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 ...
lol
Same can be said of "it's a wonderful life"
This is a nice Christmas movie:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0339343/
I don’t know how true it is to the life of A. C. Gilbert, but it carries a nice message.
It’s free on Prime, if you have that.
Happy Christmas.
I don’t consider “It’s a Wonderful Life” to be an action movie, and it is totally and completely full of the Christmas Spirit, of giving to each other, day in and day out, but especially at Christmas time.
I haven’t seen that, but will definitely check it out. Thank you!
P.S. Merry Christmas!
Bad Santa is my fave kind of modern Christmas movie. The cast is humor gold.
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