards (and has some geological advantages too). LA is the size of a small country - a hundred kilometres from end to end - but it barely has a skyline. There are no real skyscrapers there. The tallest building, even now, is still 354 feet shorter than the Empire State Building. In Century City, the tallest buildings are a pair of stunted WTC knockoffs called the Century Plaza Towers. Somebody should sue these guys because at 44 storeys they barely qualify as towers. Die Hard embraces the low-rise: Nakatomi Plaza has an even more pathetic 35 floors. There’s nothing to it (there’s an atrium, of course, but that’s the extent of the thrills on offer). Gruber falls from the 30th floor. If there’d been a restaurant awning or a big pile of cardboard boxes down there he’d probably have got up and walked away.

Terror. The glamorous marauders who seize Nakatomi Plaza are, we learn, just thieves. They’re somehow less noble for this than they would have been if they’d actually been bloodless Maoists. There’s a paper to be written about the character of this amoral gang. They’re not motivated by liberation or revolution, only by money, $640M to be precise. This gives them the focus they need - the focus of a business with an agile structure. Incentives at Gruber Inc. will presumably be distributed in an approximately corporate manner. The boss will take the lion’s share, as the founder (although we can probably assume there’s a secretive provider of the speculative capital needed to fund the operation behind him). His team will be organised like a pyramid - Theo (Clarence Gilyard) is the tech genius without whom the operation could not proceed so he must be right at the top, taking a significant cut. Karl, second in command, too. There are some weapons and explosives specialists who will be near the top. All the others are apparently idiots and obviously dispensable so they’ll be on a flat rate.

Weapons. Is this the first appearance of a police armoured car in the movies? I don’t think I have the research skills to confirm this. But the movie predicts the militarisation of American policing uncannily. Four years before the LA riots, five years before the spectacular, catastrophic Waco invasion, decades before Ferguson and the Gaza protests, the police force in Die Hard is equipped like a small army. They are, of course, as is necessary, humiliated in short order by the hardened special-forces multitaskers in Gruber’s gang, but this readiness to break out the military hardware has now become a habit.

Zones. Special economic zones, to be specific, like Century City, Canary Wharf, La Défense, the Teesside freeport, Disney’s Florida fastness. Capitalists love special economic zones: areas of land protected from local law, nasty taxes and labour regulations. They’re booming (there are at least ten in California) but they’re not a new thing. The various concessions set up by the European powers in East Asia (Shanghai, Macau, Bengal…) had the same protected status hundreds of years ago, carved out from their host countries and often defended by military garrisons. The logic of the special economic zone is that lower costs and regulation will accelerate development, producing jobs and income for the local economy but they have a second, less prominent function: they liberate parts of an economy from democratic control. They’re mini-states organised as financial entities; a model for the container state often intended, ultimately, to replace it. Residents are reduced to units of labour and consumption. When Thatcher’s government set up the Docklands Development Corporation in East London it was carefully removed from local authority control. Local people found themselves living, for almost twenty years, without democratic representation and with no say in the vast project happening around them. Century City is still a special economic zone.

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• I ought to create a supercut of scenes from Hollywood movies where the implacable, ineffably superior Feds show up to take over - to the dread and disdain of the local cops.

• Die Hard has grossed $143,651,650 since its release, it says here.

• You can bet that when Elon Musk or one of the other plutocrat-astronauts arrives on Mars the first colony will be structured as a special economic zone - subsidies and tax breaks flowing in from the state, profits flowing out to shareholders - and no pesky democracy to slow down the expansion. Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism documents the evolution of the special economic zone.

• Here’s a handy timeline of Century City history, produced by the administration of the Century City special economic zone.

• Mike Davis describes one of Gates’ elaborately stage-managed drug raids in City of Quartz:
  Perhaps 6 April 1989 will go down in history as the first ‘designer drug raid’. As heavily armed and flak-jacketed SWAT commandoes stormed the alleged ‘rock house’ near 51st and Main Street in Southcentral L.A., Nancy Reagan and Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates sat across the street, nibbling fruit salad in a luxury motor home emblazoned ‘THE ESTABLISHMENT’. According to the Times, the former first lady ‘could be seen freshening her make-up’ while the SWATs roughly frisked and cuffed the fourteen ‘narco-terrorists’ captured inside the small stucco bungalow. As hundreds of incredulous neighbors (‘Hey, Nancy Reagan. She’s over here in the ghetto!’) gathered behind police barriers, the great Nay-sayer, accompanied by Chief Gates and a small army of nervous Secret Service agents, toured the enemy fortress with its occupants still bound on the floor in flabbergasted submission. After frowning at the tawdry wallpaper and drug-bust debris, Nancy, who looked fetching in her LAPD windbreaker, managed to delve instantly into the dark hearts at her feet and declare: ‘These people in here are beyond the point of teaching and rehabilitating.’ This was music to the ears of the Chief, whose occupation thrives on incorrigibility. ‘Gates fairly beamed as television cameras pressed in: “We thought she ought to see it for herself and she did. . . . She is a very courageous woman”.’