The Final Word On The ‘Die Hard Christmas Movie’ Debate… From A Christian Perspective

If ever there’s a lull in conversation, you can heat things up again by asking that favorite Christmas debate topic. ‘Is Die Hard A Christmas Movie’.

The arguments for and against are often pretty straightforward, coloring inside the lines pitting the setting, the score, the violence and the gore.

But we wind up with both sides talking past each other because we skipped the first step we need to establish in any of these conversations. We need to define what we mean by a Christmas movie.

Dickens’ ‘Christmas Carol’ and ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ are great examples of Christmas movies that are undisputedly Christmas.

But others aren’t so obvious. Do we count the disgruntled Santa Clause going full Rambo on guys from his naughty list as ‘Christmassy’? How about formulaic sappy schlock? Slapstick shows like Home Alone? Cartoons? Claymation? Frosty the flippin’ snowman?

Where do we draw that line?

With those questions in mind, we turn to the question of Die Hard.

If there’s a requirement to check the boxes of a December backdrop, Christmas music, decorated trees and other seasonal cues, this flick checks that box in spades. The musical score is replete with familiar seasonal favorites. Heck, even the occasion for everyone being in the office tower after hours was a Christmas party.

But if a Christmas backdrop is enough to qualify as a Christmas movie, we might as well be celebrating Gremlins as a holiday favorite.

Something in the storyline itself has to say ‘Christmas’ to the audience.

With Christmas being increasingly commercialized, that message gets reduced to some version of either Norman Rockwell sentimentality or the ‘safe’ irreligious symbols of the season — Santa, elves, and so on.

Die Hard does not check those boxes at all. Obviously.

But the secular/sentimental Christmas is not the only Christmas story there is. In fact both of them miss the point of the season itself:

The incarnation of the Son of God in a humble stable in Bethlehem.

Clearly, this tough-talking, terrorist killing, NY cop whose marriage is on the rocks is not telling some formulaic religious story. So we can’t check that box either.

Or can we?

Before we write off that idea, let’s remember that good storytelling is not like reading the news. Like so many other art forms, it relies heavily on symbolism, metaphor and other indirect ways of telling a story. (Think: ‘Life Of Pi’ for example. Was it a story about a boy with a Tiger? Or one trapped on a life raft with a homicidal criminal?)

It’s fair, at this point to ask what possible connection we could draw between a baby born in some sheep shed in Bethlehem and a grizzled cop running around an office tower, knocking off terrorists, and blowing stuff up.

This is where the power of storytelling gets interesting. Because even the Bible itself has used a story to explain what was happening in the gospels. If you remember, God used the story of Moses and Egypt as a reference point for conveying the story of his own redemptive plan.

Using Moses and the Exodus as a reference point, Christmas isn’t really about a baby born to a working class Jewish teenager living under Roman rule some 2000 years ago. It’s about the hero’s journey the birth of that child represents.

Humanity needed a rescuer. They’ve tried for generations past counting to solve the problem of sin by just trying harder. They failed every time, just as scripture said they would. They found themselves enslaved.

The cycle of failure showed they needed a rescuer, a Redeemer who could save them from their captor. God sent Moses, who is both ONE of them and yet, in a special and relevant way, distinct FROM them to lead God’s people out of captivity from which they cannot escape on their own.

Let’s overlay this storytelling paradigm over the gospel story.

John McClane was a long way from home. He’s a New York cop who goes to Los Angeles to visit his estranged wife and kids. The point of his trip is to repair a damaged relationship with those he loves.

The cop is, in every way, an ordinary civilian when he’s in Los Angelas, with the same limitations of any other civilian. But as a trained cop, he’s different than the others in the tower. He has an ability to confront a threat that the office workers in this story do not. On the other end of the spectrum, he’s ‘one of them’ with Holly’s co-workers in the sense that he was invited to the party. But he’s distinct from them in that he was not among them when Hans Gruber took his hostages.

The rest of the movie plays out in an epic life-and-death struggle where McClane takes an absolute beating in the heroic attempt to save the helpless civilians. He is motivated by love.

In the climactic scene, Bruce Willis looks beaten. Rather than see his beloved Holly executed in cold blood by Gruber, he gives himself up to purchase her freedom. That act of surrender becomes the moment of final victory in which Gruber is defeated… and in the last-moment act of redemption, Bruce Willis unclasps the chain around Holly’s wrist by which Gruber would have dragged her to her destruction.

It’s a hero story that speaks to us because it echoes THE hero story.

Of course it’s a Christmas movie… you might even say it’s a Christmas-and-Easter movie.

Related:

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