"'Just the fax, ma'am'": Male Sentimentality in the Die Hard Films

ANN ARDIS AND DALE M. BAUER "'Just the fax, ma'am'": Male Sentimentality in the Die Hard Films In the middle of Bruce Willis's blockbuster hit of 1988, Die Hard—the sequel to which came out in 1990—Willis (aka John McClane) groans in pain while his partner murmurs in sympathy over the phone. Willis groans, not because he has been attacked by the German "terrorists" who are holding hostage his estranged wife and her coworkers at the Nakatomi Corporation, but because he has eaten a Twinkie. Remember that when we first meet his partner the L.A. cop Al Powell, Powell is buying a load of Twinkies for his pregnant wife. We never see her in either film; instead, Al's partnership with McClane is treated cinematically in the film's conclusion with all the soft-focus, whoozy glamor usually saved for the culmination of heterosexual romance. Why Twinkies? And why do they facilitate male bonding in Die Hard? The peculiar cultural logic that determines the role of Twinkies in postwar American culture calls attention to the sentimentality fueling the Die Hard films—a sentimentality that emerges as the white, heterosexual male's prime defense against the dangers posed to the American ideal of cultural homogeneity by contemporary feminism, post-Civil Rights era race relations, homosexuality, AIDS, and the U.S.'s loss of economic and military status on the international scene. Notably, the masculine anxiety Willis embodies in these films emerges from his allegiance to racial superiority and gender polarity. We will argue in this essay that the Die Hard films erase the history that proArizona Quarterly Volume 47 Number 2, Summer 1991 Copyright © 1991 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 1610 1 1 8 Ann Ardis and Dale M. Bauer duces racial, sexual, and ethnic differences, an erasure that makes their popularity of crucial concern to a culture intent on forgetting history.1 Yet what could Twinkies have to do with difference, and how might their weird repetition in the Die Hard films epitomize the nostalgic erasure of history in popular culture? To answer these questions, we need to recollect Dan White's notorious 1979 argument about the association of junk food, insanity, and homophobia. In 1979 White was tried for having murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and gay rights activist Harvey Milk on November 27, 1978. In Double Play, one of the few books on the story, Mike Weiss argues that White, then Supervisor of District Eight, committed these murders because Moscone has accused White of taking btibes, thereby damaging White's personal honor (271). White's attorney, Douglas Schmidt, worked the same angle to still greater effect in court. Claiming that White was depressed at the time by his failure to protect his constituency's "traditional American values, family and home" (294) , Schmidt presented White as a Vietnam vet, a former cop, and a working-class hero (333)—a man whose personal history and political convictions contrasted sharply with those of Moscone and Milk. In his own testimony, White argued that his homophobia was justified, or at least excusable, because he was temporarily insane. Insane because the greater part of his diet consisted of junk food, especially Twinkies. The legacy of White's defense is still with us. As Weiss notes, even in 1979 "the big billboard near the junction of two midtown [San Francisco ] freeways that proclaimed home of twinkies" was "an ironic landmark ," a tribute to the association ofCalifornia with male homosexuality (376). Interestingly enough, one of the first scenes in Die Hard alludes to that association: when Willis first arrives at the Nakatomi Christmas party, he responds to being kissed by one of his estranged wife's male coworkers with a bemused, "fucking California." Homosexuality is, at least to McClane, a West Coast phenomenon, something as disruptive to his way of life as coast-to-coast marriages and enthusiastic public displays of affection (he responds similarly when he sees a blond woman in skintight white leggings throw herself at and around the man she is meeting at the airport). McClane's bonding with Al over the very commodity Dan White used in 1979 to explain his outrageous murder begins...