Yes, Die Hard is a Christmas Movie: A Semantic, Syntactic, Pragmatic Approach to Resolve the Debate Over Die Hard’s Genre Status

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sometime early in the second decade of the 21st Century, many people began taking to their holiday Facebook statuses, dating app profiles and other social media to make would-be clever remarks about 1988 summer blockbuster action film Die Hard (McTiernan, 1988) being a Christmas movie. Indeed, Die Hard has now become a mainstay of late-December American television programming and repertory screenings. In other words, Die Hard has become a Christmas movie simply because enough of an audience and marketplace deem it so. An application of Rick Altman’s ‘A Semantic/Syntactic/Pragmatic Approach to Genre’ theory demonstrates rather authoritatively that regardless of initial intent and marketing, Die Hard has now been cemented as equal parts Christmas movie and action blockbuster. This article uses Altman’s methodology to explore both how and why Die Hard might be defined in scholarly terms as a Christmas movie and provides an exploration of the film’s patently American approach to Christmas traditions, celebrations and the repertory Yuletide media exploited and marketed in conjunction therewith. My analysis also demonstrates that, while Die Hard may be a Christmas movie, the myriad films which have slavishly replicated the 1988 film fail to obtain similar Christmastime genre affiliations and discussions.