Home Alone star Macauley Culkin recently weighed in on one of the oldest and often tedious debates in film culture: is Die Hard a Christmas film? He suggested that it is not, as the film could have been set at any time and would still have ‘worked’. Culkin’s criterion is curious and entirely dependent on our understanding of the word “worked”. Afterall, is it essential to the function of Home Alone’s plot that Kevin was left at home at Christmas and not during the family’s summer vacation? Is it vital that George Bailey yell “Merry Christmas!” and not any other salutation whilst running through the streets of Bedford Falls? What are we describing as essential here?
Gregory J. Markopoulos’ beautiful experimental short film Christmas USA (1949) features a young queer-coded man who escapes the stifling domesticity of his all-American family through dreams of the NYC state fair and ultimately a ritual that sees him guided through the desolate streets by a candle, leading him to an erotic encounter with another man. Returning home, he receives judgmental looks from his family before he sets out again into the cold. This is a crude summary of a complex and poetic film that fills its short runtime with expressive abstract imagery to explore and reveal the interiority of a trapped man with dreams of liberation.
But what can be stated quite objectively is that the film has almost no references to Christmas beyond its title. The only overt visual allusion is a shot of a drummer boy toy during a dream sequence; perhaps a vision of the film’s protagonist were he to lifelessly but relentlessly drum to society’s beat. What, then, is achieved by titling the film “Christmas USA”? Christmas is a powerful symbolic event. It is a self-reflective reaffirmation of Christian societal norms. Hetero-normative, patriarchal practices are inherent to the traditions and aesthetics of Christmas, swaddled in nostalgia and sentimentality. The film’s scenes of the family and of our protagonists’ pensive study of them take on reinforced significance in the context of the festive season. What better opportunity to measure oneself against societal expectations than a celebration of the Son of God?
Almost exactly forty years later, in 1988, the world had changed considerably. Hard-won victories by the gay and civil rights movements had made important progress towards creating a world in which people like the main character of Christmas USA need not feel so isolated. The protagonist of John McTiernan’s enduring action thriller Die Hard, John McClaine is an archetypal sheriff from an American western (Yippee Ki Yay). He is a stoic, though good-humoured man’s man who struggles to express himself emotionally unless confronted with the fear of death. Even the prospect of removing his shoes and making fists with his toes is a level of vulnerability he is uncomfortable with. As McClaine begins this particular Christmas, he is a man out of time. It is the turn of the straight, white man to feel isolated at Christmas. Fortunately, just as in Markopoulos’ film, a fantasy offers escape and liberation. Only in McTiernan’s film, the fantasy is real.
McClaine has travelled across the country in the hopes of rescuing his wife from the perils of the modern globalist office workplace. She’s dropped his surname and is working on Christmas Eve, thereby conceptually and physically removing herself from the domestic space and her family. She is instead devoting her labour to a Japanese conglomerate, a betrayal of all those Americans who fought in the Second World War (Pearl Harbour is specifically alluded to). This is Koyaanisqatsi: a world out of balance. Naturally, violence must occur to allow McClaine to restore the natural order. After all, the modern American man, as represented by the character Ellis, is totally ineffective in the face of foreign (naturally German) threats. He’ll sell out his country at the first opportunity. Only the sheriff can restore law and order and win his wife back into the domesticity the hero of Christmas USA so dearly sought to escape.
Christmas USA and Die Hard are exploring the same concept from opposite ends. Both protagonists find themselves shut out of what is supposed to be the most peaceful and harmonious night of the year because they are both out of their times. And so, what does Christmas mean in the context of these two films? What does it mean to set a film at Christmas, or even just to put the word Christmas in the title? Perhaps when considering whether a film should rightfully be considered a Christmas film a better question than “does the film still work without Christmas?” is “what does the film lose?”