Our Family Christmas Tradition
Setups and Payoffs in Die Hard
My wife and I rewatch Die Hard around every Christmas. Even when our daughter was born, we watched it in the hospital, so it was technically the first movie Amelia ever saw.
I never get tired of it; I just love all the little details and connections sprinkled throughout. So, I made a video illustrating every single setup and payoff (along with foreshadowing, Chekhov's Guns, callbacks, brick jokes, running gags, Gilligan cuts, and anything else I think kinda fits).
The uncensored version of this video is available to paying subscribers. Die Hard is, after all, an R-rated movie with a lot of sex and violence, which YouTube doesn’t appreciate.
What is Tight?
Die Hard has what’s known as a “tight” script.
Honestly, I don’t think anyone actually knows what this means; it’s just something people say when they like a movie.
A lot of times, it seems like a nice way of saying “sparse” or “laconic,” as if the fewer words used, the better. That’s kind of a nonsense definition, when you can’t read the scene description while watching the movie.1 It can also mean a movie with few extraneous scenes, but again, that’s not terribly distinguishing—wasted screentime tends to get cut in the edit (if not before), anyway.
To me, a better, more useful definition of a “tight” script is one that has myriad kinds of connections across a variety of scenes throughout the film, not just causally and linearly. In general, each scene should cause the next scene to happen; or, at the very least, there should be a throw2 from the end of one to the beginning of the other.
A tight script takes this further by creating connections between nonconsecutive scenes. Setups and payoffs, callbacks, Chekhov’s guns, brick jokes—all of these tie the beginning of the movie to the end, the inciting incident to the low point, and so on and so forth. The whole movie is brought together by a tightly woven web of connections.
It’s not simply that removing a scene would cut a narrative thread. It would also unravel multiple connections across the story, making it feel less cohesive.
In Die Hard, everything ties together. There are little connections throughout the script, setups that don’t pay off for an hour or more—Holly slamming down the picture frame; the horny couple engaging in office sex; and the most famous of all, “fists with your toes.”
The point of my video isn’t just to demonstrate that these connections exist, or even how many there are; my goal is to show how disparate and varied they are. I found this exercise fascinating, and I hope you do, too.
Unless it’s my short, EXT. LOS ANGELES - DAY.
“Throw” is the correct word for what I inelegantly termed “Non-Narrative, Inter-Scenic Tethers.”