The action hero.
Steely-jawed and good with his fists. Beset by troubles, major and minor. He drank too much. His wife had left him. He was broke. He was a loose cannon. He was saddled with an unending stream of new partners and a legion of captains, police commissioners and mayors that made his life a living hell. He had, always, of necessity, a dry sense of humor and a stoic world view.
He – and it was virtually always a he in the original iterations – first came to us in the 1970s, as an offspring of two great American genres: the Western and the Film Noir. From the Western he brought the jaw and the eyes, the solitude, the loneliness, the facility with guns, the indomitable nature. From the Noir he brought the city, seething, a force in its own right; he brought the feeling of being trapped in his own quest, the constant struggle against larger forces, the realism of what it would take to overcome those forces. He was not pure or untouched, not innocent, and could never be so.
And he was, explicitly, directly, unrepentantly, a blue-collar character. Not for him the effete ways of the politician, the technocrat, the businessman. If he wore a suit, it was a cheap suit. If he looked good, it was accidental, a result of his indifference combined with the sheer force of his personality. He drove crap cars. He lived in crap apartments. He disdained money and progress and softness.
John McClane was as good a hero as the genre ever produced.
John McTiernan's Die Hard, from 1988, is often regarded by fans as the "greatest" action movie of them all. (I use the scare quotes because what we mean when we rank movies is unclear to me – as it is, I think, although they dislike admitting it, to most people who rank them.)
It tells the story of McClane (Bruce Willis), a New York City cop who flies to Los Angeles in an attempt to reconcile with his wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia). He's picked up at the airport by a limo driver named Argyle (De'voreaux White) who embodies most of what L.A. represented to the rest of the country in the 1980s: snazzy, flashy, a little goofy and a bit out of touch. Argyle drives McClane to the Nakatomi Plaza, where his wife's company is having a Christmas party.
To everyone's dismay, the Nakatomi Corporation is also being targeted by a gang of international thieves, led by the notorious Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman, in a gloriously villainous turn.) This gang takes over the Nakatomi building and holds the partygoers hostage. Gruber claims to the public that they're a terrorist group with political ends, which induces the FBI to take over the scene and cut off the electricity; in reality, the gang is after the bearer bonds in the Nakatomi safe, and the FBI has just helped them by cutting the power to the safe's defenses.
Meanwhile, McClane is loose in the building and wreaking havoc on Gruber's plans. He kills one of the henchmen and gets a machine gun (Ho, ho, ho!) and a radio, with which he manages to contact a desk-jockeying Los Angeles cop named Al (Reginald VelJohnson). With the pressure mounting, bodies dropping, and the Nakotomi safe about to be breached by Gruber's minions, Al helps McClane figure out that the FBI is going to make a mess of the rescue operation, potentially killing any number of the hostages.
So, single-handedly, with only a pistol taped to his back, McClane has to not only defeat the bad guys and save Holly (whom Gruber has taken a special interest in after learning that she's married to McClane), but also prevent the Feds from turning the whole thing into a turkey shoot with a vast number of casualties. He falls down an air shaft, he leaps off the building with a fire hose tied around his waist, he gets pummeled in fistfights and nearly machine-gunned beneath a table, and for most of the film he goes barefoot because he made the mistake of trying to relieve his air-travel stress by making fists with his toes on the carpet.
It's an action spectacular, magnificently directed by McTiernan, that actually earns the adjectival encomiums – "thrill ride!" "adrenaline packed!" – that litter the breathless promos (which their authors call reviews) of far lesser films.
It also represents – and here’s where the influence of the Western and Noir genres becomes interesting – a mode of storytelling and character focus that has largely vanished from our contemporary cinema.
One of the central questions of the traditional Western film was of the righteous use of violence. This story was often scaffolded – as in Shane or High Noon or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence – around a man who was reluctant to engage in killing, but the general notion was usually that violence was ultimately necessary to protect some vision of what lay at the core of the American project. To carve a civilization out of the wilderness, to protect decency against rapaciousness, it was necessary to whack some people – usually Native Americans, outlaws, or ugly-intentioned cattle barons – even if this whacking cost the hero, as it did in so many of these tales, his place in the peaceful society that resulted.
The 1960s changed the applicability of this story. The social disruptions of that era – the civil rights movements, the gay and women's liberation movements, and above all the Vietnam War – in some sense killed the traditional Western.
It was a moment in which, to steal a line, the belief in the dream was no longer believable. It became increasingly difficult to buy into a vision of a noble man on a white horse keeping his word and righteously killing Indians and rustlers to protect the innocent and hardworking settler, all of this presented without any true violence except for the clutch-the-chest and fall-out-of-frame variety.
No, the curtain had come up and a different truth revealed. The brutality of the American colonial project, which had been elided by the traditional Western, was clearly entirely central to our history. Stagecoaches and Monument Valley and singalongs by the campfire were all terrifically obsolete: the cowboys had gone off the reservation in Vietnam and were burning Indian babies, John Wayne was making propaganda films on behalf of the war with the backing of the government.
Against this backdrop, the traditional Western lost its relevance and the so-called "Revisionist Western" took its place. Directors like Peckinpah, Leone, Altman, Penn, Aldrich, and Eastwood began making movies which no longer valorized the dream but instead commented on the moment, on the American myth itself, and on their own earlier filmic iterations. (As with any historical analysis the timing here is more fluid than I'm presenting it, as evidenced by things like Anthony Mann's extraordinary 1950s Westerns, which almost function as Noir films themselves; but in the main, this historiography holds, I think.)
At the same time in the late '60s and '70s, the cynicism that had made Film Noir such a powerful, reactionary, dark force during its heyday after World War Two – cynicism about public servants, about the cleanliness of American society, about the pervasiveness of violence and sex and squalor – this cynicism had been absorbed into the very fabric of the cop movie, as well as into the larger cinematic world.
The cops were no longer the good guys, and very often the bad guys were the good guys. So we got cynical cop movies (The French Connection, Across 110th Street), and bloody revenge movies (Point Blank, Death Wish); more broadly, we got movies about society as a malignant force to be survived (Omega Man, Death Race 2000, The Warriors) and about the naked corruption in the political realm (The Parallax View, Soylent Green) and in the social realm (Seconds, Night of the Living Dead.)
More directly referential Film Noirs had not stopped being made, of course, as evidenced by things like Chinatown and The Long Goodbye, and as well as any of the movies listed above they reflected the emerging American idea of the deep alienation of the heroic man of action. If civilization could no longer be represented by the frontier village of the traditional Western where yeomen worked together to make a new land – the "city on a hill" of John F. Kennedy and John Winthrop before him – then what was the hero defending? If America was a land of corruption, what was the man of action fighting for?
For his own sense of integrity, increasingly, as strained and broken as that often was. And against the powerful, because it was they – the politicians and corporate overlords and police captains – who were the source of corruption, whose greed and imbecility were destroying the lives of regular, blue collar Americans.
So the action hero drank too much, because the idyll was over. So he was a loose cannon, because if he listened to his boss he would not only be ineffective he would soon find himself one of the corrupted. So he was cynical and wise-cracking, because there was no other way to make it through. And he was a regular guy, not one of the perfumed elite who were enriching themselves at the cost of the rest of us.
"I was always kind of partial to Roy Rogers, actually," McClane tells Gruber over a walkie talkie he has stolen from a henchman. "Do you really think you have a chance against us, Mr. Cowboy?" Gruber responds, precipitating perhaps McClane's most famous line from the film: "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker."
Die Hard consciously ties itself into the Western genre, of course. Like so many of the traditional townspeople under assault by Native Americans or outlaws, the office workers in the Nakatomi tower are scared and helpless: they're civilians, just trying to make a living and not versed in the ways of violence. At the same time, as in so many Westerns, they're vaguely contemptuous of the man of violence. He's too raw for them, too unrefined, too uncivilized. He doesn't quite fit into their polite society.
The equation of good and bad in the film also reaches back to the Western. The Nakatomi Corporation is a bastion of commerce and progress – we see a model of a bridge they're building in Indonesia – under threat from the forces of the wilderness of crime. Here, that crime is given a European twist and a tinge of radical politics: Gruber was originally a member of a German political terror group called the Volksfrei Movement. The forward movement of capital is thus besieged by outlaws – European accents substituting for black hats – with no use for law and order.
At the same time the creeping cynicism of the Noirs and the revisionist Westerns is on full display. The motive behind the actions of Gruber and of the Nakatomi Corporation is, in the end, exactly the same. Money. At the same time, the people who possess political power – political cops, ravenous reporters, the feds – are at once ineffective and dangerous. It's only the regular L.A.P.D. patrol cop Al who has the common sense to see what's happening.
This corruption of the powerful is given its sharpest edge in one of the film's most fascinating moments. When the FBI agents – the magnificently-named Agent Johnson and Special Agent Johnson, no relation – are flying in toward the tower with the intention of gunning down what they think are terrorists, civilian casualties be damned, one of them comments: "Just like Saigon!"
Vietnam still looms. The U.S. government is still complicit in massacre. That the other Agent Johnson has no memory of the time – "I was in junior high, dickhead!" goes the reply – drives home the irony. Because the partner who wasn't in Vietnam acts the same as the one who was.
At the center of these forces, as trapped in a maze of violence and surrounded by corruption and decadence as any Film Noir protagonist, is John McClane. It's an action flick, so he'll win in the end, but like all of us he's a product of his forebearers, the cowboys and cops of earlier generations.
Which brings us back to the degree to which this particular action movie moment has faded into the past. Our current age has in the main substituted romanticism for cynicism, graphic novel theatricality for blue collar grit. The heroes all know martial arts and none of them are in the habit of drinking to excess.
The forces arrayed against us are global, and in response to this the need to protect our loved ones has come to the fore. It’s as if the scale of our consciousness and of the dangers pressing in on us – planet-level human threats, a changing climate – have somehow put our most intimate relationships in peril, bringing the family bond to the center of our filmic attention. One sees this clearly in our superhero movies, which are cartoon-born amalgams of epic-scale questions and homey mawkishness that the cynical mind of the 1970s could not help but have seen as distraction from (or cover for) creeping tentacles of corruption and political power.
Are all the older films great and all the newer ones terrible? Of course not. Every cycle produces its wonderful movies and its terrible ones. But the wise-cracking blue collar action hero has receded into history, perhaps (hopefully) to be recalled under the direst circumstances, when we can only be saved by someone who's just a fly in the ointment, a monkey in the wrench, a pain in the ass.
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Surprised you did not mention Sergio Leone in the list of western directors who took that genre in a new direction, especially since he reinvented the "anti-hero" almost to the point of self-parody.