John McClane: Just Die, Already!

Let me tell you a story I'd heard about Bruce Willis.  My brother told it to me, to explain why he never sees any of his films.

Ages ago, my brother and his then-roommate were watching tv when suddenly this new show comes on called Moonlighting.   My brother's roommate is disgusted when he sees who the costar is.  Seems he went to college with Bruce Willis, and did a few plays with him.   During one production, there was a scene where Willis was supposed to affect the act of urination.  Apparently, at one performance, Willis didn't pretend.   This royally torqued off everyone working on the play, especially those who had to clean the stage afterward.  My brother's friend made my brother promise that he would never see anything with Bruce Willis in it.   Though my brother hasn't seen this friend in about twenty years, he claims to have held up his promise.

So, if this story is true, then okay: Bruce Willis didn't become an asshole because of Hollywood.  He was always a jerk.   But let's be fair, that doesn't really make him stand out among his peers, and he's not, nor has he ever been, a train wreck like a lot of celebs.  He does some funny bits when he goes on Letterman, doesn't really take himself all that seriously, and once in a while will put in a performance that impresses (he rises above the predictable material in The Sixth Sense, for example).

But when his epitaph is written, it's going to be the classic line from his ridiculously enduring character John McClane, the hero of Die Hard: yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker! In the recent Times magazine, Adam Sternbergh contemplates why the Die Hard  films have survived twenty-five years.   Ultimately, the article is more personal than social: Sternbergh became hooked by the first film when he was a teenager, and though he admits he doesn't like any of the other three sequels (the fourth sequel is coming very soon), Die Hard remains a formative entertainment for him, much the way Ghostbusters -- a film I saw when I was Sternbergh's age when he saw Die Hard -- remains that kind of film for me.

As for Sternbergh's discussion of what makes John McClane so appealing, I'm not sure I'm convinced.   That the franchise is still a gold mine is unquestionable.   The last film was the most successful of the four.   He dismisses the notion that McClane appeals because he's an Everyman, and let's be honest, that stopped after the second film.  McClane passes into icon status in the third film.   Sternbergh claims that when you take away the action film gimmicks, you have that ordinary guy, with the films apparently "designed to evoke the desperate clammy sense of frustration you feel during a visit to the DMV, times a million." 

But you really can't separate McClane from all the silly action nonsense around him.  And even in the first film, there's a sense that what we're seeing is Bruce Willis.  It's interesting to note that John Tiernan, who directed the first and third films, said that they basically created the McClane character around Willis himself.  But Bruce Willis is not just an average schlep.  He's Bruce Willis, movie star.  Certainly this is the case by the time we get to the second film.   In reading up on North by Northwest for my Hitchcock class, I came across a useful point made by the philosopher Stanley Cavell about the Cary Grant character: whatever else we can say about Roger Thornhill -- he's likes his booze, his a control freak, he's a womanizer, etc.  -- we never forget that he is Cary Grant, and all that discourse that comes with it.  McClane may give off some kind of working-class vibe, but he's still Bruce Willis, just as Rooster Cogburn is John Wayne.   You can't keep putting him in the same ridiculous situation he was in for the first film, but you can let his persona carry the day when sloppy writing and ramshackle plotting can't.   And McClane's endurance has less to do with his "relatable-ness" to us than it does to the fact that he's still good box office, like Bond. 

The first film is a classic of its kind.  I remember seeing the second one in the theater and loving it, but everything has slipped from my memory about the film.   The others just don't matter.  I"m hoping that the next one is called Abbott and Costello Die Hard.