How Die Hard Broke America

I just watched Die Hard. In some ways it’s prophetic, but IMO it also had a really insidious impact on our culture. So much of what has gone wrong in right wing culture has strong roots there.

Start with the obvious. We have the hero New York cop who happens to be on the scene and defeats 12 heavily armed bad guys. The roots of the NRA nonsense about a good guy with a gun starts here.

We can’t overlook his black cop foil, Al. he doesn’t do anything heroic until the very end, but we learn he stepped back from street work because he shot a 13-year-old boy who had a toy gun. Instead of the boy or his family, we’re supposed to feel empathy with the cop who shot the boy.

The similarity to the Tamir Rice shooting 25 years later is uncanny. Still, it may not be just coincidence. Police are influenced by popular culture, too. Trigger-happy cops are reacting to on-screen violence, as well as real-life pressures.

Of course, Al saves our hero in the end, gunning down one last bad guy. Then, the hero’s wife punches the crass, sociopathic careerist reporter who invaded family’s privacy and put her life in great danger. A real change from earlier Hollywood narratives about intrepid reporters risking everything to report important truths.

The loathing and distrust of media that pervades society is felt most deeply on the right, which Trump was able to tap into and weaponize with his “Fake News” mantra. Certainly, much reporting is sensationalist, more focused on headlines than getting to real truths, but Hollywood has fanned this bonfire.

Sure this rightward shift began earlier in the Reagan years. The Rambo films have much to do with the conspiracy culture which sees government as a Deep State enemy. We can even point to Dirty Harry movies in Nixon era for an idolization of vigilantism.

Still, Die Hard was such a massive hit, it helped shape Hollywood and movies which followed like it. Die Hard set the stage for an all-out assault on liberal culture icons like our media and a reverence for police and authority which allows for blaming all those unarmed black people who we bury with such godawful frequency.

We need to restore the respect for our diversity, for a media which must be free to question authority, and which looks to government to present answers to our problems. Hollywood needs to reckon with its place in helping to popularize the worst elements of right-wing culture, and caused lasting damage to our politics and our planet.

As Hollywood figures out how to go forward in the COVID19 era, it really should re-evaluate its messages to America.