Is Hans Gru­ber the ulti­mate cin­e­mat­ic embod­i­ment of capitalism?

The ​‘War on Ter­ror’ has always been defined through abstracts, as a con­flict between one way of life and anoth­er, rather than any­thing phys­i­cal. This cre­ates a help­ful def­i­n­i­tion of ter­ror­ism; a kind of fanat­i­cal, blood­thirsty devo­tion to a spe­cif­ic way of life, and a desire to force that way of life onto oth­er people.

This def­i­n­i­tion of ter­ror­ism, and the War on Ter­ror, is a use­ful prism through which to approach the ide­ol­o­gy of John McTiernan’s Die Hard. When Hans Gru­ber and his com­rades begin lay­ing siege to the Nakato­mi Plaza, the assump­tion is that they’re an extrem­ist sect; Gru­ber is even revealed to have ties with a fanat­i­cal group based out of West Ger­many. But in the end it isn’t about ter­ror­ism, at least not by most people’s def­i­n­i­tion of the term. When Gru­ber and his men take Nakato­mi Pres­i­dent Mr Tak­a­gi hostage, they do so in an attempt to gain access to the company’s vault, prompt­ing Tak­a­gi to ask, ​“what kind of ter­ror­ists are you?” Gruber’s response is telling: ​“Who said we were terrorists?”

The film’s cli­max also takes Gruber’s ide­ol­o­gy – or lack of it – to task, as he’s lev­elled with the accu­sa­tion of being noth­ing but a ​“com­mon thief.” But this theft, this devo­tion to mon­ey, is pre­cise­ly what makes him a ter­ror­ist; that dis­tinc­tion is just more dif­fi­cult to make when his fanati­cism is for a dis­tinct­ly Amer­i­can ideology.

The way Gru­ber treats the hostages, and even the police and FBI, gives the impres­sion of some­one mov­ing assets around; it’s no won­der that Ellis, a clas­sic yup­pie with an expen­sive wrist­watch, obnox­ious demeanour, and cocaine habit, is the one who tries in vain to get through to his cap­tor. Ellis reframes the attack on the Nakato­mi Cor­po­ra­tion in ​“his lan­guage,” using the ter­mi­nol­o­gy of hos­tile takeovers and poi­soned pills, some­thing that serves to only rein­force the fact that Hans and Ellis are not so dif­fer­ent; they see the world the same way, they’re just try­ing to con­quer it through dif­fer­ent means.

That poi­soned pill, John McClane, is Gruber’s direct oppo­site not just in terms of how each char­ac­ter is pre­sent­ed – although a torn and blood­stained vest is cer­tain­ly a stark con­trast to a smart suit – but also in how they view the world and the peo­ple around them. McClane doesn’t val­ue any­one as dis­pos­able, and when­ev­er he fails to save some­one, whether it’s Tak­a­gi or Ellis, he’s racked with guilt; he sees them as peo­ple rather than assets.

Gruber’s suits are anoth­er strik­ing thing about him; in his open­ing con­ver­sa­tions with Tak­a­gi, he talks about indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion and men’s fash­ion, about the per­fec­tion of the mod­el for the Nakato­mi Corporation’s project in Indone­sia. His sim­i­lar­i­ties with Tak­a­gi ham­mer home the sim­i­lar­i­ties in their world­views. Gru­ber even owns the same suit Tak­a­gi is wear­ing (“John Phillips, Lon­don. Rumour has it Arafat buys his there too.”) The fact that Gru­ber is not a dyed-in-the-wool rev­o­lu­tion­ary, admit­ting to only being aware of the Asian Dawn move­ment after read­ing about them in TIME Mag­a­zine, doesn’t stop him from being a fanat­ic or an extrem­ist. An ide­ol­o­gy that dif­fers from the dom­i­nant one isn’t the only way to define a ter­ror­ist – Gru­ber is proof of that.

While his first speech makes ref­er­ence to the Nakato­mi Corporation’s ​“lega­cy of greed around the globe,” he is clear­ly func­tion­ing in the same way. The sim­i­lar­i­ties between Gru­ber and Tak­a­gi are not mere­ly cos­met­ic, as both are essen­tial­ly in favour of expan­sion in the name of indus­try and prof­it. Where they dif­fer most obvi­ous­ly is exe­cu­tion – while Tak­a­gi and the Nakato­mi Cor­po­ra­tion expand through the glob­al mar­ket econ­o­my, Gru­ber does so through fear and violence.

After all, like any true cap­i­tal­ist, Gru­ber wants to prof­it from his ven­ture. His endgame after tak­ing the mon­ey isn’t to bankroll a rev­o­lu­tion but to sit on a beach, ​“earn­ing 20 per cent”. This rich-get-rich­er men­tal­i­ty, which in Gruber’s case comes from the lit­er­al blood and death of work­ers, serves as a reminder of the dan­gers inher­ent in cap­i­tal­ism, and the inequal­i­ty it engenders.

The thrust of Gruber’s cap­i­tal­ist extrem­ism is the extent to which it caus­es him to dehu­man­ise those around him. Even the peo­ple he works with are seen as expend­able, and his ruth­less­ness extends to fir­ing rock­ets at a vehi­cle that would nev­er be able to reach him. The rea­son McClane is such an effec­tive and com­pelling hero is that he rep­re­sents the antithe­sis of Gruber’s ideology.

His self-descrip­tion as a ​“New York cop” cou­pled with his uncer­tain­ty at rid­ing in limos and attend­ing fan­cy office par­ties puts him at odds with Gru­ber. They see the world in fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent ways; just as Gru­ber has sim­i­lar­i­ties with Nakato­mi, his dif­fer­ences with every­man McClane boil down to the ide­olo­gies and very souls of the two men. McClane’s brave rebel­lion against Gruber’s blood mon­ey scheme marks him as a strange com­bi­na­tion of chest-pump­ing lib­er­tar­i­an action hero and one-man rev­o­lu­tion­ary army.