Wearing the Vest

In Die Hard I John McClaine (played by Bruce Willis) kills a German terrorist on the 20th floor of a pyrrhic skyscraper in LA.  Ruefully examining the terrorist’s shoes, he quips: “just my luck to kill a guy with feet smaller than my mother’s.” Germans and terrorists, it would appear, have femininely small feet, inadequate to shoe Willis’s barefoot, Irish-American cop. McClaine is forced to take on single-handedly and barefoot, Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber and his German henchmen, dressed only in a white vest and a pair of trousers, having been interrupted while changing his clothes in the toilets, in a bid to woo back his estranged wife, Holly, who works in the building. The film pits an Irish-American cop against the forces of German villainy. Clothing is the vocabulary through which this opposition is enunciated: states of dress and undress are the means through which the film communicates its moral order. We know that McClaine is the hero because of his bare feet, and his white vest, which becomes progressively filthier and more ragged as the story goes on. We recognise this heroism because its nakedness contrasts so markedly with Rickman’s urbane, bearded and besuited state. Baddies, it seems, wear clothes, while goodies are filthy, barefoot and semi-naked.

It would seem reasonable to enquire as to why exactly semi-nudity and Irish-Americanness should intertwine so successfully in this image of the action hero. Of course, we could undertake a semiotic and ideological reading of this costume, seeing it as that of a working-class American hero. After all, the white vest – or wife-beater- has been synonymous with brutish American masculinity since the days of Brando. There is more than an echo of Brando in Willis’s cop, and this image is set up oppositionally to Rickman’s besuited Europeanness, just as Mc Claine’s taciturn one-liners contrast with Gruber’s verbosity. The film uses costume to rehearse the battle of Stanley and Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire: the wordless bodily immigrant American versus the verbal, overly clothed, feminine (wannabe) European played by an English actor.
This explanation seems inadequate though, for the complexities of the image of Irishness embodied by Willis. Certainly, Willis’s vest also serves an erotic purpose, revealing his straining, gleaming filthy biceps and pecs, and accommodating the homo-erotic drive of his buddy relationship with the African American cop, Al Powell – a relationship that facilitates the symbolic sex-act at the end of the film where Al “learns to shoot his gun again” through his desire to protect McClaine. Certainly too, Willis’s white vest and his character’s Irishness produce a hero that is all American, being just ethnic enough to preserve the values of the melting-pot mythologies of the American dream while remaining just white enough to ensure that mythology doesn’t end up in worrying places. But the white vest – or wife beater – seems to do some complex work around the peculiar status of Irish-Americanness more broadly.  McClaine is a hero, and this heroism is imprinted on his vest: his struggles with a building and the Germans in it are marked in blood and sweat.  His costume allows us to see his work in the world and acts as a guarantor of his masculinity – “real” work is dirty work and is done by the Irish, who are the protectors of Americans against encroaching and dangerous foreignness: a strange and inverted echo of what was to befall the Irish American fire-fighters in the World Trade Centre in 2001.
However, McClaine’s vest also associates him with the stereotype of the drunken Irish wife-beater, an association parodied in the American cartoon Family Guy, where the lead character visits a pub in Ireland called Wifey McBeaty’s.

Irishness may be heroic but it is undercut with a violence that could be directed at women as well as Germans, perhaps explaining McClaine’s estrangement from Holly, and echoing again Stanley’s violence to Blanche, which begins when he rummages in her trunk of dresses. However, the threat of mis-directed violence is never realised in McClaine’s case: his masculinity is always permeated by the mocking self aware cartoonishness from Willis’s previous roles, and his witty one-liners ensure that his potential menace is undercut, made safe and comforting, functioning wholly in the service of the good. Irishness, then, unlike Stanley’s Polishness, comes to embody a mix of heroism, menace, and comedy, and it does so through clothes. Indeed, the image that Willis embodies at the end of the film - dishevelled, filthy, bloodied, and cheerful - is oddly familiar, and it’s tempting to compare it with 19th Century images of the ragged Stage Irishman. What this similarity allows us to see is the potent complexity in the stage Irish image, and its use of costume, rather than to dismiss McClaine.  Raggedness may be a means to a version of Americanness that becomes the epitome of masculinity and heroism.