“All of you, relax. This is a matter of inconvenient timing. That’s all. Police action was inevitable. And as it happens… necessary. So let them fumble about outside, and stay calm. This is simply the beginning.”

“Die Hard” is IMHO the greatest Christmas movie of all time (followed closely by “Home Alone”, of course), and I can’t help but consider it one of my favorite movies ever. I’ve lost count the times I’ve watched it, and I was already a Bruce Willis fan from his work on Moonlighting when I saw this masterpiece for the first time.

But despite epic lines such as “Welcome to the party, pal!”, or “Yipee kay-ay, Motherf***!”, the piece of acting that somehow got imprinted in my subconscious with the most force is Alan Rickman’s nonchalant reaction to the police force finally arriving at Nakatomi plaza.

He tells his henchmen to relax. This is just ‘inconvenient timing’, which means that he was expecting it at some point or another. It was inevitable; it just came too soon. What’s more, it was… necessary. That was only the beginning of the plan.

It’s a given that the first dozen times I watched Die Hard I couldn’t tell what was so strong about that instant, those short 15 seconds of impeccable acting as Hans Gruber.

Then it dawned on me: He was acting (no pun intended), as if the police arriving was just part of his plan. This couldn’t be further from the truth, since he took extreme measures to make sure that nobody outside the Nakatomi Plaza found out what was going out – officer McClane’s interruption of his master plan is what made the cops arrive.

So, in fact, if everything had gone to plan, they could have left with the bonds and reduced the building (and the hostages) to a mound of rubble (What were the explosives for, after all?)

As in any movie script, the more you look at it, the more convoluted it sounds, so a bit of suspension of disbelief is always helpful. But my point is that Hans Gruber’s body language and behavior reacting to the cops arriving and spoiling their heist left a lasting impression on me.

After two dozen views of the movie and well into adulthood, every time I suffered any kind of setback in my life, I just recalled the character’s reaction and said to myself,

“This is a matter of inconvenient timing. That’s all. This is still part of the plan”

I added that last part to be succinct and to the point. I treated setbacks as inevitable, even part of a master scheme that I had devised well in advance. That primed my mind into looking at any event as an advantage. As if the universe was working not only in my favor, but exactly how I expected it to function. Every piece falling on its place, as I predicted.

Of course, seen from a super rational perspective, this attitude was foolish. Nobody can predict every outcome to a T. Another favorite villainy character, the Joker, is known for his meticulous planning of events. Heath Ledger’s Joker takes this to the extreme, but hey, it’s fun. Unrealistic, but fun.

But who says I can’t hypnotize myself into believing “everything is going according to my plan”? Even if I know for a fact that this is myself manipulating my perspective of events… it works. It has always worked. Some times I have messed things up worse than others, and sometimes I’ve acted even against my own interests (Hey, I’m human, after all!), but I regret nothing.

Always a paradox pops up: If I relived my life with what I now know, would I make the same mistakes? Hardly. But how did I get to this point in my life? Making those mistakes. So, making mistakes made me (mostly) mistake-proof.

Maybe it was part of the plan all along, for real?

I really don’t know. What I do know is that Alan Rickman’s accent is absurdly powerful and you bet that I’ll be using it every time things seem to go south.

Much Love and Bliss,

Jesús.

The Body Language Guy