Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

The sharpest opinions on the debate from around the web

Bruce Willis.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images)

The world is full of intractable problems and hotly contested ideas. Climate change, COVID-19, the nature of capitalism. Whether Elon Musk should replace himself as the leader of Twitter. And then there is the question of whether the 1988 action thriller Die Hard is a Christmas movie. A debate that is only slightly more resolvable than whether The Dress is white and gold or black and blue, the Die Hard discourse can be traced back to a 2007 Slate article by Michael Agger, who when informed by The Atlantic's Kaitlin Tiffany in 2021 of the cultural babadook he had unleashed with his throwaway post said, "I'm the guy who threw a cigarette out the window and accidentally burned down the forest!"

Christmas elements make it a Christmas movie

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
David Faris

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.