Overanalyzing a Single Line from "Die Hard"

Every line should have multiple layers

It’s that magical time of year where my family gathers around the TV to re-watch Die Hard. An annual viewing gives us just enough time to let all the little details slip our minds, and we can enjoy the witty lines and exciting action like new.

Different things stand out each year, whether it’s Alan Rickman’s performance or the fight choreography or even the beautiful lens flares. For whatever reason this year, my wife has been randomly repeating a seemingly inane line, uttered by the smallest member of the cast: “McClane residence, Lucy McClane speaking.”

But in a script as tight as this one, every line is layered with meanings. So grab a cup of eggnog and warm yourself by the burning wreckage of Nakatomi Plaza, and listen as I over-analyze a single line from the greatest action film of all time.

A Little Line with Lots of Layers

Although superficially uncomplicated, there are several things going on here—

Exposition

On a literal level, this line tells the audience that the scene¹ takes place in the McClane house, and she’s named Lucy. But since we only re-visit this location once more in the movie, and Lucy is a very minor character, exposition is probably the least important part of the line.

Characterization

Because the role is so small, this single line characterizes Lucy almost entirely. In the mouth of almost any other character, the phrasing would come across as awkward and stiff. Coming from a little girl, it’s cute that she’s trying to sound grown up. It’s immediately endearing without being cloying.

Relational

And because we like Lucy, Holly’s reaction makes us like her more, too. She could’ve been curtly dismissive of Lucy, or annoyed that the nanny didn’t pick up. Instead, her reaction mirrors our own, reinforcing our identification with her.

Stakes

We like the mom, we like the kid, we want the family to be together. The emotional stakes are clear from the start, and heightened once Hans takes over the building. We don’t want Holly to die or Lucy to become an orphan.

Narrative Set-Up

Just before this, Holly’s assistant calls her “Ms. Gennero,” but the line is so quick, it’s easy to miss.² The fact that Holly goes by her maiden name at work but is still married to John McClane becomes very important later.

Thematic Resonance

Holly’s last name is thematically important, as well—it’s what sparks the fight between John and Holly. Crucially, it’s symbolic of the growing distance between the couple. Lucy’s line reinforces the significance of the last name, a tension that’s only resolved at the end of the film when Holly once again takes the name McClane.

At this point, you’re probably asking…

Am I Overthinking This?

Did the writers really consider all of these things when writing a quick introductory line for a bit part?

The writers certainly didn’t sit down with a list like the one above while writing their first draft(s).³ The above analysis is really only possible post-facto.⁴ It’s not how writers thinking in the moment of creation.

But during a re-write? Probably.

Every time a writer does another draft, they look for new ways to deepen every line, compress as much meaning as possible into every action performed or word spoken.

It’s possible the scene was originally Holly calling the nanny, Paulina. After all, the standard Hollywood rule is to never work with children or animals. But if Paulina had answered the phone, the audience wouldn’t care as much about the family dynamics.

Maybe an early version had Lucy answering the phone in a generic way, like “Hi, mommy!” That would’ve lacked specificity and charm.

A good director, like John McTiernan, may have come up with the idea of the kids drawing on the floor before the phone rang, so we could see Lucy’s excitement at being entrusted with the grand responsibility of answering the phone.

Collaboration and effort made this single line as layered and meaningful as possible, and it’s not anywhere close to the most memorable dialogue in a film full of quotable one-liners. The big things matter, but it’s the little things that build up, almost invisibly, to create a classic film.

A Brief Digression into Abstraction

Writing manuals talk about high-level stuff like story structure,⁵ but the real work of writing happens at the granular level.

As Neal Stephenson said in Idea Having is Not Art:

Each artform has its own set of conventions and constraints. For example, if I’m writing a sentence, I can choose from any word in the dictionary. But once I’ve made that choice I need to spell it correctly or else no one will be able to read what I’ve written. And there is a vast range of ideas that I could express in a sentence, but the sentence needs to be structured according to rules of grammar.

Notwithstanding all of those rules and constraints, there is still vast scope of possible things that a writer can say. Moment-to-moment decision-making is happening in some kind of intermediate zone between—at the more granular level—spelling words correctly (where there is only one correct choice) and writing grammatical sentences (more choices, but still somewhat rule-bound) versus—at the higher end—delivering a coherent manuscript hundreds of pages long.

That intermediate zone, where all of the decisions get made, is poorly understood by non-writers. Many published novelists, including myself, have stories about being approached by someone who “has an idea for a book” and who proposes that the writer should actually do all of the writing and then split the proceeds with the idea haver.

The lesson here isn’t to over-analyze every single line you write; it’s that every line can matter. When it’s time to re-write, look at everything the line accomplishes, from exposition to emotional depth, and see if you can add to it.

And then someday, someone will over-analyze a single line from your movie.

But is it a Christmas movie?

Free subscribers will have to wait until Christmas Day to unwrap the answer to that question, but paid subscribers get to peak early, after the paywall.

Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? Is Lethal Weapon a Christmas movie? The fact that one of those is a perennial holiday debate, but the other isn’t, tells us something about how that term is used.

Both are action movies from the late 80s, set during Christmas. Both have lots of gunfights, swearing, even a little nudity. They’re significant moments in the careers of both their respective lead actors and directors. And they’re both totally watchable today.

So why is one—maybe ironically, maybe not—a popular Christmas movie, and the other not even in contention? Although a general audience member may not articulate it this way, I think it’s the underlying themes.

Shane Black famously uses Christmas as a backdrop for many of his films. But it’s ultimately just that—a backdrop. Visual interest to hold the audience’s attention, in case the quips aren’t quippy enough.

Martin Riggs is a Vietnam vet with PTSD. He struggles to find meaning in his life. Murtaugh’s family gives him a glimpse of the path not taken, the life he could’ve had. But the overarching theme is Riggs discovering that his flaws—his violence and his temper—can still be valuable to the community.

It’s a fine sentiment, but it’s not Christmas.

Most people see Christmas as a time for families to come together, resolve their differences, and celebrate as one. Riggs is resolving internal conflict (his self-perception of his self-worth) in Lethal Weapon, whereas McClane must resolve relationship conflict. If you were to remove the villains from Die Hard, it would still fundamentally be about a man getting over himself and reuniting with his family at Christmastime.

Do They Know It’s Christmas Time at All?

What if you removed Christmas altogether?⁶ Can a Christmas movie be set at a time other than Christmas? Consider Children of Men—

A sufficiently erudite and pious film student could argue that it’s a sci-fi/action re-telling of the Nativity story—a man unexpectedly called upon to protect and guide a pregnant woman and bring her miraculous child into a world in need of hope.

But would any normal person call it a Christmas movie? I’m not purely descriptivist when it comes to language, but it seems to me that we at least have to take common usage into consideration. Children of Men would then be a Nativity allegory, but not a “Christmas Movie.”

Christmas Conclusion

Given these examples, I think a Christmas movie has to include the following elements—

1. Set largely or significantly during Christmastime. (It’s a Wonderful Life’s frame story happens on Christmas Eve, although much of the flashbacks do not.)

2. It must reflect the common, modern experience of Christmas, i.e. family reunification.

Neither are sufficient on their own, and both are necessary.

That’s just my opinion. What’s your edge-case for a Christmas movie?

1. In a production sense, the two halves of this phone call would be shot separately, and thus would require different sluglines in the script. Narratively, however, this is all part of one scene—Holly lets her assistant go to the party, rebuffs the sleezy guy Ellis, and then checks in with her kids. The scene ends with revealing that John is her husband, finally connecting the office party with John’s arrival at the airport.

2. I actually had to go back to check if Ginny did in fact say Holly’s last name.

3. The long and complicated history of Die Hard’s development is beyond the scope of this article.

4. The fatal flaw in most screenwriting advice is thinking that analyzing a script is the same as writing a script.

5. Joel Spolsky calls the people who seek this kind of abstraction Architecture Astronauts: “When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.”

6. No, not like that.