The Films of 1988: Pumpkinhead

Bolted doors and windows barred,

Guard dogs prowling in the yard,

Won't protect you in your bed,

Nothing will, from Pumpkinhead.

- Pumpkinhead (a poem by Ed Justin)

A contemporary Grimm Fairy Tale, the 1988 horror film Pumpkinhead (directed by the late Stan Winston) is also something more than that general description implies. The film actually serves as an example of modern, cinematic folklore. In the Jungian sense of that term, it contends explicitly with the human unconscious and human archetypes.

Pumpkinhead is the story of kindly Ed Harley (Lance Henriksen), a man and father who sees his young son, Billy (Matthew Hurley) recklessly killed by a group of irresponsible tourists: dirt bikers led by the brutish Joel (John Di Aquino).

After his boy's death, Harley visits an old witch, Haggis, seeking help. 

Alas, even this sorceress cannot raise the dead. 

Instead, the old crone suggests a wicked alternative: Ed can make his vengeance manifest in the form of an invincible demon called Pumpkinhead. Ed once saw that very monster in childhood, in 1957, and so he follows the witch's instructions for conjuring this monstrous Personification of Vengeance.

Before long, Pumpkinhead goes on a vicious murder spree -- a surrogate for Ed -- attacking Joel and all his friends and eventually murdering them in horrible, merciless ways.

However, Ed soon begins to see the nature of the terror he has willfully unleashed on Earth, sharing Pumpkinhead's "sight" at critical moments. 

Ed then comes to the realization that he must pay the ultimate price to curtail the evil he has loosed on the world...

When discussing folklore, Swiss philosopher Carl Jung pinpointed specific universal character archetypes, many of which are given a new life in this Winston horror film. 

Henriksen's Ed Harley, the film's protagonist, is a manifestation of the Ego. 

He is a man of gentleness and reason, who has repressed his "emotional" past (the vision of Pumpkinhead) and now lives in relative seclusion with his son, far from the dangers of noisy city life. 

We have every reason to believe that Ed is a "good" salt-of-the-earth type character, at least until his quest for justice turns punitive; becoming a quest for vengeance.

Pumpkinhead himself is another Jungian archetype: "The Shadow." He is the opposite of the Ego (Ed) but with qualities nonetheless present in the Ego, only ones not identified or openly acknowledged. 

In other words, Pumpkinhead is representative of Ed's buried, undetected blood lust; his vengeance personified. These blood-thirsty, merciless qualities have always been present in Ed, we must believe, but without a catalyst (the death of his beloved boy), they would never have boiled to the surface and found expression.

Ego and Shadow are connected in another way too: inside the very shape of Pumpkinhead. The beast soon begins to take on the facial features of the man who raised him: Ed. So part of Ed -- the ugly part -- is literally inside the demon. They Ego and the Shadow share "sight," they share a face, and they share a destiny: damnation.

Finally, we come to Billy, a blond-haired little boy. 

He represents an archetype that Jung believed was present in every one of us: The Child. 

The child symbolizes innocence, naivete, the future, tomorrow, even treasure. To Ed, Bill is indeed the greatest treasure in the material world; the innocent thing to be protected from an increasingly cruel, loud, and fast modern world. 

Billy is Ed's hope for a better future, and Pumpkinhead features many beautiful, sweet scenes (including one at a kitchen table...) that involve Ed and little Billy -- father and son -- living their life of togetherness and fellowship. 

Though Henriksen is often called upon to play sinister roles, it is his tender, fatherly side that resonates most powerfully with me, as both a viewer and a film critic. It's a side you often see on display in two of his best productions: Pumpkinhead and Millennium. 

And it's also a side that brings forward, with great power (and emotion...), the scope of Ed Harley's loss; the scope of his pain and suffering. 

With Billy gone, Ed has lost his hope for the future; his purpose for living. He has lost all his tomorrows. So when Ed seeks vengeance, the audience is definitely on his side. We know he's a good man; we understand what he's lost and we -- with him -- demand justice.

But folklore -- again in the Jungian definition of that word -- always serves a specific moral purpose.

It excavates the unconscious, the very instincts and failings of mankind as a species. It intentionally deals in stereotypes and absolutes so as to make a cogent point, and in Pumpkinhead that is indeed the case.

 Billy is not just sweet...he is angelic. 

And Pumpkinhead is not just Vengeance made manifest, but the epitome of Vengeance Made Manifest: an ugly, snarling, horrible, murderous, unstoppable, sacrilegious demon. 

Ed is not just tortured, but he is tortured in a Biblical sense, like Job himself. 

The point of Pumpkinhead, of course, is that "two wrongs don't make a right," and that vengeance is not the same thing as justice. 

Vengeance is something else entirely: the unquenchable need to inflect some greater pain on a person who has wronged you. The Bible writes of "an eye for an eye" because violence tenfold against your enemy was too draconian, too horrible. That's explicitly Ed's sin in Pumpkinhead, seeking an out-of-proportion punishment for the crime of murder. 

But our emotions are engaged in this remarkable horror film -- and our imaginations are stirred -- by the universal, almost stereotypical nature of the beautiful child, the bereaved Dad, and the monster from Hell.

Like the best horror films ever made, Pumpkinhead remains determinedly anti-violence (and anti-vengeance) -- in much the same manner as Wes Craven's misunderstood Last House on the Left (1972) -- because it it points to a painful and often forgotten human verity: vengeance solves nothing. 

And the cost to the person pursuing vengeance is often, literally, his soul.

In Pumpkinhead, Ed is forced to reckon with the fact that he has called an unearthly presence to right an earthly wrong. His response to a tragedy was understandable, but ultimately out-of-proportion. The teens in the films are careless and rude, and they did kill Billy in that incident. But Joel -- who is reckless and negligent -- is actually guilty of simply being an arrogant, thoughtless asshole. He never set out with malice to hurt anyone. 

The wronged Ed, by contrast, does proceed with malice. He calls a demon that doesn't discriminate between victims, that doesn't weigh evidence, but merely judges ALL the involved teens as guilty, despite their varying levels of responsibility. Again, this is not justice, and Ed learns that fact the hard way.

In Pumpkinhead, the Ego unleashes the Shadow, a force of incredible evil, and in process poisons his own soul. 

I always wonder: what would Billy think of his father's conjuration of the beast? Isn't Ed's decision to revenge Billy's death, actually, the very thing that destroys Ed's goodness? That destroys the innocence inside him?

These are the questions that the original Pumpkinhead contemplates with great style and intelligence, and it is rewarding to view a horror film in the decade of Death Wish-sequels, Chuck Norris, Dirty Harry and Rambo that advocates a stance against vigilantes and eye-for-an-eye "justice." 

Pumpkinhead sees no benefit, no reward, no healing in blood lust. Even more commendably, the film offers a didactic lesson: Ed sought revenge but didn't understand how how messy and monstrous revenge could be until faced with it through Pumpkinhead's inhuman, eyes.

Pumpkinhead is a beautifully crafted horror film, one routinely aglow with a cold, blue-gray palette, and heavy on oppressive atmosphere and atmospherics (including fog and mist). The film seems to exist outside any specific modern decade, granting it a timeless, universal quality that matches the theme about unchanging human nature. And the pumpkin patch where Pumpkinhead is born is not soon forgotten: a Stygian landscape of ruin...as though vengeance has made the earth itself lifeless and decrepit.

So many horror films trade in black-and-white homilies, but Pumpkinhead even opens the door to ambiguity, particularly in the depiction of the sorcerer witch, Haggis. 

Essentially a "neighborhood witch" that expresses the tensions between country-folk and city folk and between the natural and supernatural worlds, her role is never exactly clarified in the screenplay or by director Winston. Essentially, she sends Ed to Pumpkinhead, but is it because she divines his purpose (vengeance) and wishes to expedite that purpose? Or is it because she seeks to destroy Ed's soul? Is she just using necromancy and other tricks of her trade to facilitate a "customer's" order, or is she a more sinister agent who gets something personal from the corruption of the innocent?

By utilizing Jungian archetypes (the Ego, the Shadow, the Child), and by focusing intently on a shared trait of our contemporary culture (the desire for personal revenge after a crime), Pumpkinhead dramatizes a universal tale about the human condition. The film's characterizations are "well-developed for the genre," (The Houston Chronicle, October 14, 1988), and the film has "heart...and a touch of sweetness" (The Daily Morning News), but more than that, it serves as a statement against the times in which it was crafted. It sees revenge as a wrong doubled; not as a wrong corrected.

Shakespeare wrote that "The rarer action is /In virtue than in vengeance." (The Tempest, Act V: Scene I), a plea for people to forgive their enemies rather than punish them. It's human nature, perhaps to hate those who hurt us, but Pumpkinhead is a reminder that revenge actually solves nothing. In presenting this moral point with archetypal clarity, Pumpkinhead serves ably as modern American folklore, not to mention thought-provoking cautionary tale.

Cult-Movie Review: Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)

Upon viewing Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) this week, I was struck with an illuminating thought. 

There are two kinds of horror movies in 1970s and 1980s franchises.

The first kind of movie is an artistic masterpiece, one that thrives on visual imagery, on symbolism, and on subtext. In this category, I land movies such as Halloween (1978), Phantasm (1979), A Nightmare on Elm Street and Clive Barker’s original masterpiece, Hellraiser (1987).  These films operate on both a literal level and a metaphorical one.

And then there’s the second kind of horror movie in these franchises, which viewers will often detect in the first sequel.

This second brand of franchise horror film eschews the overt, careful artistry of the first film and doubles down instead on internal mythology.  In other words, the details of the world are hammered out, and character motivations are more deeply explained. A sketch is colored in, essentially, but in terms of symbolism some things get lost, forgotten, or over-written.

Why do horror franchises from this era operate in this fashion?

Well, perhaps because symbolic imagery and sub-text may be limited to a specific, singular narrative or set of characters. That imagery may be beautiful, canny and informative, yet when time comes for a sequel with a new story, new characters, and even a new setting, it is hard to sustain it. The zeitgeist has changed, for one thing, and so symbols change. 

Therefore, intrepid filmmakers turn to the internal consistencies of the world where they work. Like the idea that Michael Myers must have a concrete motivation for his murders, and is thus the sibling of Laurie Strode.

Perhaps this is why sequels so rarely live up to the originals. They don’t pinpoint an adequate new sub-text or deep imagery to sustain the series. So instead, additional concrete details are provided.

Yet, inescapably, familiarity is the enemy of horror. The more we know, the less scared we become. We are scared not when we know more, but when we no less.  The more vague the details, the better chance that we will be unsettled by the film.

Hellbound is the second kind of movie in terms of this paradigm.

Specifically, Hellbound: Hellraiser II is a mythology-based, world-building sequel to Clive Barker’s brilliant horror film, Hellraiser (1987). It’s a good mythology-based horror film on it own terms, but I miss the sheer artistic inspiration of Clive Barker’s inaugural film in the franchise.

Hellbound opens with a recap of Hellraiser’s scary ending, and then shows us the origins of Pinhead (Doug Bradley) himself. It also finishes off any personal business left lingering between Julia (Clare Higgins) and Frank (Sean Chapman), before settling down in Hell itself.  The details of Hell, and even an evil Deity (Leviathan, Lord of the Labyrinth) are all explored.

The focus, as that description suggests, is on deepening and broadening the Hellraiser universe. The focus is on providing more details, and revealing a consistent “universe.”

I can’t complain too much, however since the solid 1988 sequel shows audiences how Cenobites are manufactured, takes us to Hell for a grand tour, features the great Ashley Laurence in a starring role, and reveals to us precisely the kind of torment in Hell that Frank deserves.  There’s an overall reflection of literary mythology too -- an Orphean descent into the Underworld to retrieve a loved one -- but even that is broadly applied.

So by my estimation, Hellbound is a good horror film, of the second type.

It’s just that traveling from Hellraiser to Hellbound is roughly akin to going from Phantasm (1979) to Phantasm II (1988).

The first film in each series is richly symbolic and reveals something about the human condition, whether the fear of mortality, or mankind’s sexual obsessions. 

Then the ambitious sequel comes along, and it’s big and world-building and totally impressive as a straight-up horror flick, but it exists almost purely on a literal level, not a symbolic one. 

Therefore, in comparison to the original, I can’t help but register the sequel as a bit of a disappointment, or at least a come down. I admire so much the rarefied, symbolic level of Hellraiser and Phantasm. 

This is about me, as much as the film, a reader might conclude. I want my horror movies to do more than just scare me a little, like I’m on a roller coaster ride. I want the movie to concern or reflect something important; something that makes me think about the world, myself, and my relationships.

So I miss Clive Barker’s facility for visual symbolism in Tony Randel’s Hellbound, but I still like the sequel for what it is (a rip-roaring, gory horror movie), even if, at times, the movie looks to be held together by little more than spit and polish.

“The mind is a labyrinth…a puzzle.”

Following the ghoulish events with Julia and Frank, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) is remanded to the Channard Institute, an insane asylum.

There, she talks about the box, and doorways to Hell being opened and closed.

Listening intently to her strange tale is Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham), a man who has devoted his life to the study of the Lament Configuration. 

Another patient in his custody, young Tiffany (Imogen Boorman) is mute, but is an expert at solving puzzles. Presumably, he has in mind for this ward to solve one particular puzzle box.

Even as Dr. Channard takes gruesome steps to revive Julia (Clare Higgins), Kirsty receives a message that she believes is from her dead father.  “I am in Hell. Help me,” it reads, written in blood.

Kirsty determines to go with Tiffany, into Hell, and rescue her father.

After Tiffany opens the box, Channard meets his fate as a Cenobite, and engineers a coup of the Labyrinth.  Kirsty helps Pinhead (Doug Bradley) finds his humanity for one battle against this new cenobite, but it does not go well.

After an encounter with Frank, Kirsty must summon all her resourcefulness to escape Hell, and more than that, stop Channard.

“What tales will she tell us from the other side?”

In a significant fashion, Hellbound really is about tales from the “other side.”

The other world that we saw only briefly in Hellraiser, Hell itself, is depicted for long stretches of the film. Some of the visuals are generally amazing, while others prove a letdown.

The matte painting, for instance, of the labyrinth, looks astonishingly good. There are several shots which reveal Kirsty and Tiffany walking a long, narrow pathway across that Escher-like maze. The maze extends to the horizon, but also stretches downwards, across multiple levels. 

Also successfully depicted is Frank Cotton’s personal hell.  He lives in a room where ghostly women “promise” sex but never “deliver.”To Frank, this is a punishment on the scale of Tantalus, and quite appropriate. He lives, essentially, in a trap that will drive him mad for all eternity.  And that’s the reason he summoned Kirsty. He believes she’s a girl who keeps her “promises,” and wants to test that theory.

Unfortunately, when we don’t see the big matte shots, or visit Frank in his personal Hell, the underworld is depicted in less than inspiring fashion.

In fact it appears to consist of one hallway that branches off, and is filmed again and again. At one point, we get a P.O.V. shot with the camera hurtling through the corridor, and before the editor can cut away, it looks like there are some boards or lumber balanced against one wall.

This section of Hell: under construction.

When one couples shots like this one with the fact that Chatterer’s make-up design completely changes at one point, with no explanation, one gets the feeling that the film was made in a tearing hurry, and suffered from a lot of tinkering with.

Tiffany’s weird hall-of-mirrors/carnival scene is similarly crude in visualization, and doesn’t really add anything to the proceedings. Did she lose her Mom at a carnival? The sequence never makes us understand why this circus-like place is Tiffany’s personal Hell, or why she is permitted to escape it.

On the plus side, the Cenobite-making chamber is radically evil and neat, though it proves a stumbling block in future entries since it isn’t, apparently, required to make Cenobites after all. 

And though I wonder about the rationale of making Leviathan a huge puzzle box, I nonetheless love the deeply creepy black light it periodically shines across the realm. Instead of a lighthouse, Leviathan is a dark-house, shining darkness throughout every corner of Hell.

To get back to my treatise on mythology, Hellbound feels duty-bound to give us a lot of information.  It provides background on Pinhead, revealing his pre-Cenobite life. We learn he was a British soldier in World War I, and Hell on Earth, the next installment, even tells us his name.

We also get to reconnect in the film, powerfully, with Clare Higgins’ Julia. Once more, she gives voice to the film’s intermittent motif about literary mythology (seen in the Orpheus-like story and in the damnations of Hell being like the torments of Tantalus or Sisyphus). Here, Julia relevantly notes her role in the myth; that she is both the “wicked stepmother” and “evil queen” in Kirstie’s fairy tale. I love that Julia, formerly repressed and frigid, internalizes this role and emerges from Hell as a siren, a seductress.

Again, however, one has to wonder about the discontinuities between the two films, vis-à-vis revival via human blood. Frank had new skin after three strangers and Larry were killed in the first film. Julia in Hellbound kills a room full of prostitutes, and still doesn’t have all her new skin yet.

Another scene in the film is also incongruous. It shows a hospital ward of insane patients being tortured by many copies of the Lament Configuration, even after Pinhead has verbally confirmed that desire, not hands, call him. The scene doesn’t make any sense, in light of that remark.

Yet Hellbound’s heights of imagination generally tend to overcome such deficits. A movie would really have to go some distance to prove itself bloodier and gorier than Hellraiser was.  Hellbound manages that feat with ease. The scene involving a straight razor, a bloody mattress, and a very sick man, is one for the record books.

The Channard Cenobite is hugely creative too, for example. Who in his or her right mind devised an individual who is carried around by a giant worm that has burrowed into that individual’s head? The conception and imagery of the character is remarkable.

If the final battle between Channard and Pinhead’s team had featured a little more punch, a little more suspense, I’d rate the film even higher.  I very much enjoy the scenes of Kirsty and Pinhead teaming up, as it were, but I wish Pinhead put up a better fight before getting his throat slit.

As it stands, Hellbound is a perfectly satisfying mythology-based horror sequel. For those who “have to see, have to know…” -- like Channard -- the movie both promises and delivers.

For those audiences seeking a film functioning at at the same artistic apex as Hellraiser does, however, this first sequel may not exactly qualify as a “pleasure.”

Die Hard on a Blog: Die Hard (1988)

Die Hard is the movie that launched a hundred cinematic knock-offs or so.

John McTiernan’s blockbuster 1988 so dramatically and thoroughly revolutionized the action genre at the end of the eighties in fact that -- for at least half-a-decade -- virtually every new entry in the genre was described as “Die Hard in a (fill in the blank.)”

Movie-going audiences soon saw Die Hard on a Bus (Speed [1994]), Die Hard on a battleship (Under Siege [1992]), Die Hard on a Train (Under Siege 2 [1995), Die Hard on a Plane (Passenger 57 [1992], Executive Decision [1996]) and even Die Hard in a Hockey Stadium (Sudden Death [1995]).

So in the spirit of that memorable nomenclature, welcome to my newest blog series: Die Hard on a Blog.

All the movies I will feature here in the coming weeks include the critical element of a nefarious terrorist or criminal threat acting inside a closed-setting, and the singular hero who combats it.

Today, in the inaugural installment, I’ll remember the still-unmatched progenitor of this cinematic trend: Die Hard.

The film is very closely based on novelist Roderick Thorp’s (1936-1999) literary work, Nothing Lasts Forever (1979), which in turn was inspired by the author’s viewing of The Towering Inferno (1974).

The novel concerns a retired detective, named Leland, who visits the L.A. high-rise HQ of a company called Klaxon Oil. He is there to visit his daughter Stephanie, for the Christmas party, when a German terrorist, Anton Gruber, takes seventy-four hostages. 

Many elements in the film, including a barefoot hero, the gun taped to the protagonist’s back, and the use of explosives in an elevator shaft, recur directly from Thorp's written words.

Rich in invention and humor, Die Hard (1988) succeeds on many levels, and remains today much more than a thrilling fusion of disaster film and thriller tropes.

First and foremost Die Hard is absolutely dazzling from a visual standpoint, in large part because director McTiernan eschews excessive and unnecessary cutting, and preserves the space or geography of the action by utilizing tilts, pans, and other, often extreme or sudden camera motions. 

Not only is the space of the action preserved in this fashion, but the rapid camera motion accelerates the film’s sense of pace.  

Our view of the action literally banks, turns and performs barrel rolls. It’s as if we’re seeing through the furtive eyes of the desperate hero, registering everything, everywhere, in an effort to endure and survive.

Secondly, for all its bells and whistles, Die Hard essentially boils down to a battle of wits between two evenly-matched opponents, one ruthless, intellectual and urbane (Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber) and one wide open: Bruce Willis’s John McClane.

At times it actually feels like a realization of destiny that these two resourceful, ingenious, determined characters should face each other, “mano e mano” at the Nakatomi Plaza. No other place in the world is tall enough for both of their egos and self-confidence, perhaps.

Yet in terms of its pure, psychic appeal, Die Hard is actually something more than a great and eminently satisfying action movie. 

It is undeniably a primal male wish-fulfillment fantasy that was forged in a time when masculinity was facing existential questions about its value and worth in the larger American culture.

John McClane’s battle in this film is not simply to defeat Hans Gruber or rescue the hostages in Nakatomi Plaza, including his wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia).

No, his battle, as I hope to explain in this review, is to redeem himself as an alpha “male” and showcase his viability as such. 

Some might suggest that this leitmotif renders the film sexist in some way. I’m not here to make any particular conclusions or social judgments about that notion, only to draw your eye and your intellect to the argument the film crafts on both a visual and often sub-textual level.

“Just a fly in the ointment, Hans, just a monkey in the wrench, just a pain in the ass.”

For Christmas, the NYPD’s John McClane (Willis) flies to Los Angeles to be with his estranged wife, Holly (Bedelia) and his two children, John and Lucy. A limousine delivers him to the high-tech Nakatomi Plaza, where Holly works a successful and high-powered career executive.

When John and Holly reunite, they argue about their marriage, and the fact that Holly now uses her maiden name, Gennero, rather than her married name, McClane.

Their personal differences must wait, however, because a group of European terrorists led by Hans Gruber (Rickman) invade the building, cut the power, and take seventy-four Nakatomi employees hostage, including Holly.

John seizes an opportunity to escape the offices, into the larger building. Almost immediately, he begins taking on the terrorists, one-at-a-time, much to the irritation of the erudite, well-organized Gruber.

John also gets a call outside of the building for help, and ends up teaming via walkie-talkie with L.A. cop Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson).

Before long, news crews, and the F.B.I. are also on the scene, but McClane is the only man on the inside of the building, the only man who can stop Gruber’s plan. 

That plan involves explosives, a bank vault and much deceit…

“It’s Christmas time, Theo. It’s a time for miracles.”

It is plain to see how Die Hard adopts many key elements from The Towering Inferno. There’s a rooftop rescue that goes awry in both productions, for example, a lot of fire, and the same central location: a Los Angeles high-rise building. In both productions, helicopters are destroyed too.

Die Hard takes that setting and those creative elements, however, and creates something new for the cinema, an action movie in which the hero is an “every man” who is outnumbered, out-gunned, and cut-off from authority He is tested quite egregiously, and must succeed based on nothing but his wits and his cunning. 

McClane is a man alone.

The highest plateau of film quality, for me, arises with the idea of visuals mirroring or reflecting thematic and narrative concepts. We see this idea play out in Die Hard as director John McTiernan deploys a kinetic, almost constantly-in-motion camera. Objects -- like a whirring table saw, for example -- loom suddenly in the foreground. Or the camera suddenly shifts on its axis, and goes plummeting down a basement staircase the viewer has not yet detected.

This approach possesses two virtues.

The first is that this brand of camera motion preserves the space of the battlefield, to adopt a war metaphor. Were the film to feature an over-abundance of cutting, the space (and time) would feel fractured. But by whirling to register objects, or tilting and panning to see things, McTiernan makes us feel like we are trapped in the building with McClane.

The second virtue is connected to the first. The camera’s movement -- always “discovering” new objects, rooms, and enemies -- recreates the mental state of the film’s characters. Around every corner could be a threat or an opportunity, and the camera work expresses a kind of nervous energy as Gruber and McClane both harness the (same) environment to win the day. 

The camera-work also is adrenaline-provoking. We are never sure what we will see next, and so we start paying attention to every detail, every moment of the action. This is reflected in the character dynamics in so many ways. Hans picks up that McClane is walking barefoot, and in the next moment, orders his henchman to shoot out the glass from a nearby pane, creating an impediment for his opponent. The camera and the characters learn things at the same time, and seize on that learning for their game of chess.

Sometimes, the camera moves brilliantly to  reveal the proximity of danger. At one point, for example, cinematographer Jan de Bont's camera tilts up from a smoldering bullet-hole in a vent shaft to a close-up of a vulnerable McClane, perched inches away. The director could have cut to a reaction shot, instead, of his hero. But that simple tilt tells us just how close McClane came to death.

The whole movie is filled with anxiety-provoking moments such as that one. As a result, Die Hard is fun to watch -- a veritable roller-coaster ride of a movie -- and that’s primarily because of the ingenuity and efficacy of so many compositions. The visuals engage us, and demand attention.

As I noted above, Die Hard is also a primal male fantasy. 

It is about a man who grew up with heroes like John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Roy Rogers and James Arness (Marshal Dillon) discovering, as an adult, that men like that are no longer called for in American society. 

Those cowboys were protectors and patriarchs, but Gruber dismisses them all as products of a “bankrupt culture.”  Even other 80s male icons such as Rambo are name-checked, and Lee Majors’ The Fall Guy is seen on TV at one point.  The idea, I suppose is that American culture has changed radically in the 1980s, but no one has bothered to tell the movies about that fact. We still raise our boys into men thinking they can be cowboys. They still kill the bad guy, get the girl, and ride off into the sunset.

Yet just consider for a moment the shift in demographics and the economy that occurred in the eighties and how they changed the picture for masculinity in this country.

By 1985 half-of-all college graduates were women, and women with outside-the-home careers jumped to 49%. Women moved successfully into traditionally-male held jobs in banking and white collar management too.

On one hand, movies like Working Girl (1988) epitomized the era. On the other, efforts such as Mr. Mom (1983) dramatized the opposite side of that equation: a stay-at-home Dad raising the kids.

Die Hard, very simply, concerns a man, John McClane (Bruce Willis) who doesn’t cope well with this shift in cultural expectations, and what that change means for his ego and self-respect. His journey in the film involves a successful attempt to re-assert his role, value, and place in the American family when he is no longer the primary bread winner or the "hero."

That opportunity occurs at the workplace of his wife, Holly, who has moved out of John’s home in New York with his two children, and earned kudos as an executive at a Japanese-run corporation. Holly is a complete success, and is so confident in that career success that she goes by her maiden name, “Gennero” instead of her married name, “McClane.” 

Several times, the film gives us visualizations of that name, Gennero. We see it in the building registry and on the door to Holly's office. In a very concrete, visible way, then, Holly has separated herself from her marriage, and her husband.

But then John ultimately saves the day, and Holly introduces herself to Al Powell not as Holly Gennero, but as Holly McClane. 

That, right there, is the the punctuation of the whole movie. That’s the whole wish fulfillment aspect in a nut-shell: the idea that John can bring his wife around to his “idea of what this marriage should be.”  

He doesn’t do this by being a good listener, by being a shoulder to cry on, by being a good dad, or by being a partner in the work-force, an equal earner.

He does it by being just like those predominantly cowboy heroes of yesteryear.  By besting the bad guys, getting the girl, and riding off into the sunset.

Yippy-kay-yay, motherfucker.

The sub-text, of course, is that John McClane and other men have been somehow emasculated by the rise of women in the workplace in the 1980s. John is rudderless and alone, and must re-assert himself and his male-ness.  

This idea gets a surprising amount of visual play in the movie because of a nifty little bait and switch trick.  John keeps seeing gorgeous, often naked women, and though he registers them, he doesn’t act on his sexual impulses to conquer them.

What type of shot or sequence or shots recurs in Die Hard quite frequently?  

Well, it is a shot of a beautiful woman who is “seen” by McClane either in the same shot, or in cutaway reaction shot.  Then, he kinds of sighs, and moves on, with resignation, after noticing her allure

This happens again and again in the film, and one must ask why. Why does this composition recur?

Let me give you the examples before I answer that question.

In the airport, McClane sees a women in tight-white pants leap effortlessly into the arms of her boyfriend. Her rear-end appears to defy gravity.

At the party, McClane ogles a woman standing beyond a fountain, in long-shot.  Here we get both the object of his gaze, and a view of his gaze.

Then, in Holly’s office, a sexually available woman bursts in with her lover. John sees her, through the mirror, so that we get his gaze, and the object of his gaze in the same composition.

Immediately after McClane escapes from Holly’s office, John heads to a floor upstairs. He looks out a window, and sees an apartment across the way. A half-naked woman is lounging there, in front of her window. The camera moves in on McClane as he registers her presence.  Again, this encounter features two shots: the object of McClane's gaze, and a view of him gazing at that object.

And, finally, during his chases back and forth through the infrastructure of the Nakatomi Building, McClane twice sees a pin up of a nude woman. She catches his eye on one occasion, and he cranes his neck to look at her. On another occasion, he speaks to her like an old friend.

There are no fewer than six instances, then, in Die Hard, wherein John’s gaze is explicitly connected to the visual of a sexually-desirable woman.

What does it mean? 

Quite simply, there’s the idea here that marriage and society -- and modern convention too -- shackle men, and prevent them from being their true selves. These things hold them back, rendering them impotent, just as new-fangled 1980s ideas about women in the workplace take away their manhood too (by the movie's way of thinking; not mine).

And how does John exert or assert his manhood, if not by conquering these available, luscious women he constantly encounters?

 By shooting guns. A lot.  By killing terrorists.

In Die Hard, McClane asserts his masculinity not by having sex with all the abundantly desirable women he miraculously keeps casting his eyes upon, but by committing bloody violence and re-taking his place as a powerful alpha male.

Now, no man is an island, of course, and John still requires emotional support, even while doing things that a man must do. He turns not to his wife (who is unavailable to support him), but to a "bromance" with Al Powell. McClane finds that for his emotional needs in a time of crisis he needs, simply, another man, and one who is, importantly, a cop like he is.  

Al Powell has been rendered impotent by society too. He’s a desk jockey who hasn’t fired his gun since an accident years earlier.  

How does he get his groove (and masculinity) back?  

Again with a pistol, by killing someone.

Once more, I would like to stress that I’m not rendering any kind of judgment, pro or con for the argument that Die Hard so carefully constructs. However, it is abundantly plain the message is there, and part of a wish-fulfillment fantasy aimed straight at men in the eighties. 

They have been held back too much, and if they want to earn back the respect of women and men around him, they have to be gun-toting heroes in the mold of John Wayne, Rambo, or any of the other heroes that Gruber names.

The appeal in Die Hard, not entirely unlike the appeal of the Dirty Harry films, is the characterization of a male hero -- in a time of change -- reverting to "simple" cowboy form. Die Hard makes that characterization funny by references to Roy Rogers’ sequin shirts, and by McClane’s foul-mouthed but nonetheless immortal catchphrase.  

In other words, Die Hard is a movie that is both primal male fantasy and simultaneously smart enough to be self-aware about it. 

It would be easy to write much more about this film. 

For instance, Die Hard is one of my favorite Christmas movie of all time, because -- again -- it deals so ironically and with such self-awareness about the contradictions between a holiday celebrating love and peace and the bloody violence in the Nakatomi Building. 

This conceit, this juxtaposition, reaches its zenith of brilliance in the film’s final shot. Nakatomi burns and smolders, and the soundtrack plays the song “Let It Snow.” The lyrics, in case you have forgotten, commence with: “The weather outside is frightful. But the fire is so delightful.”

The fire at Nakatomi Plaza is delightful?

Hell yeah it is. For John McClane, who has won back his wife, defeated the bad-guy, and is horizon-bound.

When I first devised the idea of writing about Die Hard (1988), I thought about all the approaches I could take, and realized just how brilliantly the film fulfills multiple functions.  

It’s an ironic Christmas story. 

It’s a development of the Towering Inferno setting. 

It’s a primal male fantasy about re-asserting manhood according to the Hollywood definition of that term, and, finally it’s an elegantly-shot action film too. 

But the passing of Alan Rickman demands that I add one more paragraph to an already too-long critique of this film.  

His Hans Gruber is, without exaggeration, the perfect movie villain. Not because Gruber can shoot. Not because Gruber threatens people. But because Rickman projects so much intelligent, wit, and cunning.

At one point, Rickman's Gruber quips about the “benefits of a classical education,” and that dialogue makes a valuable point. 

Rickman, a slender intellectual sort is able to project so much cerebral menace as Hans Gruber that we feel the muscular, t-shirt clad McClane is in constant danger from him. 

In short, Rickman proves that not only is smart sometimes sexy, smart is also sometimes damned scary.  

His best scene in the film involves Hans’ on-the-fly adoption of an American accent when he unexpectedly encounters McClane. This scene is rife with tension because we don’t know what John knows, and we didn’t expect Hans to prove quite so…adaptable in the field.

Gruber also gets a death scene that has yet to be topped in the action film genre (pictured above).

So if my description of Die Hard as a primal male fantasy is somehow disturbing or uncomfortable for anyone, there’s no need to focus exclusively on that aspect. 

Die Hard features so many other virtues -- from its stirring fight scenes, accomplished camera-work and great performances to its brilliant Michael Kamen score -- that’s it difficult to choose which one really makes the movie soar.

So the year 1988 and the dawn of Die Hard? 

A “time of miracles” indeed.

Next Tuesday, Die Hard on a Blog continues with Die Hard 2: Die Harder (1990).