Hudson Hawk Tuah
How a Shitty Bruce Willis Movie Marathon Reminded Me to Embrace the Absurd
Today if you go to 105 N. 3rd Street in Manhattan, KS you will find a little gaming cafe called the Village Geek. One of those tabletop D&D, Digimon, Pokémon type gathering places tucked into a little multi-story strip center hidden right behind the mall. I have never been to the Village Geek, but 15 years ago in that very same building once was a hole in the wall pub called “Mel’s Tavern.” One of those little dive bars that had been around for decades with cliche things like “Taco Tuesdays” and “Thirsty Thursdays.” It was the “Home of the Fishbowl” which really was just a frozen schooner glass filled with cheap beer, but between the cobwebs in the corners, the haze of Camel cigarette smoke, and the row of shaky-handed alcoholic old men posted up at the bar, let’s just say Mel’s Tavern definitely had a rustic charm to it.
I remember walking into Mel’s for the first time, a young radio advertising sales executive, who had just been handed a new client list, and Mel’s was on it. So, dressed in my suit jacket, tie, suspenders, and cuff links, I wandered into this den of inequity hoping to secure a brand-new advertising contract, and when I entered, young, dumb, full of vim and vigor, it was the classic record scratch scene. It was obvious I did not belong there. The crowd of people with the name tags on their button-down work shirts looked at me like their parole officer had just shown up. Luckily the owner Brett was kind and willing to sit down and talk with me for a little bit about the sports station I represented, and slowly over the course of a couple beers, the tie was loosened, the jacket was off, I had secured a new sponsor, and to top it all off, I was good, and day drunk by lunchtime. That’s how Mel’s Tavern became my Thursday night spot for after work brews with my friends and co-workers Andrew Latham and Drew Bartlett. It was on one such occasion that Drew spotted a flier for a band named “Mountain Sprout” playing that weekend and indicated to me it would be stupid to miss seeing them live as it was truly a one-of-a-kind experience. Knowing Drew to be a man of impeccable taste when it came to things like this, I knew I had to check it out. So, in March of 2009, in the middle of a snowy Kansas night, I set out to see my one and only Mountain Sprout show.
Many people don’t know this, but the legendary CBGB venue in NYC actually stands for Country, Bluegrass and Blues. The full name of the venue is actually Country, Bluegrass and Blues and Other Music from the Underground. It opened in 1973 and over time became synonymous with Punk and New Wave but make no mistake about it, Bluegrass, in its original form, is as subversive and counterculture as the Sex Pistols were. This type of Bluegrass is the exactly the type of Bluegrass the band Mountain Sprout plays. Crammed into a 100-person venue which was well beyond fire capacity at the time, I found myself surrounded by a cadre of long-haired hippie chicks with armpit hair and flower dresses, methed-out white guys with dreads, rednecks, punks, bikers, and more. It was like every gang from the 1979 cult classic “The Warriors” had shown up to the same place. And there on a dimly lit stage was a scene straight out of the Appalachian Folklore of Hillbilly Elegy. A hunched over big bearded, gray haired banjo player in a white dirty undershirt. A harsh looking woman with black teeth, unkempt hair, and some kind of Amish getup on the stand-up bass. A fiddle player strung out on what one could only assume was methamphetamines. It was quite the scene and that was before they even started playing.
To really give you an idea of what type of life this band was living, literally before they started their set they asked from the stage if anyone had a couch they could sleep on and promised to show their host a good time in exchange for lodging. Once their sleeping arrangements had been made, it was time to strike up the fiddle and boy did they. That night I was delighted to hear songs about such topics as shitting in the woods, wishing you weren’t related to your cousin so you could have sex with her, and making meth in Arkansas because you lived in a dry county and didn’t want to drive 45 minutes for beer. And amongst this endless array of Americana, I heard a song that has stuck with me since. The chorus goes something like this:
“The Sun Goes Up,
The Sun Goes Down,
The Hands on the Clock go Round and Round,
There’s Nowhere Else to Go,
We’re all living in this place,
Sitting on a Big Blue Marble, Flying Through Space”
As I listened to this song in my corduroy jacket, fedora on my head, drunk, sweaty, surrounded by strangers and body odor, singing, dancing, communing with the Music Gods in a dive bar in the Flint Hills of Kansas, in the middle of what seemed like a blizzard, I realized just how ridiculously absurd life really is. That’s a lesson I seemingly had forgotten until recently when I watched a shitty Bruce Willis Movie Marathon.
Bruce Willis, the man, has lived a fairly absurd life himself. Born in West Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall to a Military Father and Native German Mom, Bruce ended up growing up in New Jersey. As a child he had a pretty bad stutter, but as he got into High School, he found acting helped it go away, so he did that in numerous one act plays and productions. After High School, he attempted to start his own Private Detective agency but failed miserably and so he thought he would try the acting thing again. Without much thought, he moved to the Big Apple, Hell’s Kitchen to be exact, and began bartending by night and auditioning for roles during the day. It was at this stage in life that Bruce auditioned for a new TV Show called Moonlighting. He was up against 3000 other prospects including big names at the time like Dennis Quaid and “Jessie’s Girl” singer Rick Springfield. This unknown bartender from Jersey was up against long odds, and when an actor is faced with long odds sometimes there is only one thing you can do.
As all around renaissance man and former lead singer of Black Flag, Henry Rollins tells it when auditioning for the 2002 Danny Devito Comedy “Death To Smoochy,”
“I’m walking down the hallway and I go ‘How am I going to get through this without making an ass of myself?’ and I have to totally change my motivation. I know I’m not going to get this part…I can now rest assured that that won’t happen…my motivation changes from getting the part to being so over the top that Danny Devito will never forget me. That’s my new mission, freak Danny Devito the fuck out.”
He goes on to describe how he forgoes the script and starts screaming “Smoochy” at the top of his lungs, throwing furniture around the room, almost attacking Danny Devito’s assistant, while running through a table and coming very close to breaking a TV. After several minutes of this insane behavior, he breaks down in a sweat, notices Danny Devito is hiding from him and offers to do it again before being excused.
Within minutes of leaving the audition he gets a call from his agent. Fearful that his agent is mad at him for his outburst Henry begins to explain why he went over the top, but his agent interrupts him to say that they were so impressed by his audition he was the frontrunner for the part.
That exact approach was how Bruce Willis went into his audition. Relaxed and completely at ease Bruce charmed the room by going off script, improvising and cracking jokes with the casting directors and much to his surprise it worked! Bruce had landed the part and would go on to spend five seasons starring in the show alongside Cybill Shepherd while winning two Primetime Emmy Awards.
The mere fact that Bruce Willis was up against 3000 other people for this one role was a completely absurd situation he found himself in, but by leaning into it and going over the top in his audition, Bruce set himself down the path of success that would lead to him making the exact same movies I would go on to watch in my shitty Bruce Willis movie marathon that inspired this piece.
That sentence alone is absurd. Absurdity is all around us, at all times, everywhere. And you don’t even have to look that hard to find it.
Take for example, April 8, 2024. They now call it the Great North American Eclipse and it was a total solar eclipse that started in Mexico and worked its way up through the United States into Canada. The mere existence of a Total Solar Eclipse is so improbable it’s borderline an impossibility. For example, the Sun is 400 times larger than the moon, meaning the moon has to be almost exactly 400 times closer to the Earth to make a true Total Solar Eclipse possible. If that’s not absurd, what is?
History is littered with absurd stories. After the failed assassination attempt of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, his would-be assassin Gavrilo Princip stopped to get a sandwich. Meanwhile the Archduke got lost on his way to the hospital to check on victims from the attempt earlier in the day, so his driver stops to get directions at that exact sandwich shop where his would-be assassin was able to become his actual assassin when he spit out the sandwich, pulled his pistol and shot Franz and his wife, thus kicking off the set of events that would lead us in to World War 1.
There’s the curious case of Sout African Astronomer Danie Du Toit, who was giving a lecture at a university about how death can literally strike at any moment. After the speech he sat down and popped a mint in his mouth, only to choke on the mint and die minutes after he gave the speech.
It is this exact absurdity that Bruce Willis leaned into throughout his entire career. He was the king of embracing the absurd.
Fresh off the blockbuster movie Die Hard, at the pinnacle of his career, Bruce used his newfound pull in Hollywood to fund a passion project. He wanted to make what he called an “Anti-James Bond film.” A new franchise character like Indiana Jones meets the Pink Panther, he would call this dashing new hero, “Hudson Hawk.”
Hudson Hawk was the kind of big budget, star driven, vanity-project you only get once in a blue moon. Think John Travolta spearheading Battlefield Earth or Kevin Costner fighting for Waterworld to be made. These films are somehow always off beat, unlikely endeavors that hardly fare well at the box office but usually end up with a small cult following who can appreciate their eccentricities and inconsistencies. Well, except for Battlefield Earth, not sure if that has a huge cult following or not. Either way, Hudson Hawk was in the same vein.
Inspired by a song Bruce Willis wrote called “The Hudson Hawk,” Bruce was intricately involved in every part of the production from the costuming, the soundtrack, and it’s the only writing credit of his career. To say he put his chips “all in” on this movie would be an understatement.
To help him execute his vision he enlisted the help of director Michael Lehmann and screenwriter Daniel Waters, the team behind the 1988 entirely original black teen comedy “Heathers” a true cult classic film. It was clear that while the studio had no idea for the insanely off kilter tone of the film, Bruce knew what he was going for and had the team to bring his Frankenstein Monster to life.
The premise of the film starts with our protagonist “Hudson Hawk”, a world-renowned cat burglar (as the film calls him over and over and over again) being released from prison and all he wants is a good cup of cappuccino, a running joke throughout the film as he never seems to be able to actually enjoy his drink. Within minutes of being released from prison he is recruited by the Mario Brothers (I know…literally the fucking Mario Brothers) to steal Leonardo DaVinci’s inventions. Little does our hero know that the Mario Brothers are actually working for an ex-CIA Operative played by a game James Coburn, not afraid of tarnishing his legacy in this movie at all, who leads a gang of super spies where each is named after a different candy bar. Be on the lookout for a very young David Caruso in this film playing the eponymously named “Kit Kat.” To further complicate the matters, James Coburn and his gang are actually working for an Evil Billionaire couple who are probably brother and sister and are definitely fucking, played spectacularly by Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard.
Meanwhile, Hudson Hawk teams up with an undercover Nun, played by the always adorable Andie MacDowell, who is on a mission from the Pope and later on becomes his love interest. He also has a “cat burglar” partner by the name of Tommy Five Tone who is played by Danny Aiello in what might legitimately be his finest performance on celluloid. Together, the pair go on a series of heists, timed out to specific classic jazz standard songs, where they sing and dance while committing these elaborate capers. Truth be told, every one of these sequences is intensely enjoyable, but gets quickly disrupted when these light comedic acts give way to what seems like a scene out of an Eli Roth movie. I am not joking when I tell you there is a decapitation in this movie that is as grotesque as anything you will see right out of an early 2000’s Saw sequel and within minutes later, we are back to the laughs.
Now if all that sounds like a lot for an audience in 1991 to take in, it definitely was. Especially when you consider the fact that it was marketed as basically another “Die Hard” sequel. Off its approximately $70 million dollar budget, Hudson Hawk would go on to gross a whopping $17 million at the Box Office, making it a complete and total box office disaster for everyone involved. The image of Bruce as a leading man was tarnished, Michael Lehmann would never direct another Big Budget Hollywood Movie again, and Tristar Pictures actually went out of business over this. One would think that would be enough for Bruce to never try anything like this again, right? Well, you don’t know Bruce Fucking Willis.
There’s an age-old Hollywood adage that basically goes “Do one for them and do one for you” meaning make a big hit, then a smaller more intimate artistic picture. A great example would be hot off the heels of Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. made a very small drama with Jamie Foxx called “The Soloist.” That’s the idea anyways, but for Bruce Willis, it was make a giant blockbuster action film and then make a batshit crazy flick.
Within 3 months of the disasterpiece that was Hudson Hawk, Bruce was back with the critical and commercial success of The Last Boy Scout. Just like that, Bruce was back, and all was forgiven. Naturally, one would assume Bruce took the cue and stuck to the formula from then on, but this is Bruce Fucking Willis we are talking about.
By 1993, it’s batshit crazy time again with Serial Killer Cop Thriller “Striking Distance.” I describe this movie as “Airplane!” meets “Seven.” One second you are in a wacky high speed car chase and the next witnessing a grisly murder. On top of that, Bruce Willis is at what seems to be his physical low water mark with an award-winning beer belly and an almost full horseshoe receding hairline up front, but oddly long neckline. It’s like not a total mullet, but definitely dipping its toe in those waters. The chef’s kiss of this cinematic delight is a performance from Murphy Brown character actor Robert Pastorelli as our titular villain where he leaves everything on the field. By the time the movie is over there is not one piece of scenery he has not personally chewed up.
While Bruce did not get a writing credit, he did frequently butt heads with the director and impose several ideas of his onto the film. Based on initial test screenings it was obvious all the things Bruce wanted added did not really work, but hey it’s Bruce Willis, so you go forward with the project. Ultimately Striking Distance ended up being a largely forgotten mid-level 90’s thriller. Another misfire of absurd proportions in Bruce’s career. Another time he was on the ropes and relegated to b-movie territory until his very next movie 1994’s Neo-Noir “Pulp Fiction.” Box Office Champion Bruce Willis was back!
Pulp Fiction might have been Bruce Willis’ critical apex. As Butch Coolidge in Tarantino’s second film and what many regard as Quentin’s Magnum Opus, Bruce for the first time in his career was not only a movie star, but now a critically acclaimed movie star. There was genuine awards buzz for the first time in his career. And how does the hero of our story respond? With an erotic thriller that can at its best be described as awkward and at its worst sensually inept. This submarginal melodrama was called “Color of Night” and to say it is a wild ride would be a definitive understatement.
I have to admit that anytime I see a label on a movie that says “Featuring 17 Hot Steamy Minutes Not in the Original Version” I am instantly interested in seeing that movie. Now that’s only happened once to me, but based on my experience watching “Color of Night” you can bet I would do it again for any movie labeled that way. This movie inspired my deep dive into the lesser-known film oeuvre of Bruce Willis. To it’s credit, this movie definitely holds up its end of the bargain on the 17 Hot Steamy Minutes too, because the audience gets the Holy Trinity of Bruce Willis male nudity. Not only do we get full-fledged peen shots, but later on you get balls and the cherry on top, a little Bruce taint as well! This is Bruce Willis, just fully embracing the idea of a “skin-a-max” soft core porn for no other reason than he’s Bruce Fucking Willis and he just wanted to. And while the film did go on to win a Golden Raspberry that year for Worst Film, its consolation prize was Maxim Magazine Voting It in as Best Sex Scene Ever Made, an award the director proudly accepted and displayed in his bathroom.
Being that this is one of the more obscure Bruce Willis movies you can probably guess how this story ends up by now. No one got along on the set, the director gets into fights with the studio and actually becomes so upset by the whole ordeal he almost has a heart attack and dies, this ultimately leads to 4 different versions of the movie being released and it eventually becoming a critical and commercial dud relegated to the bargain bin at Blockbusters across the nation. I am truly unsure of which cut of the movie I even watched, but I am going to assume the 17 Hot Steamy Minutes Version is the Best Version.
Despite turkey after turkey, stinker after stinker, dare I say, turd after turd, somehow, someway, the hero of our story, Bruce Fucking Willis comes out completely unscathed. There was one point in his career where he was making a sports comedy because after Jerry Maguire, everybody wanted to make one, this film was going to be called “The Broadway Brawler.” A production so disastrous the movie fell apart in a mere twenty days and left Bruce Willis facing a serious lawsuit from Disney. How did Bruce respond? Instead of being sued, he agreed to a three-picture deal with a severely reduced rate for the Mouse House as long as he could pick the movies. The next three films that followed were Armageddon, the number one movie of 1998, The Sixth Sense, the six-time Academy Award nominee, and the moderately successful family feature “The Kid.” If that’s not a ridiculous run, I don’t know what is. It’s all because no matter how ridiculous the situation, how silly the moment one is facing, or how monumentally stupid life can seem at times, Bruce always leaned into the moment.
This is something I used to know at my core, but somehow through divorces and failed businesses, burned bridges and restless nights, I had forgotten how to truly love and embrace all the absurdities that life brings you. In my mid-twenties, when I still had the ideals you can really only hold on to when you are young and naive, things like hope and ambition, I remember every single time I would have a stressful work day or get too caught up in the rat race, I instinctively knew the best thing I could do was go home and put socks on my ears. I didn’t know why, but I knew that you couldn’t take yourself or anything else seriously when you had socks on your ears. It’s just a fact.
This behavior of acting silly to deal with the heavy stuff in life became a mantra later on in what I call my “Explodeded” years. This was a time in my life’s journey where I was an insurance agent by day, who would moonlight as a podcaster. It started around 2013 when I would essentially drunk dial my buddy Chad, record the conversations and release them as a podcast called “Scheizen For Brains.” Eventually, and much like the bands I was in growing up, the format of the show would never change nor the cast members of the show, but the name changed like thirteen times. At some point what had started as the Scheizencast on the Explodeded Podcast Network, had just morphed into “The Explodeded Show” complete with a brand-new Exploding Cat Logo, and the motto of this show literally was “Embrace The Absurd.”
What began as a catchy slogan for a silly podcast became an aphorism for a living, breathing, testament towards the absurd. We ate absurdity for breakfast only to shit out ridiculous rainbows. There was the time I remember randomly I had New Hampshire Presidential Candidate and Living Meme, Vermin Supreme’s phone number, and so we drunk dialed it and had a ten-minute discussion about metric time. Or in the middle of broadcasting live from the San Antonio Horror Convention, sitting in between the booths of “Vampirella” and “The Warriors” I got overly inebriated, took my shirt off, and ended up accosting Buck Rogers in the 25th Century trying to get him to relapse after decades of sobriety.
There was one episode of the show where we ended up on a tangent talking about how we loved and missed the actor Vince Vieluf from the movie Rat Race. Shortly after that episode aired, a listener emails in a tip that Vince Vieluf is living a private life now as a bartender in Austin, TX along with the address and phone number of said bar. Cut to a night of drinking at a dive bar off Sixth Street, listening to a techno band wearing Unicorn heads, while taking shots with the former star of Grind and Rat Race Vince Vieluf. A night that ends with a fucking once-in-a-lifetime inspirational speech from an actor who walked away from it all, telling a group of young podcasters to be creative, but never do it for the money. Telling us, much like my favorite musical the Rocky Horror Picture Show, to “Don’t Dream it, Be It.” And with that he snuffs out his cigarette, tells us good night, and like a fucking ghost Vince Vieluf not only goes home for the night, but he also fucking leaves Austin never to return again.
Moments like those, where life is at its absolute most absurd. When it feels like the scriptwriters are doing a good job. Those are the moments you can’t overthink, or plan, or control. They just exist. It’s an absurd thought that because I saw a sticker on a VHS tape that promised an extra 17 Minutes of Hot Steamy Love Scenes, it prompted me to have a shitty Bruce Willis Movie Marathon. It’s absurd that after watching these ridiculously, over the top, film flops and fiascos that it reminded me of how I used to Embrace The Absurd. It’s absurd that this reminder has led me to actively engaging in new practices and discovering new patterns of thought.
I find it comforting now to remind myself in all manners of life that I am just a monkey. I might think I am more advanced. I might be more self-aware or even more educated. But make no mistake, the monkey shit still runs strong in all of us. And I find it helpful to remind myself of that at all times. I was reminded of what I used to call the “27 Fake Mustache Rule” which was one of my laws of life at the time. Basically the “27 Fake Mustache Rule” is to always have at least 27 fake mustaches at your disposal at all times. Since I have had facial hair for a while I have had to replace the fake mustaches with wigs and silly hats, but it still does the trick. My absolute favorite way to truly embrace the absurd is what I call “reveling in the sonder.”
The sonder is a new word I have learned, but a concept I have been familiar with for a very long time. I picked it up from a girl I was “almost dating” for a while there. I say almost because after the first date, I think we could both see it all playing out, a real future between two people as we combine two separate lives for a new and exciting journey together, but even though the first date went so well that same week I got a lamp for my living room. It’s now been well over a year since I was living in the motel and the fact that I have a living room lamp now, let alone furniture at all, is still somewhat surprising to me. There I sat, looking at that lamp illuminating the corner it was placed in, and I thought it just couldn’t get any better than that moment right there. Sure, I could see where this new and exciting relationship would go. Maybe a new apartment, new hometown, new job, or just new things to do, but none of it compared to just appreciating the light my new lamp was giving off. That small, simple pleasure was worth everything. Needless to say, I called that relationship off, but I am still thankful for the experience because I learned about the term Sonder.
Coined by Author John Koenig, his definition of sonder is, "The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own." It’s this idea that while we look at everyone else in the world as the “NPCs” to use a video game term that basically means non-playable character, but while we look at everyone else this way, that’s exactly how they are looking at us. Yet here we are a world of 8.5 Billion NPCs all living out our own individual heroes’ journeys. The whole concept can get quite overwhelming if you think about it too much. Instead of thinking about it, I invited you to truly indulge yourself in the sonder. Almost like taking a late-night dip in the lake.
What you want to do is go to your nearest community gathering place. Whatever makes you feel comfortable, it could be a shopping mall, a church, it doesn’t matter. For me, it was a dive bar known for being open at 7am every morning. When you get where you are going, find a good spot to post up and just truly bathe in the sonder. Don’t just people watch, but try to understand the people you are watching, develop their backstories, focus on their mannerisms and body language. It’s amazing what you will start to see.
My first night out in the Sonder, I saw a guy I called Matt. Matt was around my age, had the look and feel of a guy who coaches Little League Baseball and takes it way too seriously. I assume Matt is freshly divorced. The way he is dressed it feels like it’s been a long time since he went out somewhere. His cologne smells of desperation and his beard hasn’t been properly trimmed in a matter of months. You can tell he’s waiting on a woman from the way he keeps turning around to face the door every few minutes. Finally, she walks in. And let’s just call her Shannon. Shannon is not the kind of gal Matt remembers dating back in the day. Then again, it’s been a couple decades since Matt has been out and things change. It wasn’t that Shannon was unattractive, quite the contrary. Despite the wear and tear of multiple children and baggage of multiple baby daddies, her body has held up well, but behind the crow’s feet and the furrowed brow is an overwhelming sense of sadness of a dream deferred and a life not fully realized. The type of sadness that never really dwells at the forefront, that kind of goes away after a couple martinis, but it always just kind of resides there, right behind the eyes, and no matter what you do, it will never truly fade away. That’s the kind of sadness Shannon has, it’s the kind of sadness Matt’s not used to and not sure if he can handle it. Or maybe it’s that he just doesn’t want to handle it because to help Shannon out with her sadness would mean having to admit he carries around that exact same sadness within himself. I could tell all of that just from the way they hugged when they greeted each other, and that’s just one story out of a hundred from a little dive bar in the middle of nowhere.
We are surrounded by thousands of these stories every day. Each person with a separate path and separate goals, leading a separate journey filled with pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow. If you stop and think about it. Like, really, truly, reflect on the sonder you will realize how infinitely big and beautiful the universe is and how infinitesimally small you are. You are a mere speck of sand on a beach that is so large you can’t even fully grasp the size of it, and yet on your little speck is an entire universe of relationships and friendships, love and loss, successes and failures. Everything in that one little speck alone is enough to overwhelm oneself and yet it is but a speck, amidst an ocean amidst a galaxy amidst an ever-expanding universe. A concept by which it’s very nature can only be described as patently absurd.
So, what do you do when you find yourself adrift in the sea of absurdity? One man who always knew what to do was Bruce Fucking Willis. Faced with the absurd reality of being diagnosed with Aphasia, a condition in which a person slowly loses their ability to speak and communicate, our protagonist, who once started acting to help with his childhood stutter, would again answer the call and fully embrace the absurd deck life had handed him. Instead of taking fewer roles in his diminished capacity and trying to carefully select the roles he did take, Bruce put the fucking hammer down and went for it. Filming at a breakneck pace and getting paid an unbelievable amount of money for what would amount to a glorified cameo, Bruce Willis entered what they call the “Geezer Teaser” factory and cranked out over two dozen films in the last couple years of his public life. He would be handsomely compensated at the rate of roughly $2 Million Dollars per two-day shoot, and armed with a wireless earpiece so he didn’t have to even learn his lines Bruce made as much money as possible with the last little bit of time he had available. He didn’t worry about prestige or legacy or status. He took care of the people he loved in the most ridiculous Bruce Willis way possible.
It has been a couple years since Bruce retired from public life. Unfortunately, his condition has worsened, and he was recently diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. From the few glimpses we have seen, shared by his family on social media, you can tell he lives a quiet life surrounded by those who matter the most. It’s not known for sure exactly how long Bruce knew about his condition, but what we do know is he has never made a public statement about it. Not a fan of the overly sentimental, Bruce kept his cards close to his chest. The closest to vulnerability we ever got with our hero was in his response at the 2018 Comedy Central Roast of Bruce Willis, when he said:
“Nothing Can Keep Me Down. I’ve been attacked by terrorists, asteroids, film critics, music critics, restaurant critics, divorce lawyers, male pattern baldness, and none of it. None of it stopped me. Because I am still Bruce Fucking Willis.”
In some ways the story of Bruce Willis is the story of us. We have all had a “Hudson Hawk” moment in our lives. The moral of Bruce’s story is that when you fail in life as badly as Hudson Hawk, don’t stop there, just keep going. Sure, you will fail several more times and we’ll get other crappy movies like “Striking Distance” and “Color of Night” but we’ll also get gems like “Death Becomes Her” and “The Fifth Element.” And that is the ultimate moral of the Bruce Willis tale. When life gives you absurd lemons you make absurd lemonade. Inside of every single one of us, if we only allow ourselves to truly embrace the absurd, we can all be Bruce Fucking Willis.
