What Comes Next: Die Hard

My son Lucas is a curious little thing. We read him a nursery rhyme or an alphabet story or whatever, and when it ends, he loves to say “What comes next?!” Like, sorry buddy, that was Z, the alphabet’s over, there’s nothing left. But “What comes next?! What comes next?!” He just wants to know.

With toddler books, there is no next. But with movies, there is a next. Even if the movie doesn’t get a sequel or what have you, the movie creates a world — even if just in our imagination — and once you create a world (unless we’re talking about The Cabin in the Woods), that world continues to exist — again, even if just in our imagination. There is always a next.

So I’m starting up a little thought exercise. “What comes next?” I imagine what comes after the cameras cut in our story. Do the characters actually live happily ever after? Or do things just go bad?

First up, because I know it better than anything else: The best movie of all time.

What Comes Next: Die Hard

John McClane has beaten the Hans Gruber group. Hans got shot and fell 30 stories. Karl got beat up, quasi-hanged, and then shot three times by a desk cop. Takagi and Ellis were murdered, but the Nakatomi Corporation’s bearer bonds were preserved (yay capitalism!). McClane’s wife agreed to use his last name again. Yay!

But there’s more.

So who came out the best?

Holly. John is likely a big celebrity (even in the late-‘80s) for his exploits, and he gets the knowledge that he saved a lot of lives and killed a lot of bad guys (even assuming that would be pleasing to him, which is pretty dubious), but he also has some significant injuries. Dude had several insane fistfights, got shot at least once, and oh yeah, has glass all up in his feet. (My favorite you-don’t-think-of-it-at-first detail from the movie is that after it’s all over, John and Holly have to come down 30 flights of stairs. The elevators are all varying degrees of broken and blown up. Dude had to walk 30 flights, hugging his wife, on two several cut-up feet. Agony.) Meanwhile, what was Holly’s biggest injury? Her wrist probably hurts a bit due to Hans clinging to her watch before he fell. Other than that, the biggest thing that happened to her was her top button coming undone so she showed slightly more skin?

Also, her boss (and her manager? Ellis was above her, right?) just died, and she was the leader of the hostages after Takagi died. It might take a while for Nakatomi LA to get back on its feet, but Holly is going to be in charge when it does. And the Nakatomi Corporation can cash in on an enormous insurance claim and public sympathy, so her job is going to be real lucrative.

Who came out the worst? (Among the survivors)

Honestly, I’m tempted to say John, just for the bloody feet and the 30 flights of stairs. I think about it every time. But ultimately, I’ll go off board a bit and say Ginny. Don’t even know who Ginny is, do you? She’s Holly’s poor assistant, pregnant with the baby who’s “ready to tend bar.” She survives, but she does so after having to climb up and down the stairs to the roof and then down all 30 flights to the ground at eight months pregnant or whatever it was. She’s in agony. She gives birth, and the baby’s fine, but crippling survivor’s guilt combined with post-partum depression all at once? Ginny is gonna have a real hard life for a while. She develops an addiction, she loses her husband, she loses custody of her child. Some years later, she makes it onto a reality show as some sort of “Remember that woman who survived Nakatomi?” thing, but it’s a rough post-Nakatomi life for ol’ Ginny.

Who came out sneaky-good?

Theo! I’ve maintained this for years — Theo was just the tech guy. He definitely got busted after being found unconscious in the parking garage, so he didn’t just walk away clean. But he never held a gun, he never threatened a hostage (one of only two bad guys who can say that, and the other (a) never got a name or dialogue, and (b) also didn’t get killed, strangely enough). Yes, those of us watching know he was a heartless little death-enjoyer, but in reality it wouldn’t be even the smallest problem for him to just testify that he was hired to run the computers, he didn’t know how bad it would get. Theo’s going to jail, and not for a little while. But he’s not there forever. A good lawyer, and he’s out in 15, 20 years. Which means now, today, he’s been out somewhere in the range of another 15, 20 years. He’s had time to start over, come up with a plan, maybe enact some revenge.

What I’m saying is, we need a Die Hard 6, and Theo needs to be the villain. Viva la Clarence Gilyard Jr.

So what was the next little while like?

Argyle takes John and Holly away, presumably toward Holly’s house. Within a minute or two, John’s adrenaline wears off, he realizes he’s in excruciating pain, and Argyle has to take him to the doctor, where he stays for the next week. His kids come to visit him, including the wracked-with-guilt Lucy, hating herself for putting her parents at risk in a TV interview even though she had no way to know better. She spends all her time devastated about that, which ultimately manifests in an unfair bitterness toward him, which is why she eventually leaves his name behind and goes by Gennaro. Paulina, with the stress of the aftermath and fear of being exposed as in the country illegally, quits, meaning Holly can’t spend as much time at the hospital as she’d like.

Argyle … man, he gets screwed here. An LA limo company hired specifically by the giant Nakatomi Corporation? It ain’t Argyle’s fault he got stuck, banged up the limo, was late returning, but it doesn’t matter. That sort of boss is gonna fire his ass immediately. Back to the cab, Argyle.

Okay, so Al. I know in Die Hard 2 we see him still a cheerful pudgy cop, but I will always maintain that’s a façade. I refuse to believe that “Oh, I killed again” is the cathartic release it’s portrayed to be. Maybe that night he sleeps well. But eventually, he’s still the cop who killed a kid. That’s why he’s still at a desk in the sequel. He’s going to have some nightmares, some PTSD.

Dwayne T. Robinson is set. His sniveling ass can tell everyone how he didn’t agree with the two Johnsons’ FBI plan, he can say how the SWAT team screwed up. Al Powell is a good cop, he’s not gonna tattle. Dwayne is chief of police within two years.

And because snivelly little guys never get the comeuppance you want them to get, Dick Thornburg is fine as well. We already know from the sequel that he gets an even better job and that he successful gets a restraining order against Holly for punching him, but it’s more than that. He leverages his experience as the first reporter to break the story, the first reporter to find McClane’s family, the closest reporter to everything into a book deal where he is cast as the hero. He makes the rounds on every news show over the next few weeks and makes a blue jillion dollars. Freakin’ Dick. I just hope he doesn’t get that table at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant. But you know he does.

And back to John. We know he remains his sarcastic, badass self through three more good movies and one god-awful trainwreck. And we know he remains a cop. But we also know he learns no lessons. He loses Holly. He alienates his daughter, fair or unfair. And he wasn’t even on duty when this all went down. He likely gets sued (“covered with glass!”), isn’t able to work for a long while after everything else, and faces a suspension. Things turn around for him for at least a bit, with he and Holly reconciled in DH2, but these problems persist, and that’s why he is “one step” shy of being a full-blow alcoholic in With A Vengeance.

And the minor characters?

There’s a frequent flyer who remembers a guy with a handgun and a giant teddy bear on his plane, who he had given some “fists with your toes” advice. Later, he sees a news report about a cop who was visiting his wife, thwarted a major terrorist attack, and is now hospitalized with major foot injuries because he was barefoot the whole time. Does that frequent flyer feel like he helped or hurt?

There’s a pair of Nakatomi Corporation employees who were caught by terrorists mid-hookup in some random person’s office. She was thrown out to her coworkers still topless, so she ended up having to run up and down the stairs with no bra, always uncomfortable (or so I’m told). Do they have psychological issues even having sex in the future? I feel like you would.

There’s an LAPD dispatcher who refused to send help to what turned out to be the biggest single crime in the history of America. She lost her damn job.

There’s a professional hostage negotiator and author who went on live TV to talk about Helsinki Syndrome, which is tough, because it’s actually called Stockholm Syndrome. And the hostages were absolutely not experiencing it. He was mocked and discredited, and his publisher dropped Hostage Terrorist, Terrorist Hostage from its shelves.

And finally, there’s a gas station attendant whose day consists of seeing a skyscraper down the street basically falling down around him and the story of a cop who bought an entire giant bag full of Twinkies. He never even realizes those two are connected, but he very much tells the story about the fat cop and the Twinkies, and he definitely does not believe the cop’s story about having a pregnant wife at home.