how to live with a mistake
by Douglas Messerli
Steven
E. de Souza and Jeb Stuart (screenplay, based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp), John McTiernan (director)
Die Hard / 1988
I
never think of myself as a moviegoer even slightly interested in what is
generally called “action” movies. I abhor violence, I am a firm believer of
gun-control, and have never been interested in what I perceive as the
macho-boy-American shoot-em-up, beat-em-up, kick-butt genres of American
film-making that seems to do just fine at the box-office despite my inevitable
indictments. Clint Eastwood’s early “make my day” moxie and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
rustling muscle-headed Austrian accented insinuations have left me cold.
How to explain, then, my delight in films
such as John McTiernan’s Die Hard or
Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One,
both motion pictures which I have watched numerous times with intense pleasure.
I might explain away the second as a kind of political thriller—which I may
explore in another essay— but the first….? There are always exceptions when one
loves movies! Perhaps even my title of this essay might explain it, “How to
Live with a Mistake,” a line from the film itself.
Certainly
the “story,” as I express time and again in my film essays, is of little
importance. A group of pretend German terrorists takes over the 30th
floor, the offices of the Japanese Nakatomi Corporation, where the staff is
busy celebrating Christmas Eve, in order to steal the corporations’ 600,000 million
in bonds in its safe. What does very much matter, however, are the intense
details of the plot the team has hatched in order to accomplish the task, and
part of the joy of this movie is the precision in which the villains employ
their complex machinations as they move from simple takeover, to the
involvement of local L.A. police authorities, to the appearance of F.B.I.
agents—all calculated with evil relish in an attempt to capture the complex
codes to the safe by, in the end, forcing the governmental agents to close down
the entire electrical gridwork to the Westside Los Angeles neighborhood—on
Christmas Eve nonetheless!
Of far greater background significance is
the fact that the New York policeman McClane has determined to “come home”—or
at least show up at his wife’s home—for the holidays to his estranged,
super-capable executive wife, Holly Gennaro-McClane (Bonnie Bedelia), whom he
has, in a standard 1980s sexual stand-off, refused to comprehend as the
superior income producer, preferring to remain entrenched in his New York
police activities. McClane is, in short, an outsider visiting what he perceives
as a very strange new world in Los Angeles—a man feeling completely incapable
of fitting into that new world he encounters. But, of course, once all hell
breaks loose, with the terrorists-thieves imposing themselves upon this
alternative space, he feels right at home, determined to save the day, in the
end, realizing through his involvement with the local authorities—particularly
with the personable hometown cop. The cop, like McClane, has made a mistake:
Sgt. Powell has accidentally killed a 13 year-old boy, and consequently has
never been able to use a gun again.
In fact, as I’ve mentioned, every last
one of the authorities and individuals of this film share McClane’s dilemma:
all are men who make ridiculous mistakes. Only he, as the film’s hero and the
local former street cop get the opportunity to correct their ways. And that is,
quite obviously, the center of the film’s frenetic action.
Throughout most of this work, McClane,
playing out a kind of Roy Rodgers cowboy sensibility while dressed as a
barefoot, white tee-shirted Christ, becoming more and more bloodied as the
scenes progress, finally redeems himself. Willis plays the role with a kind of
macho sarcasm that is so endearing that you’d have to be a Grinch to hate the
man. And he is, in the end, a true hero, along with his slouching beast of a
limo driver, Argyle, on his way to Bethlehem. Along the way, the film shows
that not only the terrorists, but local news reporters and even phone police
responders are equally incompetent—none of them having been prepared for the
strangers’ intrusion.

But the truly important elements of this
film have little to do with those interesting plot resonances. For at its heart
McTiernan’s film is an abstract portrayal of a single man against the
industrialized complex. Even the company head, Nakatomi head executive Joseph
Yoshiobut Takagi (James Shigeta), shot to death early in the movie, has no
control over the company computer codes nor the dark computerized controls of
the spaces of the building in which his company is housed. In fact, no one—employees,
the cop McClane, the local police, nor F.B.I agents—seems to comprehend the
extensive limits of the world they are facing. Only the so-called terrorists
have perceived the extent of the inhuman world the society has created, and
they easily make use of this in their attempts to close it down and control it.
What McClane must single-handedly discover is just how dark that inhuman world
is and how to turn it into a situation which he might, as a single human being,
take back control.
I watched this film, this time around—I’d
previously seen the film on the large screen and on television several times—on
a Netflix tape played on my computer. Every time I stopped the film for a
bathroom break, a glass of wine, or a telephone interruption, I came back to a
scene that was hardly recognizable: a shadow of a being spread across the space
of a concrete wall, an eye peering through a strange concrete structure of a
horizontal slit, McClane staring down the shaft of an endless elevator well. Time
and again, individuals are placed along a corner of descending steel walls,
cornered against cascading electrical cables, forced to propel themselves
against panels of glass. At other times McClane even uses his symbolic penis
(his stolen machine gun) to pinion himself along a strap dangling, spider-like,
into what seems like interminable space. Bodies are spewed from crashed-through
windows. Entire floors of empty offices neatly set up in rows of computers are
machine-gunned down into the glass components of their capsuled entities. As
much as this is a battle of man against man, this film portrays—far more
effectively—a world in which man is at war with the societal constructs he has
created, a world of concrete, glass, and fiber-optics.
The actual encounter with the enemy,
McLane and his wife against the evil Gruber, is a comic one, the ridiculous “Roy
Rodgers” facing off his evil opponent with an absurd Christmas greeting, his
wife finally loosing Gruber’s grip so that he falls from that 30th
floor into empty space. Film lore recounts that McTiernan let Rickman fall several
moments before the time he was to have been released, the shock of that early
abandonment clearly registered on the actor’s startled face.

McClane, strangely enough, is a quite
innocent hero. His only real failures was to have given up a relationship with
his wife out of generational male role preoccupations. In McTiernan’s fantasy,
he saves the day—and saves his relationship in the process. But in real life,
the Grubers of the world—both real terrorists and Wall Street robber barons—can
easily destroy our societies, particularly the society constructions which
themselves seem pre-determined to destroy the world in which we live.
Los Angeles,
December 13, 2012
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