GROSS DISTRACTION - a complete 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.
Efficiency. Our villain, like a lot of leaders in the movies, is a student of scientific management. What Gruber has assembled, for his mega-heist, is a well-capitalised ad-hoc firm, optimised for a single project and with a rigid division of labour (the explosives guy, the computer guy, the heavies…). What he’s up against, though, is an individual: a freelancer from another era, a cowboy who instinctively understands that he can overcome his preening, optimised foe by bringing the chaos (see also M for Management below).
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 (he plays a wise-cracking playboy private detective - an unpromising origin for an action hero who walks on broken glass) 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.
Improvisation. It’s not strength or dumb courage that secures victory for McClane in the tower. It’s adaptability, a willingness to act in the moment and to improvise. He’s not the first implausibly resourceful action hero - working outside the system, making good use of what he finds - but McClane, cut off from back-up and unable to trust anyone, became the prototype for a whole category.
Jurisdiction. Who’s in charge? Who has authority? Here we have at least four competing candidates: the hyper-organised criminals; incompetent, bureaucratic law enforcement; the ineffectual paternalist capitalism of the Nakatomi Corporation and the insurrectionist improviser who humiliates them all (see also M for Management)
Knowledge. One of Gruber’s flaws is that he’s an intellectual. He claims to have had a classical education. He probably got it at the Free University of Berlin, centre of student radicalism in the sixties and seventies. We know he was active in the fictional Volksfrei Movement (an analogue for the very real and very prolific armed group the Red Army Faction) but suspect that along the way he probably acquired his high-end managerial and finance skills as a post-grad in Mannheim or Cologne - with the rest of the German business and administrative elite. Lieutenant McClane got his education on the streets in small-town New Jersey and on the job in New York City. This is essentially the standard Hollywood clash of epistemologies. In the movies street knowledge always beats book knowledge.
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.
