A Die Hard Epiphany
If I waited for the skies to part to figure this out, I’d still be waiting. And I have presents to put under the tree.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year when I get to watch Die Hard again, solo in the living room, two fingers of whiskey on the rocks.
People used to argue over whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie, but I consider that debate over.
I think Die Hard is a popular Christmas movie because it offers some escape, a two-hour catharsis from the enforced fun of the holidays. It’s a little more than that, but let’s start there.
On March 13, 2024, I had an interview with a New York State agency. By this point I’d have several first-round interviews that ranged from conference rooms and people in suits, normal stuff, to a facility where I had to be buzzed in and escorted to closet-sized office where I sat in front of two dudes who looked like they were in the cast of Clerks, complete with backwards baseball caps and flannel shirts.
The plan for this interview was to get on the road right and visit my mom. She’d just gotten home from the hospital, and I planned on driving down and back to pay her a visit. It would turn out to be the last time I would see my mom. The memory of that morning interview came back to me recently, I think, because of the one answer I gave.
What, one person asked, would I consider my greatest accomplishment at my previous job?
For a second I sat there, repeating the question out loud to buy some time as I thought of an answer. Developing a particular class or getting promoted to full professor came to mind. A little coffee-deprived, I blurted out a different answer.
“My greatest accomplishment,” I said, “was that I had that career in the first place.”
I paused, sort of surprised at what I just blurted out. I was lucky to get the professor job, considering the academic job market, and I’d like to think I took as much advantage of the opportunity as I could, from teaching to committee work and helping young people write well.
As my career reached its end, I said, I think that’s what stands out.
The answer seemed to go over well, or at least didn’t lose me the job. I would end up turning down the job in favor of the one I have now.
But the answer I gave, I stand by it.
More than 25 years ago, I worked as a secretary at NYU’s film department. It was a thankless job, but I loved all things academia so much that I was happy to still be inside the bubble of the college where I got my M.F.A. degree.
Downstairs was the cinema studies department. I heard this story, I think from my friend Marion. It was the first day of classes and a cinema studies professor announced they’d be studying Die Hard’s script.
Half the class got up and walked out in protest.
How dare this professor defile this hallowed auditorium with a movie directed by the same person who directed Predator and The Hunt for Red October?
These students preferred the nonlinear narratives and atmospheric scores, not the ones filled with explosions and big hair.
Even back then, I suspected those students had it wrong.
I am thinking back to June 2021, when I got a friend request from a woman in Texas. The name was familiar but I couldn’t quite match it. We had one mutual friend, a poet I admire in Philadelphia, which helped me guess that this person was not an insane person.
Shortly after I accepted the friend request, I got a message from her.
“I am not sure if you realize who I am,” she began. “Your biological father married my biological mother after your parents’ divorce. I am estranged from my mother and I was estranged from your father before his passing.”
Oh shit, I thought. This is the little baby the “other woman” had back when my dad had his affair in the early 1980s. She’s all grown up and is writing to me.
But why? Turns out she wanted to find out if “your bio dad is also my bio dad.”
Recently, she’d taken a 23 & Me test, and she wanted to ask if I’d be willing to take it to find out if we were half-siblings. She never knew who her biological father was. She had beautiful kids, all grown, and she was a professional of some sort. She went to exercise classes and didn’t like Ted Cruz. A decent person. The story of their estrangement, which I’d kind of heard over the years, placed me in her camp and not my father’s.
As we messaged more, it sank in that she didn’t want to find out if my dad was also her dad and we were half-siblings. She wanted to confirm and rule out that my dad was also hers, that he was NOT her dad.
Writing back to the daughter of the woman who broke up my family was surreal, even while my college announced its next waves of layoffs and the world went to crap in general.
My dad had been dead for over a decade at that point, but it still hurt to think that she wanted to confirm that we weren’t related. It was a new feeling, to be in the camp of the unwanted.
Taking the test would also mean that, if I took the test and confirmed we were half-siblings, it would also mean my dad’s affair began more than a year before we knew and he admitted to being the case.
I had talked to my mom about it. She didn’t seem as thrown off as I thought she would be. Having decades of perspective and grace and kindness does that to you.
I took the 23 & Me. She did not show up as a relative.
I did find out that I’m 1.87% Italian. My sister was super-excited about that.
Die Hard is chock full of Chekhov’s guns. Chekhov’s gun is the storytelling principle, story device that says if you put a gun in a story early on, there must be a reason for including it, and it’s going to be used. In Die Hard, Bruce Wills’ character’s literal gun in the opening scene counts as a Chekhov gun.
There’s so many others: the nanny, the limo driver, the make-fists-with-your-toes guy, the L.A. cop’s backstory that lands him at his desk job.
Watching Die Hard every Christmas, I rewire my brain with the familiarity of the plot and its many bread crumbs, set to a foiled-by-faux terrorists Christmas party in an office building in Los Angeles.
Since the NYU walkout in the mid-90s, most people have gotten on board to thinking of Die Hard as not only being worthy of study, but having a perfect 110-page screenplay. Die Hard is now a logline prefix: “Die Hard on a [blank]” is how we describe movies, and everyone knows what that means.
This year, I watched Die Hard to forget that I don’t have to confess to my mom that I’m watching that Bruce Willis movie again. I will miss hearing her sort of good-hearted disapproval. Just the thought of doing anything other than sanctioned Christmas activity than “Little Drummer Boy” and scented candles and sentimental everything just confused my mom.
This is my first Christmas without my mom. No phone calls on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, no shouted thank-yous for the many gifts she would mail up just in time for us to wrap them up the night before.
Now that I don’t have the back-and-forth with my mom, now that I don’t have a foil for these anti-whatever things that I do, is there any point in doing it anymore?
I know that these Substacks have to end with some kind of life lesson or uplifting theme, but I’m afraid I don’t have one for you, not this time.
I used to have this writing exercise with my students called “The Forced Epiphany.” Students loved it, I think, because unconsciously it made fun of the idea of having an epiphany.
Epiphanies are everywhere in writing, especially in commercial nonfiction. It’s annoying. Most of the time, epiphanies are the product of agents and book doctors who are eager to have writing come to some sort of Big Lesson. At best, epiphanies reconstruct those moments of realization; they’re reenactments of wisdom.
Still, it is often thrilling to teach students to do it, if for no other reason than to pull back the curtain and show young writers they can do it, too — they can have an epiphany just like the writers have in the books they read.
I’d have my students think of questions about their draft. Then they’d make a “field trip” somewhere: walk outside the class building or go to a museum or coffee shop, and take notes. Copious, detailed notes. Next, I’d have them go back to their draft and try to answer their question and have an epiphany, a forced epiphany.
It’s kind of a cheesy Carrie Bradshaw Sex in the City move, but I’m here to tell you, it worked. Students came up with epiphanies all the time: “Suddenly, while I was looking at Y, I figured out X.”
Boom. Epiphany.
My turn. It’s not going to be pretty, this forced epiphany, but here goes.
Why do I think I’m writing to you about my job interview where I had an emo moment about my career ending with a couple of state employees and snobby cinema studies students in the 1990s and the lack of my mom’s presence and a woman who wanted to confirm we that we in fact did not have the same father?
Because none of my life’s narrative makes sense, if it ever did, and watching Die Hard’s drum-tight, nesting egg story unfold year after year helps me piece my own plot somehow.
Is it strange to think that watching Nakatomi Plaza explode or Bruce Willis walk over broken glass every December adds up to a confirmation of life making sense? Sure. Does it sound like an artificial, dime-store forced epiphany? Well, very well then. I guess it’s that, too.
But if I waited for the voice of wisdom to appear until I tried to figure all this out, I’d still be waiting. And I have presents to put under the tree.
Happy holidays. And thanks for reading, as always. I apologize in advance for any typos. They drive me crazy when I spot them after I send this out.
Or maybe just buy me a coffee.
