The fantasy offered by Die Hard is basically one of masculine empowerment. We, the (male) audience, see ourselves in John McClaine and want to see him win, so when he does, we're happy. This much is obvious, so let's unpack some of the subtler ways it does this.
Masculine empowerment manifests itself, in this film, in the form of skill at combat, physical prowess, and guerrilla tactics. This plays up the traditional, empowered role of the MAN (often at the expense of the woman) as a warrior, a hunter.
Don't worry. There are still women.
John is introduced as, first and foremost, a nice guy. He's on an airplane and politely conversing with the guy next to him. All men see themselves as nice guys and hate riding on airplanes, so we can immediately see ourselves in John.
Furthermore, his name is John, which is the most bland male name in the world. His surname is Scottish, but the spelling has been Websterized, which is to say, Americanized. This appeals to the core (read: white) American target audience of the film – many of them have Scottish ancestry and perhaps a Scottish last name, but see themselves as predominantly American. He's also played by Bruce Willis, who is now considered to be one of the paragons of the American Badass – up there with Clint Eastwood and Samuel L. Jackson – but at the time, he was known as kind of a shlub for terrible movies like Death Becomes Her. This makes him relatable, because although we like to see ourselves as badasses, we know we're shlubs too. So when John McClaine transforms from shlub to badass, so does Bruce Willis, and by proxy, so do we.
This is what Bruce Willis looked like before this movie.
Then John stands up and we see he has a gun, but don't worry, he's a cop. This makes him reasonably badass already, but since it's not how he's introduced, it doesn't feel overdone. This is very important: he cannot come on too strong as a badass or else the fantasy collapses and we can't identify at all with the main character. This is the dreaded Mary Sue – a character who is simply too idealized to make for satisfying storytelling.
John is a badass cop, but he's also – JUST LIKE YOU – a shlub whose wife left him, thus making him relatable again because he has the same failings as many of us: he's no good with women. The target demographic of this movie is, of course, all men, and ideally men with a fairly traditional view of masculinity. It follows, therefore, that these men “don't understand women” all that well, which is to say, they think of women as a puzzle to be unlocked rather than just a bunch of people. John's failed marriage is a more benevolent form of this, but other stories marketed towards men can be more chauvinistic (see Taken or anything with John Wayne in it) or outright misogynistic (see The Wicker Man remake).
This woman has no idea of what is about to happen, and how silly it will be.
John's from New York, and although not everyone in the audience is also from New York, it has the right everyday, honest quality that is lacking in public perceptions of the glitzy, alien Los Angeles where John is going. When John shows up at the corporate party, he doesn't fit in very well, arguably because he's too “real” and they're all a bunch of goddamn phonies.
I think one of the keys to unlocking Die Hard's wish fulfilment is the character of Harry Ellis, the guy who is trying to get with John's estranged wife. We're set up, right away, to hate this guy. We want to hate him, because he's a sexual rival to John/us. And lo and behold, he represents everything John isn't – a smug corporate weasel. He's not a hunter or a warrior. He does not live up to the tradition expectations of masculinity, attempting to defuse the threat of Hans Gruber through words rather than violence. It helps that this movie came out in the '80s, when people generally had a fairly low opinion of corporate douches who got rich off trickle-down economics and snorted coke while honest people like you and me were breaking our backs to make ends meet, &c.
If you like this man, then you have no idea who he was or what he did.
Let's also take a look at the bad guys. While John is an honest everyman who spends most of the movie in a muscle-shirt the better to show off his pipes, Hans Gruber is a witty, sophisticated, suit-wearing, classically educated villain, which – like Ellis – plays into the assumed resentment the blue-collar audience has for the wealthy and cultured, who are seen as “less manly”. Note that Hans is quite learned on international mens' fashion, adding an unspoken homophobic layer to our hatred of him.
I'm soooo ambiguously camp!
Of course, we also have to deal with the fact that Hans and friends are foreign, but more than that, they're (mostly) German, which capitalizes on the assumed xenophobia and lingering WW2-era patriotism of the blue-collar audience. This xenophobic aspect is downplayed a bit by Al the likable and sympathetic cop who is black, Argyle the hi-larious limo driver who is black, and Takagi the admirable and extremely brave Japanese man. We like these guys, so we don't feel like racists even though we hate the eeeevil Germans.
I should also deal with the fact that not all of Gruber's crew are Germans. There's also an Asian guy, a Southerner, and a black nerd. The evil Asian's role is pretty straightforward: he's another evil foreigner, but he has a good counterpart in Takagi. The Southern guy makes the evil not entirely foreign, and we realize that O NO EVIL CAN COME FROM OUR OWN HEARTLAND. Finally, we come to Theo, the African-American hacker. Normally, I'd suggest that his being black was incidental and that he was mostly just an evil nerd (because the audience probably dislikes nerds for the same reason they dislike Eurodandies like Hans, tacky '80s snots like Ellis, and that slimy reporter character). But remember what happens to Theo? Argyle, the jokey comic relief black guy, punches him in the face. This scene may have been added later after the black actor was cast – while everyone would be okay seeing Bruce Willis himself kill a nerd, watching him kill a black guy would make us uncomfortable. This is Die Hard, not 300. So they give it to Argyle, for much the same reason that any female villain in an action movie will get killed by the heroine and not the hero.
It is, however, entirely okay for Al to shoot Karl, the muscular German guy. In addition to it being a symbolic moment where he rediscovers the truth by which John lives and that Ellis failed to grasp – that violence is awesome – it's also the most humiliating way to kill Karl. Karl doesn't speak a whole lot, but he is German, blond, muscular, and cares a lot about family (remember how angry he gets that his brother was killed?), so it shouldn't be too hard for the audience to put together that he's a Nazi. He probably isn't, but that's not the point.
Are we gonna split hairs, here?
He's Nazi-ish enough to qualify, and watching him get shot dead by a black guy is extra-fulfilling for the Nazi-hating audience. It's also a moment that lets Al really shine, which is appealing to any black guys in the audience for obvious reasons, and to white guys because it lets them feel really enlightened about race. It's the same reason everyone wants a black best friend.
Al is made extra-likable because – unlike Argyle, who is frankly kind of annoying – his blackness isn't overbearing. He's a cop first, rather unlike John, because John is a protagonist and Al is a supporting character. You know he's a cop first because in his first scene he's buying potato chips (or something) and the store clerk says he thought “you guys” eat donuts. It was donuts, not fried chicken, and Al laughs rather than getting offended, so it's a stereotype about his copness, not his blackness. So Al's a cop who happens to be black, but he is still black, which makes him an African AMERICAN, and ONE OF US, and therefore, watching him kill someone you can pretend is a Nazi is like chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” You get to feel really proud of how enlightened and non-racist your country is. Assuming you're American. And if you're not, then you can use America as a synecdoche for wherever you do live. This works even in the German dub of the movie, where all the bad guys are suddenly given French accents.
But you know what cops suck? High-ranking ones. Al and John are ordinary beat cops, just regular hard-working joes like you and me. But Police Chief Dwayne and the two Agent Johnsons... they're jerks who “can live with” hostage casualties. Because the film's target demographic, you see, didn't have a lot of faith in the federal government. Ronald Reagan was the president, Watergate was still within living memory, and Escape From New York was a really good movie, so it's hard to blame them. As for Dwayne, he's in the tradition of the chief from Dirty Harry, and although Joe Schmo has no specific grudge against police chiefs, he knows he hates his own boss, and he can easily displace that onto Al's boss.
We never really find out all the details of John's breakup with his wife, but when she figures out that he's the one causing so much trouble for Hans, she says “Only John can drive people this crazy” or something similiar to that, so it was clearly behaviour similiar to this that caused their estrangement. I'm not quite sure how that's possible, but let's carry on. She also says the line with a hint of pride, and by the end of the movie, she's melting into his arms again, so it's safe to say that in addition to saving the lives of himself and all the hostages, John also saved their marriage. But the best part is, he saved it by doing the very thing that drove her away. This isn't a story about a man changing to get his woman back; it's a story where a woman realizes that her man was right ALL ALONG.
Let's also examine the fact that this is a movie where a man has to save his love interest from a villain. That's true of about %80 of all stories ever told, and it's a very comforting male fantasy because we get to be heroic, get laid, and kill somebody with no feelings of guilt. There are two big variables here: the villain is often a monster (a dragon, or an alien, or some kind of Other), and the threat posed is often explicitly sexual. When you consider just how many aliens were interested in Earth women specifically in the '50s, you start to worry, because the fantasy being sold is basically this: those who are not like us want to rape our women. Remember that the '50s was when the Civil Rights movement got started. You'll figure out what the real fear is, here, and it ain't a pretty one.
Back when racial equality was a radical and scary subject, and not just a given.
Hans doesn't pose any such sexual threat to Holly (that would make his sexuality less ambiguous), but he IS a foreigner, so that's got to count for something when John rescues her from him.
All this said, I still really like Die Hard. It's a fun movie, and knowing the wish fulfilment fantasies it offers doesn't take away from that. There are far worse fantasies to sell, and the way it's sold is at least moderately respectful of the audience's intellect. For every Twilight there's a Pride & Prejudice, and for every Ecks vs. Sever there's a Die Hard.
My favourite scene was the bit where Prejudice realizes that she really does love Pride after all.
