Live Free or Die Hard opens today, and while Bruce Willis waits with bated breath to see if a truncated bus ad can buy him another ten years as an action star, our friends at Slate and the Guardian are contemplating what it all means.
Last week, Joe Queenan published a looong consideration (incidentally, why does the Guardian's film section still post 2,300 word essays in one long column? Would it be grossly capitalist for them lay a story out across two pages?) of the collateral damage left by Willis' John McLane throughout the course of the franchise:
How much is it going to cost you? Well, in addition to all the high-rise buildings, bridges, highways and subway stations that are going to have to be replaced, there is the niggling subject of lawsuits both against the police department and against John McClane himself. Recently I reviewed the Die Hard carnage tally, and determined that McClane could easily be tied up in court for decades due to his madcap, unauthorised escapades. In the original Die Hard, either he or his employer would be on the hook for the deliberate destruction of the skyscraper in which Rickman's terrorist cabal is holed up. And because McClane, a Manhattan cop, was operating without any authority whatsoever on the Los Angeles police department's turf, the bill for the calamitous devastation would not be sent to the LAPD, but to the headquarters of New York's Finest. This being the case, it's hard to see how McClane would ever be in a position to affect the course of events in Die Hard 2. He would long since have been forced to take early retirement.
I love geeking out over the real-world implications left ignored by action fantasies; I crave a Law & Order spin-off dealing only with the legal problems of the great action heroes. There were a couple of throwaway lines in Ghostbusters 2 about the gang going bankrupt after having been sued by the city for the havoc wrecked in the first film--wouldn't that trial have been more fun to watch than all that nonsense with Peter McNichol and Sigourney Weaver's horrible baby? But Queenan isn't offering his 2,300 words in the name of parallel universe hypotheticals--the ultimate goal here is to point the finger at us idiot Americans for allowing McClane to continue his fiscally irresponsible rampage across four films:
Backed into a corner, most audiences would admit that John McClane is a major head case, a Grade A loony, the living, breathing apotheosis of overzealous policing, and exactly the opposite of what most of us want in our lawmen. Why then are the Die Hard films so popular? [...] Though I am always loath to suggest that a movie produced by Joel Silver possesses a deeper meaning, in this case the underlying message of the Die Hard movies comes through loud and clear: American society is so prosperous that it can not only survive inflation and recession and the dotcom meltdown and the current collapse of the housing market and Donald Rumsfeld, but it can even survive John McClane's latest madcap escapade. In a society with this much money, money is never going to be much of an issue.
After all that scolding, Eric Lichtenfeld's celebration of "yippie kai yay ***" as the "greatest one-liner in movie history" should be refreshing. But ultimately, Lichtenfeld doesn't beat Queenan's argument so much as play into it:
When terrorist-slash-exceptional thief Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) taunts hero John McClane (Bruce Willis), "Who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child?" and asks this "Mr. Cowboy" if he really thinks he stands a chance, McClane's answer"Yippee-ki-yay, ***"marks the moment that McClane, an everyman, assumes the mantle of America's archetypal heroes: Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Gunsmoke's Marshall Dillon, and others who have been so vital to American boyhood. Unlike the many action-movie one-liners that are rooted in the hero's narcissism, McClane's stems from our collective wish-fulfillment. He is not referring to himself, not suggesting an "I" or a "me" but an us. And considering the European Gruber's appreciation of fashion, finance, and the classics, McClane's comeback acquires an additional subtext: Our pop culture can beat up your high culture.
So the Die Hard movies are not so much about America flaunting our excess of "money", but about preserving the American spirit of willful defiance of international influence. Pop culture becomes the driving force of multinational conflict resolution. In short, it's way worse than Queenan could have imagined.
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