Craig Mazin: Well, I mean, look, the gender politics are incredibly regressive. I mean, we have to talk about for a second how brilliantly this movie encapsulates the Reagan era. So very briefly you have a story about a woman who dares to have her own career. And her husband doesn’t want to follow her to Los Angeles because he’s a New York cop. And bizarrely has a backlog of cases? That’s not how policing works. He can just go ahead and be a cop in LA if he wants to. He can join that police department, I’m sure.
So this is the root of their marriage problems. She has dropped his name and is using her own. At the end, the way he saves her ultimately is by getting rid of this token of her success, which is the Rolex watch.
John August: The Rolex watch.
Craig: She earned because she’s really good at her job. That has to go. And also she takes his name again because she must resume being his property, fully more. And this is really where I love Die Hard for being so Reagan era and honestly Trumpian in this regard, too. The ethos of the movie is that the people in charge of stuff like the bureaucrats in charge of law enforcement and the FBI, they don’t know anything. They’re stupid and incompetent. The media elites are terrible, unethical liars who don’t care about anything. The only people that can save you in the end – oh, and Europeans are trash.
John: Yeah.
Craig: The only people who can save you in the end are just good old American men.
John: Working class men.
Craig: Working class men who are constantly rolling their eyes at the stupidity of those pencil neck “experts.” The insanity of the way that these police go about their job, not the police man we’re rooting for, but the police in charge. So like we’re procedure junkies now. We were not in 1988. So we watch this movie and we’re like, huh, I guess that’s how the police might. So there’s a cop car that’s been riddled with bullets, and a body also riddled with bullets has fallen out of a building onto the cop car. But the deputy chief of police is like, meh, I’m sure it’s nothing. OK, I buy it. No.
John: No. All right, but let’s talk about the gender politics for one second before we get into this, because looking at Bruce Willis’s character arc which is shallow but it is there, McClane does say, “Tell my wife I’ve been a jerk. I should have been more supportive.” He does have that epiphany as it comes through it. So I would say that they’ve drawn that relationship in a way that is meaningful within the course of the movie as presented. And I did like that it didn’t go out of its way to punish Holly’s character for being successful and being ambitious. They try to acknowledge that she should be able to do these things. The movie as a whole, everything gets destroyed, but I didn’t feel like they were trying to single her out.
And even though she is the woman who is being rescued, it didn’t have the very classic rescue princess tropes. She didn’t feel helpless through a lot of it. She was never screaming or panicked.
Craig: No.
John: She was incredibly competent.
Craig: But in the end they damseled her.
John: They did damsel her.
Craig: And it’s definitely a movie about a man rescuing a woman. She’s perfect. She has no flaws.
John: True.
Craig: Except for her weird insistence on being successful. [laughs] And a good mom. The Rolex thing is sort of startling. And the fact that at the end she’s like, “I am – no, my name is Holly McClane.” Look, it was 1988.
