So there’s bad news today, Bruce Willis’s family announced to the press his retirement from acting, after a diagnosis of aphasia; who knows how bad his health is, at 67, but his career is over. In our strange age, the news came as an Instagram post by his daughter. I suppose the press is just as dead as Hollywood, so it makes sense to go to social media, but in the context, it’s one more baffling thing for the millions of fans, learning about life, the body, & mortality in the ghost world of the internet. We are stuck with all these contradictions: It’s there in a personal post, but it’s spreading all over the world—it’s going to be recorded forever by computer memory, but it’s likely to be forgotten instantly by most people who glance at this bit of news… So there is an end of all that.—Not even fame has any power over us anymore…
Willis is the last actor to have something of the combination of manly charm, comic talent, a few famous roles, working with remarkable directors & writers, & luck that makes a star. The best we can do with an actor we admire is to enjoy his work & learn from his portrayals of character & enactments of story; if we learn about our society from the movies, we are likelier to remember & to be grateful. Our memories much more than the fantasies of the screen count now, so here are my essays on Bruce Willis:
My Die Hard essay for Law&Liberty & the two podcasts I did on the movie, talking crime in American cities with Pete Spiliakos, a big issue in movies from the 70s to the early 90s, though unheard of now, & redemption for police officers with C.J. Wolfe, which is a theme as timely & as absent from our cinema. This is his most famous role, the movie likeliest to be remembered 50 years hence, not to say to become a national pastime for a while, as a Christmas movie! So read up, listen to the conversations, remember the citizen-hero: Director John McTiernan gave Willis something close to immortal fame in as John McClane!
Next, something much stranger my essay on 12 Monkeys on its 25th an., a fascinating Terry Gilliam fantasy of a techno-tyranny emerging from biological terrorism that spoke with newfound urgency in 2020—Willis was then at the peak of his powers, playing various kinds of working class heroes that might save decadent, too sophisticated for their own good societies…
Here’s a review of one of Willis’s recent movies, Death Wish (2018), Eli Roth’s remake of the ‘70s Bronson vigilante story. Worth thinking about how much deadlier our cities are, how cowardly & cruel our liberalism, & how impotent the citizenry—this movie is a good jolt to begin such reflections…
(I also lamented the scabrous roasts that make our decadence uglier with a taste for the sordid more desperate than excited, & which quickly becomes boring—Willis was the willing victim of such an ugly spectacle, just as his career was going down the drain. It’s one of the ugly truths about our times that we tolerate or even pay for degrading spectacles…)
Alas. And yes, I do believe the vax is the likeliest explanation. It's a significant adverse reaction category. See Steve Kirsch.
Thanks for all your writing/speaking on Willis over the years, Titus. When the Die Hard movies came out, I was too hipster (and still had too much of a bad taste in the mouth from his detective show Moonlighting) to appreciate the "working class hero" aspect, which your work allowed me to later see. First time I saw Die Hard, in fact, was this last Christmas season!
Glad to hear, Carl!
Yeah, the show--not for me, either...