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Thursday, December 24, 2009
Live Free or Die Hard (Wiseman, 2007)
Like so many films that revived old franchises this decade, this one poses as a sort of restart, asserting above all that the history of its previous incarnations has to be overcome to make the film make sense to current tastes. I can’t remember if it’s actually in the film or was in a review, but the basic premise is something like “John McClane: Analog. World: Digital. Sparks Fly.” (Okay, the actual line is “You’re a Timex watch in a digital age.” Mine’s better.) McClane’s skill set, his persona—all are threatened by the new world order—but not necessarily the one you’re thinking of. Even for an action film, Live Free or Die Hard‘s political imagination is stunted, like a libertarian’s (the film’s title is an extremely apposite one). The first Die Hard didn’t require much in the way of geopolitical awareness either (just a lucre-driven Hans Gruber), but in Live Free or Die Hard, it’s just taken for granted not only that America is the world, but that even its government exists largely to get confused and toyed with by unstoppable criminal masterminds.
The film’s engagement with politics may be blunt and uninspired, but it is almost metafictional in its overt engagements with the action film genre (and I mean that as a compliment). There is a competitiveness in the film, a desire to top not so much the first three Die Hard films as to best other action-film spectaculars of the past three or four years (particularly Transformers). A police cruiser launched into the air to destroy a hovering, menacing attack helicopter ("I was out of bullets,” says McClane) is the film’s most naked (and successful) effort to produce a special effect that exists as nothing but oneupmanship. In the film, the maneuver John McClane makes to produce this car-helicopter collision is not entirely gratuitous (the helicopter is a threat), but it is also enormously clear that McClane thinks of propelling a car into it before anything else, like running away. It’s exactly what will make him—and us—go “wow!” and so he does it. This is why one goes to see films like this.
But what fascinates me about Live Free or Die Hard is that the comparisons it begs are not to the Jason Bourne films or the Daniel Craig Bond films—which might be the natural comparisons (ostensibly “real” action heroes with no superpowers, no supervillains, not terribly reliant on gadgets, heavy emphasis on toughness)—but rather to what became the decade’s go-to trope of the superhero genre—the fear of obsolescence, of a public genuinely uninterested in heroics. Hancock, The Incredibles, Watchmen (obviously, in comic form, the origin of this trope), The Dark Knight. McClane isn’t really in danger of being pushed into involuntary retirement or protested against by the benighted citizenry, but there is more than token resistance on the part of everyone involved to the idea that heroics are still viable, and McClane himself has a sort of heavy-handed line about heroes no longer being appreciated.
This conflict goes deeper, however, than mere thematics—the film itself plays out a constant tension between wanting to make the computer hacking stuff actually seem threatening, the wave of the future, etc., and not completely making McClane seem obsolete through making the computer stuff compelling. The film’s effects are a question aimed at the audience—aren’t you sick of CGI? or is that what you really want, more hypertrophied toys and dancing pixels? But then again, the film admits, computers are pretty cool. Did you see that helicopter blow up? We can’t do that without computers. (The helicopter and car were real enough, but they had to add spinning rotors, falling people, and explosions into the shot digitally.)
It is a productive tension—in this film at least, and it pays off, surprisingly, in political terms, turning what could have been an extremely reactionary film into a sort of qualified rejection of nostalgia. Yes, Live Free or Die Hard is a libertarian fantasy and an analog finger in the digital eye, but the film’s basic conservatism isn’t ultimately resentful, much less revanchist, as so much of the conservative movement is today. McClane is not aggrieved by the prospect of his obsolescence, he doesn’t play the “I’m just taking my country back” tea-bagger tune. He’s just happy that heroics are still called for once in awhile; he’s just delighted he’s got another shot at blowing up helicopters with cars.
Comments
Aaaaarrrrgggggghhhhhh.
Is it because it’s MLA season that Valvesters are writing pieces that only a David Lodge character would write?
I want back the five minutes it took me to read this. I want them back, or else I’ll throw a tantrum.
http://www.racialicious.com/2009/12/21/and-we-shall-call-this-moffs-law/
No, no, Andrew. It’s not that easy. Anyone who has read anything I’ve posted over the past years to the Valve knows that I’m all for analyzing. It’s what I teach 125 students five days a week.
My problem is with the subjects chosen for analysis and the reasons behind these choices. I tell my high school juniors that they have to make a case, in their introductions, for *why* they feel the need to write about something. Too often, these pop-culture-goes-politics pieces take for granted the occasion, the need, the audience. What problem raised by the text or its reception necessitates this piece of analysis? A political analysis of a text only makes sense if you can at all trace some political influence actually caused by it. Otherwise, it feels like a boilerplate exercise, a personal whim, the sort of thing that characterizes academics in David Lodge novels.
Very interesting--so you feel that my post is a giant waste of your time because I didn’t specify my purpose in writing, yet your comment didn’t specify that, didn’t in fact make any form of critique, didn’t in the least present a reason for its own existence other than the expression of your frustration or disgust. In other words, just another waste of your (and my) time. Which was basically the point of the link--you taking the time to express a wholly valueless note of frustration is really not very different from the people the Racialicious post described--you’re just saying “My personal whim is that Valvers shouldn’t share their personal whims, that’s just my personal whim that I have to share.”
I think there’s a big difference between presenting an academic reading of a film and expressing a comment about it. The purpose of the comment was clear: ugh. The purpose of the original post, still not so much. I just find it odd that the assumption is consistently made that a political reading of a film is its own reward.
I don’t think I made that assumption, though. The post isn’t a political argument that happens to take a film as its subject or example; it was a response to the film that happened to end up in political territory. The politics certainly didn’t precede the film, but came out as I thought about how the film worked and who it seemed to be addressing itself to. So the justification for this post doesn’t need to come from the political significance of the film, but simply from whether the film deserved a response.
I feel kind of funny justifying a response to a film that made a healthy amount of money, comes from a series that is a cornerstone of and a large influence on a massively profitable and culturally significant genre, and got pretty solid reviews. That kind of films generally seem like decent things to have responses to. Better than many other options, at any rate.
Oh, and sort of tangentially, just why is my reading “academic” rather than “critical” or even “appreciative?” I mean, I’m not trying to shrug off the “academic” tag, but I feel like you’re using it more affectively than typologically.
I suppose I’m simply being mean-spirited. But my mean-spiritedness comes from the feeling that anything like a real culture in American letters is dying and precious and delicate and that when those who teach or research arts and letters commit time to crap like *Die Hard* or *Avatar*, they are at some level digging a grave for a serious culture.
I’m not saying I don’t enjoy crap. I love Wham, for godssake. But I don’t think Wham warrants a response beyond my enjoyment.
In this end, this is all very symptomatic of my own hangups since leaving the academy. I look around me and I see serious artists struggling for an audience; I see K-12 teachers of English struggling to preserve respect; and I see academics, with what I’d say is a sworn committment to preserve and cherish the arts and letters, spend an inordinate amount of time, this late after the rise and fall of cultural studies, with blockbusters and comic books. They’ll go after someone like James Wood, and then they’ll return to their treatise on *The Wire*. (Cue outrage that someone doesn’t think *The Wire* is better than sliced bread.)
I don’t think the obsolescence theme is anywhere where near new, even in movies. Isn’t the desperately seasonal “It’s a Wonderful Life” about more or less the same thing?
I like this post a lot.
Portions of this critique were first articulated by Michael Scott in the episode where he sells diet pills, I believe.
This has proved a very interesting read for me. I also see this in a lot of films.
I had to let that spam comment through--they’re selling helicopters!