Postmodern Die Hard, Courtesy of AI

Skip to comments.

Posted on 12/15/2024 2:09:20 PM PST by DFG

Someone recently suggested that as Artificial Intelligence progresses, it may well put a lot of postmodern college professors and other abstruse theorists out of business. Forget the ancient debate about whether ‘Die Hard’ is a Christmas movie (it is, of course); our pal Josh Dunn of the University of Tennessee decided to test this proposition by asking ChatGPT to produce a plot summary of ‘Die Hard’ as written by PoMo major domo Jacques Derrida, and this is the result:

Ah, Die Hard, a text of explosive multiplicities, invites us to deconstruct its narrative architecture, its spatial-temporal labyrinth, and the aporia of heroism and terror. At its surface, we encounter the tale of John McClane, a “cop,” a metonym for the sovereign subject, who is thrust into a high-rise citadel, the Nakatomi Plaza—a veritable simulacrum of late-capitalist modernity, both transparent and impenetrable.

Here, McClane is ostensibly positioned as the agent of order, but what order? The order is already fractured, splintered. The film begins with a marital fissure, a différance, as McClane travels to reconcile with his estranged wife, Holly Gennaro, who has reclaimed her pre-marital name, destabilizing the paternal phallus, the symbolic order he presumes to uphold. Enter Hans Gruber, the antagonist, whose identity is itself a mask, a play of signifiers. A “terrorist,” but not a terrorist—his violence is aestheticized, his motives avaricious rather than ideological. Gruber’s elegant nihilism challenges the binary oppositions upon which McClane’s symbolic authority rests: law/crime, hero/villain, chaos/order. Is Gruber not merely the inverted reflection of McClane? Is not the difference between them traceable to the play of arbitrary signs?

(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...

1 posted on 12/15/2024 2:09:20 PM PST by DFG

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson