This article is from Film, Form and Culture (3rd Edition), published by Peking University Press.
Written | Robert Korker
The translator | Dong Shu
How do we combine a theory of cultural studies with a way of understanding the structure of a film form, and then propose a way to read film texts in the context of a larger cultural practice and the culture as a whole?
This task will include: a meticulous observation of a film and an analysis of its composition—including its overall form, narrative structure, actor function, and star effects; at the same time, we need to point out the thematic structure of a film—what it says; we will also place the film in the context of other films of the same kind and study its intertextual structure; and then we will extract all these factors and then look at it through the eyes of the era in which the work was made and the era in which it was analyzed at the moment.
In other words, we will try to observe it in the eyes of a contemporary of cinema, and again through the eyes of a modern man.
We also have to arrange all this information in terms of broader social issues: technology, politics, and gender, race, class, and ideology, and how the film it deals with panders to or disproves those fundamental ideas and our impressions of our place in the world.
We will give certain value judgments about movies, but this should not be done mechanically. For the best criticisms are written in a comfortable and rigorous style, in which the ideas are articulated and analyzed, and are based on the film being studied.
There will be digressions along the way, but it's also part of a complex interweaving of the film and its cultural environment.
I want to apply this criticism to two seemingly unrelated films. They are Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) and John McTiernan's Die Hard (1988), 30 years apart, and the latter is an important work in the popular action genre.
Vertigo (1958)
Die Hard (1988)
Vertigo is a very complex and highly rigorous film, shot by one of the few directors in the United States. Hitchcock's popular television show Hitchcock Theater began airing in 1955 and made him a household name.
Coupled with his cameo appearances in his own films, Hitchcock's weekly television presentations make him one of the most recognizable filmmakers in the world.
Vertigo was born during Hitchcock's prolific years, just before the popular films Rear Window (1955), To Catch a Thief (1955), Catch a Murderer (1956), and the less popular but darker Confession of Grievances (1956), and just before north by Northwest (1959) and the success of Psychopath (1960).
Vertigo is a film with all the elements of a film crafted by a director who has excelled in both his film and his career. Hitchcock, as a self-conscious artist, attempted to produce a work that was both commercial and subjective by accurately estimating the public's tastes and his own creative needs.
Like most Hollywood films, Die Hard looks like a movie that came out of nowhere. But we now know that the so-called "out of nowhere" refers to the anonymity of studio productions.
John McTiernan, the director of "Die Hard," switched from television commercials to movies. Television commercials—along with Music Television and the Southern California Film Institute[3]—are the main incubator for new filmmakers. He made two feature films (Nomads (1986's Nomads) and 1987's Predator) before filming Die Hard.
"Die Hard"
After filming Die Hard, he made two more successful films – The Hunt for Red October (1990) and the third sequel to Die Hard in 1995. In an industry that held the notion that "your standard is your last film," McTeachernan's career was faltered by the defeat of Phantom Heroes (1993).
The success of Die Hard 3 (1995) allowed his career to take off again, although he did not show the creativity he had when he made Die Hard (McTiernan's fourth sequel will be released when you read the book.
Hitchcock is a representative of filmmakers who worked and became famous within the Hollywood system, and he can learn from the system and put a personal mark on his work. McTiernan is a new Hollywood icon, and although he is not a contracted director (although he may have been in the old studio era), he is still a competent example of a commercial film director.
He is an outstanding artist who is able to work as part of a large collaborative group of experts in action/special effects films, and he can sometimes combine a film into a work that ultimately surpasses all its compositions. He managed to make Die Hard into a film that was successful in every way.
Culture-Technology Mix: Film and Television
Analyzing these films in the cultural context of cinema leads us to interesting and sometimes unexpected paths: we need to take into account the technology of film and television, the actors and their performance styles, and the size of the screen itself, because these are all relevant to the cultural context of the work we are talking about.
Both "Die Hard" and "Vertigo" have received a lot of favors from television. Hitchcock and Bruce Willis's fame comes from the TV shows they worked on — Hitchcock Theater in the '50s for Hitchcock and willis for the '80s for a series called Blue Moonlight Detective Agency.
In addition to making viewers aware of Hitchcock, television's help to Vertigo is more indirect, more technical, and an economically driven result. Interestingly, movies had to be created using screen size.
As I discussed earlier in the third chapter, screen size, as an element of shot composition, is an integral part of the aesthetic of cinema. We also have to revisit this.
Hollywood movies are designed to immerse us in the narrative process. The wide image size is part of this type of immersive effect. These extraordinary images engulf the viewer and flood their space.
Instead, televisions are drowned out by the space around them. Small, low-precision images — although the advent of digital high-definition widescreen televisions will change that — can't compete with large-size, clear images projected on the screen.
So in the '50s, when thousands of viewers left theaters and stayed at home to watch TV, Hollywood responded by enlarging and widening the movie screen.
Hollywood pretends not to understand what television really means—a visual narrative delivered for free to the comfort of a home environment—and instead thinks that they can conquer their desire for television by further conquering viewers with images.
Of course, for the sake of "double insurance for both ends of betting", they also bought some TV stations and produced films and episodes for tv.
Widescreen techniques developed, invented, and improved in the early 1950s only brought a tiny minority of audiences back to theaters, and, as we've seen before, left filmmakers without a consistent compositional framework.
Paramount Pictures, the studio Hitchcock worked for most of the 1950s, also developed its own widescreen process, known as The Vestaveschen, and competed with 20th Century Fox's Sini mascop.
From 1954 to the late 1950s, Fox's films were shot on the Sinimaskop widescreen, and all of Paramount's films were shot in Vistaveson, including Vertigo.
Hitchcock turned this necessity into an advantage. In a way, Vertigo is a story about a man's travels and searches. In the first part of the film, Scotty, the central character played by James Steward, is stalking a friend's wife.
He fell in love with her, and after her death, he was always looking for a replacement. The first half of the film is mostly about shots of Scotty sitting in a car, driving across Los Angeles, following the woman named Madeleine to a museum, a flower shop, and Golden Gate Park.
These listless driving, surveillance, and spying scenes are not only the main narrative embodiment of Scotty's deep obsessive-compulsive personality, but also a kind of scenery clip that shows the style of San Francisco with Vestavishin. Hitchcock was a studio director and a man who made films in the studio's exclusive screen format to get paid.
At the same time, he uses the horizontal format of the widescreen to show Scotty's wandering process and where his boundaries lie, making the widescreen part of the film's scene scheduling and narrative structure. The screen opens up the horizon and also adds boundaries to it.
Bruce Willis, television, and movies
By the 1980s, the battle for screen size was over. Films have been, and will continue to be, shot in different widescreen size formats.
Die Hard is a Panavishin widescreen film (1:2.35). The film makes excellent use of the wide horizontal space, especially the characters framed in the corners of the vast architectural space– making them look like they have been conquered and weakened by their surroundings.
The connection of "Die Hard" to television is not achieved through the technical channel of screen size, but directly through its star, Bruce Willis, who in the popular TV series "Blue Moonlight Detective Agency" plays a detective who likes to laugh and talk wittily - a slightly old-fashioned youth figure: he has both a conventional personality of self-confidence and an ability not to take himself too seriously, and it is with the infinite glory of this image that he has entered the film industry.
"Die Hard" was only his second film (the first was 1987's Drunken Pretty Lady), but it opened the second chapter in his unusual career in American entertainment culture.
Overall, the exchange of actors between media is relatively lacking. Movie stars like Willis dabbled in movies after starting out on television, but he almost never goes back to his old career. Most people stay in one of these mediums and pursue an acting career.
This is partly due to the long-standing feud between the two forms of media – although economic antagonisms no longer exist because the ownership of the companies that currently produce and distribute movies and TV shows has merged.
One of the reasons for this is salary: the salary for filmmaking is high; however, the main reason is related to status. Although fewer and fewer audiences are watching movies in theaters, movies still enjoy a higher status than television.
Willis often returns to the series to play a small role or make a cameo appearance. He seems to be closer to the British tradition, and in that country, the film and television crossover is not shameful.
Cast Faces: Bruce Willis, James Stewart
As we discussed earlier, movie stars are a combination of personalities constructed from their film productions and promotional ads. Big stars became part of the culture, they were identified, identified, gossiped about in tabloids, and their "private" lives became public events.
Bruce Willis and James Stewart both share this star quality, but in a very different way.
Bruce Willis, as a TV star, can extend his personality, which is already familiar to millions of people, in Die Hard.
After that, he continued to experiment with serious and comical roles, but he had to go back and play the playful adventure roles that he was so easy to play, but an elderly action figure also needed to find other ways to play — not counting the fourth "Die Hard" scheduled for release in 2005.
His usual play path is rather limited: his expression is mostly sneering and slightly fragile smirk, or he makes an expressionless serious face like in "The Sixth Sense of The Spirit" (1999). His performance is a very physical display: he uses his body as an expression of energy and chaos, violence and revenge.
While most people—especially men—can't figure out how to express themselves and can only rely on pretending to be stupid to get through, he conveys a quality of inspiration and charm through a physical toughness and cunning.
James Stewart in Vertigo is also a well-known star, but he began to appear on screen in the 1930s.
Stewart's play path is also not broad, but the limitations of his play path have made him something like a cultural barometer in a long acting career.
Prior to the 1950s, Stewart's screen faces included variations of passive, sweet, slightly cramped, and humble images. His public face is as calm and taciturn as his character.
It is this sense of passivity and humility that seems to turn him into a rubber stamp whose presence not only gives the character traits needed for a particular character, but also gives the viewer a specific reaction. This simple and gentle illusion made him a mirror that reflected the best mental aspect of everyone.
By the 1950s, he began to specialize in comedy roles, often set up as a dragging, head-hanging, humble and shy character, whose simplicity was irresistible. His roles are always non-threatening, and the audience feels both intimate and self-consciously superior to him.
The character of George Bailey in Frank Capra's A Good Life (1946) simultaneously encapsulates and transforms stewart's face that has been carefully cultivated by many different directors and audiences.
A Good Life (1946)
Stewart and Capra add a certain level of anxiety and despair to the character of George Bailey. Driving the film's narrative is George's attempt to leave Bedford town and the ongoing setbacks he suffers in achieving his dreams.
Frustration and anxiety reflect a ambiguity of how an ordinary individual succeeds in an unfamiliar new world that emerged in the late World War II, in a world of old conventions and changing accepted lifestyles.
"A Good Life" is one of the few Hollywood films that refuses to fulfill a character's dreams and forces him to recognize another identity — and almost literally the movie imposes it on it.
In fact, George's frustration was felt in the story's refusal to present itself the way he wanted it to, and led to his suicide attempts. It was only through the intervention of heaven that he understood that without him, the town he resolutely wanted to leave would become a dark, violent, and decaying place.
Through this understanding, he chose a more "responsible" path and became a stay-at-home man, a banker, and a protector of town welfare.
One of the postwar masterpieces of uncertainty about the present and the future, "A Good Life" is a statement that expresses cultural incompatibility and the fantasy of the age of innocence.
It's still moving, and together with another World War II film, Casablanca (directed by Michael Curtis, 1942), it's one of the most beloved black-and-white films.
Casablanca
At the same time, it steered Stewart's acting career to another track.
His role became more serious, and the desperate and morally confused side of his portrayal of A Good Life was brought to life through the successful renditions of his series of roles, most notably in Hitchcock's films and in a series of Anthony Mann's Westerns, such as Snake River Storm (1952) and The Bloody Park (1953).
Hitchcock began to make changes to Stewart's performance face in Soul Requiem (1948), Rear Window (1954), and Catch of the Dead (1956).
In Rear Window, a semi-serious, half-comedy film about the ill consequences of voyeurism, Hitchcock began to induce a fretting style of performance from Stewart with a bit of ecstasy in it.
Rear Window
He plays a photographer who is trapped in a wheelchair due to an accident, spies on a neighbor and asks his girlfriend to investigate a murder he believes has occurred in an apartment across the street.
Beneath its playful exterior, the film raises a moral question about staring, about seeing and seeing what shouldn't be seen. This film is a superb interpretation of the front-and-back shot technique.
In Vertigo, Hitchcock took a step further into the fanatical character he gave to Stewart in Rear Window, and the two created an excellent depiction of the state of insanity in contemporary cinema.
Vertigo and the culture of the 50s
In order to understand Vertigo and Die Hard, it's important to understand what happened in the late '40s and '50s that gave Hitchcock's film a sense of despair and ultimately led to the various questions about heroism that we'll find in Die Hard.
The end of World War II did not bring an emotion of triumph and strength to American culture, but rather to a feeling of discomfort rolling in the chest, a suspicion of the future and a vague sense of the past.
As soon as the news of the Germans' attempt to exterminate the Jews and the two atomic bombs dropped over Japan to end the war was revealed, it caused a huge wave in the cultural world, and it proved how easy it was to make the myth of civilization and order collapse.
China's communist revolution, Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe, and Soviet nuclear tests in the late '40s further deepened social frustration that the second large-scale war of the century would settle the world down.
In the United States, the economic, racial, gender, and class relations that began in the early 1940s continued to spread during the war years and generate anxiety years later.
Laborers expressed their displeasure through wartime strikes after strike. The northward migration of African-Americans in search of economic opportunities that have benefited people that have never been available before — has upset the mainstream white community.
Meanwhile, African-American soldiers fought valiantly in the Legion of Independence overseas. Attacks on Hispanic led to the Zurt Riots that spread from southern California to Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York.
The outbreak of violence not only demonstrated the self-expression and self-protection of ethnic minorities, but also set the stage for the creation of the post-war myth of juvenile delinquency.
By the early 1950s, culture was torn apart by bizarre changes and misalignments, including suburbanization and escape from central areas, the formation and institutionalization of multinational corporations, the slow and painful civil rights process, and the continued redefinition of gender identities.
Nevertheless, the United States of America sublimated these and other pressing events into a struggle against a mostly fictitious external enemy (and then a completely fictitious internal enemy), the "communist threat". Almost everything was incorporated into this anti-communist Cold War discourse.
Founded in the late 1940s and continuing to be active in the House Committee of Un-American Activities in the 1950s, several commissions run by Joseph McCarthy, newspapers, magazines, and numerous political and pop culture terms have accused almost anyone who once or still held liberal or left-wing views of being communists.
Friends and colleagues reported each other, government workers, teachers, film and television screenwriters, directors and actors lost their jobs, intellectuals were groundlessly suspected, and blacklists were spread everywhere. American culture and politics suffered a great purge.
Women have also been purged by culture in a similar way. Their roles changed dramatically during the years of World War II. As most young men went overseas to fight, women flocked to work, they did a great job, and many enjoyed the pleasures of disposable income for the first time.
Although few women can sit at the management level, they keep factories and shops in order and find a popular sense of freedom from the daily affairs of the family.
The impact of this sense of freedom was so deep that a massive ideological reorganization had to take place after the war. The men returned from the battlefield and wanted to get their jobs back. The women had to be rearranged into previously passive routines.
Films, magazines and newspapers once again glorified motherhood and the family, the submissive role of women and the importance of the nuclear family — men working freely outside and women taking care of household chores inside.
Discussions about gender are caught up in a vortex of absurd anti-communist discourse. Issues such as politics and the individual, state power, the workplace, the family, and gender have all become ambiguous and contradictory.
Deep fears of subversion and assimilation, conquered or altered by internal and external enemies, are filtered down to questions about the roles of men and women in culture, and the way gender determines power structures.
The culture of the 50s was no less obsessed with sex and gender roles than we are today, and it tried to alleviate this problem through regulation. The most conservative desire of the decade was to maintain a perfect imbalance of "husband and wife, male and female".
Fear of women, fear of difference, fear of communism, and fear of assimilation became a striking marker of this age of anxiety.
People seem to find a sense of security in the same sense, but worry that too much assimilation can become dangerous.
For example, when corporate culture is seen as the source of reliable jobs for men and a solid consumer economy for the country, it is also seen as a distraction from the image of free, unfettered men who are supposed to go their own way in the world.
Thus, the voice and books of men who had become inferior to the company and the family began to appear.
Some popular literature is very direct in showing anger at assimilation, the apparent decline of male potential, the growth of corporate culture, and communism.
In 1958, a book called The Decline of American Male, a compilation of articles published in the popular magazine Look, claimed that women controlled men's behavior, ranging from the early formation of men's psychology to the types of jobs they chose and their ability to compete.
Because now women need equality or greater satisfaction than men, they begin to control their sexual desires. Women's repression, combined with cultural pressures, creates a fragile shell for men who have no individuality, no power, overwork, and pressure to "love and make moral decisions as an individual."
Men are weakened and regulated, they become weak and cowering. "Unlike the communist countries, which veto by force, in the liberal and democratic United States of America, men have been quietly taken away from an inheritance." As men disappeared, so did the state. Female-dominated communism ruled everything.
Kinsey Report
Sex, control, and anti-communism were the three trajectories of the cultural madness of the 1950s. Gender issues were further exacerbated by the publication of two scientific reports, which became one of the most influential and disturbing cultural events of the 1950s after anti-communism.
The Kinsey Reports (published in the late 1940s and mid-1950s, respectively) are two works of a scientific analytical nature that present themselves as objective systematic investigations.
The conclusion that there is no standard norm for sexual activity and no controllable conventional definition of sexual intercourse frightens almost everyone.
In a world where moral, cultural, and political safe havens have become increasingly difficult to find, the need for security will grow stronger, but the Kinsey report seems to remove another supporting point.
What the report seems to be trying to say about sex becomes part of an overall concern about subversion — cultural, political, and gender. Nothing seems to be solid.
Vulnerable men in movies
Many films of the decade have explored gender issues in subtle and complex ways (as well as race issues), and they can put aside anti-communist hysteria.
Many of these films, from cultural fears of assimilation, from juvenile delinquency (another concept of self-intimidation invented by civilization about what masculinity is experiencing, while at the same time creating another fear that can be blamed on the mass media) have somehow transformed the gender conception of the old stereotypes of rough male heroes.
Some of these films, such as Heart Like Iron (1951) and A Thousand Strands of Grey (1956), bring male characters in their negative, sensitive, and vulnerable times with personalities and traits that are usually found in female characters.
A Thousand Strands of Love in Grey (1956)
A series of postwar film actors—Montgomery Clifford, James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Paul Newman (in The Heart of Iron, Rebellion Without a Cause" (Nicholas Ray, 1955), "The Biker Party" (1953), and "Left Gun" (1958)—showed a search for new forms of expression under the guise of introverted sensitivity.
Their acting style was a major break with pre-war film conventions; their characters explored repressed anger and sexuality on an overall cultural level. In "Biker Party," Marlon Brando plays a very sensitive driver who bursts into tears during a night scene with his motorcycle alone.
"Biker Party"
At the beginning of the film, a girl asks him, "What the hell are you fighting against?" "What do you know?" He asked rhetorically. Together with Rebel Without a Cause, the film touched on the empathy of restraint and confusion among many people in the '50s.
Considered subversive, Biker Was Banned in Britain for many years, but its interest really wasn't with the rebellious character of the male character, but with the ambiguous expression of his anger and passivity.
In addition to gang fighting, the film's presentation of masculinity runs counter to the conventions of heroism and power; ultimately, the femininity of men is the attraction and curiosity of this and several other films of the same kind.
Vertigo is not a film about rebellious youth, nor is it a film about fear of assimilation or communist subversion in a superficial sense. Rather, it is about a middle-aged man who is squeezed by both sexual repression and despair, and whose awakening leads to the death of others.
It is a 50s film about oppressed and destroyed professionals, and is closer to "A Thousand Strands of Grey" and Nicholas Ray's "Above Life" (1956) than "Biker Party" and "Rebel Without Cause" directed by Ray.
Rebel Without a Cause
However, it is also subordinate to the decade's concerns about issues such as change and betrayal, power and passivity, domination and slavery, and sexual panic.
It calmly speaks of this concern and the overall sense of incompleteness and incompleteness in culture — perhaps unfinished personal affairs , and a diffuse sense of anxiety.
It touched on the Cold War's obsession with containment in an indirect way.
The political culture of the 1950s was obsessed with containing the "communist threat." By portraying a deeply repressed man who is contained by fear and driven by obsession, Vertigo personifies politics.
"Die Hard" looks like it's the opposite of "Vertigo." It's a film about completing a mission, and its protagonist is uninhibited. The film features a group of evil villains supported by a powerful and witty manipulator behind the scenes.
Unlike Vertigo, Die Hard is about masculine power, heroism, and unquestioned action. Despite being a quick-witted heroic character, John McLean, played by Bruce Willis, is not unrelated to some sensitive men who began to appear in the 50s.
The pain accompanied him. John's pain is not the bewildering cultural anxiety that influenced the characters of the day 30 years ago, but a more contemporary one—though its roots are deeply rooted in the gender ideology of the 1950s and the conservative ideas of individual initiative in the 1980s.
John's wife leaves him, and the narrative of Die Hard is advanced through his journey from New York to Los Angeles in search of reconciliation. John's reaction to his wife's newfound sense of independence has the same anxious component as his predecessors, mixed with a '50s fear of corporate power.
But John McLean was a man from the late '80s. His insecurities are evident through cultural discourse about female independence (rather than male dependence), as well as through the fact that his wife has left him, taken a company job, and even re-used her own last name.
Such events in the 50s would have been seen in 1950s films as a handle to ridicule rather than as a cause of anxiety, or rather, into anxiety in the form of mockery. In Chapter Six, we've noticed this response in Ida Lupino's Bigamy.
John of "Die Hard" and Scotty of "Vertigo" do share a common pedigree. Both characters are police officers.
John comes from a long tradition of cinematic cops, the Tough-Hearted New York Irishman, a unique image in the film while maintaining his mysterious character.
Scotty's tradition is more local—he's a San Francisco cop, and it's more in tune with the image and narrative of the wounded man in '50s films. He couldn't meet the requirements of the job.
While John McLean is obsessed with divorcing his wife and begins to prove his manhood, Scotty is devastated and suffers from a fear of heights, a stroke response to a moral and emotional collapse of heights and himself.
This leads to the death of his companion at the beginning of the film, when a rooftop chase leaves Scotty shaking and paralyzed to reach out to a colleague.
Scotty leaves the force and becomes vulnerable in the big picture set by a businessman who exploits his sincerity, insecurity, and self-doubt, and ruins his life with a woman who Scotty thinks he and she have fallen in love with.
Scotty survives at the end of the film, but is weakened and returns to the Void. John McLean saves his wife through a series of explosive adventures, develops a deep bond with an African-American cop, and survives and triumphs in a series of apocalyptic events, but becomes a somewhat paradoxical super-cop.
Scotty's despair and John's ambivalence are partly the result of the gender overhangs we mentioned earlier, and these troubles are characteristic of the age to which his story belongs.
Scottie Ferguson is a shy 50s man with a weak body shape, ability and subjective initiative. There was almost nothing he could push. This man who lives in a fictional little container is a metaphor for all the middle-class middle-aged men of the 50s who are thwarted by forces they can't control.
John McLean, on the other hand, is a collective fantasy that arises in his opposing reactions. By the end of the '80s, the loss of control had gone from fear to fact. Successive blows on cultural self-confidence and individual might to conquer the world have sounded alarm bells.
While some of the major victories of the 60s and 70s – the gains of minorities and women's rights, the effective mass protests against the Vietnam War – were accompanied by larger, deeper defeats.
The assassinations of Kennedy and King, as well as the combined frustration of the supporters, opponents and fighters of the Vietnam War, have created a lingering cloud of melancholy.
The nixon administration's corruption, which culminated in watergate, the stagnation of real wages, and a more implicit but more far-reaching realization that the United States has little power in an increasingly complex and fragmented world, and that the power of the individual over everything else has waned... All of this has dominated culture.
The anxieties of the 50s turned into helplessness of the 80s, reflected in the search for the heroes of the times, and reflected in the campaign of Ronald Reagan, the movie star/president.
Heroic characters, at any time of the culture, are intimately linked to the issue of masculinity and are now always being questioned.
It was subjected to this torture in the 1950s and made a comeback in the late 1980s.
Activist men who are strong, moral, righteous and courageous will sweep away the decay and violence in culture — through greater violence — and never stand up to the test of reality.
After World War II, the assumption of heroism was questioned. The great Western director John Ford explored the fall of western heroes as early as 1948's Fort Apache.
Stronghold Storm
In The Searcher (1956), Ford forced him and America's favorite hero, John Wayne, to make a performance in the film that explored the approximation of heroism to mental paranoia.
This scrutiny and exposure continued—especially in Westerns—through the early '70s, and resurfaced in other genres in the late '80s.
Die Hard thinks a lot about old-fashioned movie heroes, especially John Wayne. I pointed out that the character of Bruce Willis is related to the irish policeman's film routine, but there are many more to it than that. His character is john McLean.
In 1952, John Wayne played the lead role in an anti-communist cop film called Big Jim McClain. John Wayne, who plays Jim McClain, becomes Bruce Willis, who plays John McClain.
However, this is not a simple replacement or even a complex reference to the heroes of great movies. It tries to embrace heroism while denying it.
In a passage in Die Hard, the terrorist Hans is enraged by the frustration of John's wit and shouts at him in despair, "Who are you?" Another American who watches too many movies... Do you feel like rambo or John Wayne? ”
Sylvester Stallone's Rambo came out three years before Die Hard and was one of the last action-adventure films to take the character at its center very seriously. Rambo became a right-wing symbol.
It wasn't until 1984's Terminator that action movie heroes began to take on some of the reflexive nature of '50s Western heroes. Arnold Schwarzenegger took his acting career a step further by ridiculing his role.
In Schwarzenegger's pretense, there is always a sense of security and harmlessness, and he even became safer after shooting Terminator, when he actively teased his early roles in the film and continued to follow the comedic route.
In Die Hard, John prompts his presence, with the former saying somewhere in the film, "Enough explosives to blow Arnold Schwarzenegger fly." "It wasn't enough, somewhere he was still dressed like Rambo.
John McLean is a hero, and if he could have been more serious, he would have followed the john Wayne-Rambo tradition of character.
He fought like a man; he was bloody (or blooded, as some die-hard believers would say when interrogated under torture); and he showed an unusual ability to heal himself, unusual enough to become a model for subsequent action-adventure films.
He eventually became John Wayne and Rambo, and at the same time became a parody of both. "Die Hard" opened a new chapter in cinematic violence, which we now call cartoon violence.
The violence inflicted on the human body in the film has reached the point where "real" people can no longer survive.
These contemporary popular film productions—including the Die Hard series, the Lethal Weapon series, The Ultimate Condor starring Bruce Willis, and Stallone-led Dragons and The Wild Mountain, as well as a large number of comic book adaptations, from Stallone's other film, SWAT Judge (1995) to the X-Men series (directed by Brian Singer, 2000, 2003), to the Spider-Man series (2002, 2004) and Hulk. (2003) – It begins to reveal the fact that images and narratives no longer originate from the real world, but from film and other popular art forms, and that cinematic violence has become a visual trick— a digital visual trick.
Of course, the movie can only go this far. The viewer doesn't seem to want to see a blanket exposure to artificiality and self-reflexes.
The failure of The Ultimate Condor and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Phantom Heroes (1993, directed by Die Hard director John McTiennan) was partly due to their lack of seriousness towards themselves and a sense of playfulness that shattered the expectations of some viewers for necessary illusions.
We want to see heroes laugh at themselves, but we don't want them to mock us.
Heroic anti-hero is perhaps the best description of John McLean. He went from a confused late 20th-century man to a brave, clever, and indestructible man, a guardian of his wife and companions. He's always a little confused, but he's always on call.
Phantom Heroes
In order to more clearly understand the separation and convergence of these two films and their protagonists, we need to think about the narrative methods of the two, because it determines the way the two films explore the experience of the times at that time.
With its dark, ironic structure, Vertigo uses a modern narrative.
Modernity–the ever-advancing pace of technological innovation, the growing process of urbanization, the rapid fragmentation of coherent, cohesive structures of the family, religion, subject race and its status, government, and the fall of individual agency and individual power–culminated in the 1970s and 1980s.
Responses to modernity are presented in a variety of different ways, including the stories told by culture itself. Film and television turn our fears into our focus, sometimes confirming them, sometimes trying to temper them through narratives that dominate fate, overcome obstacles, and compensate for emotional losses.
In the '50s, science fiction explored the fear of our vulnerability to extraterrestrial forces (a parable of the "communist threat" of the time) — stories that are constantly being reinterpreted today, with only enemies changing. The romance attempts to confirm the failure of the individual by preaching the idea that the family, the pleasure of the world, is above individualism, and that this is the best barrier to modernity—and at the same time the fragility of the family.
Vertigo is an extraordinary confirmation: it confirms the disintegration of the modern family and the concept of self. It also has romantic elements and fantasy brushstrokes, but it is mainly concerned with the disintegration of modern men.
Scotty is a lost man who has lost the ability to act and love. His female friend Mickey can't attract him sexually. Her simplicity and directness frightened him, as did her sense of humor.
She was a designer who was designing a bra ("You know those things." You're a big man now. She said to him). The bra she's designing has a "revolutionary lifting effect" based on the cantilever principle, and it also mocks the 50s fervor for female breasts and women who meet the expectations of men's fantasies.
Scotty's own fantasies have a strong obsession, he believes that women are out of reach for him, and that the pain he experiences is either impotence, sexual dysfunction, or outright gender panic.
Scotty and Mickey then followed the bra jokes about the three weeks they had been engaged a few years earlier. Scotty insisted that Mickey had canceled the engagement. She didn't respond, but Hitchcock did it for her: he cut her close-up twice, which was compact enough to upset the central compositional balance.
She just frowned, then looked not far away. This is a very typical Hitchcock posture, which extends the viewer's understanding of the situation by discovering the standard grammar of the reactive lens.
In this example, Mickey's reaction footage suggests to us that Scotty is not only sexually handicapped, but also that he himself is completely unaware. He didn't know who he was or what his abilities and flaws lay.
Scotty is an emotional shell, and a wealthy businessman pours in an absurd story about his wife, who, according to him, is controlled by the soul of a woman who committed suicide in the 19th century.
The businessman asks Scotty to track down a woman he identifies as his wife and report her whereabouts—when in fact the woman is just pretending to be his wife. She then becomes at the heart of Scotty's life, and it is precisely because of the lack of a strong center that his life becomes lifeless.
Scotty is the male representative of the postwar era: no power, no sense of self, and only rebuilds his own desires in others, who are not as he thinks.
Everything is fake, and the businessman sets up a big innings—also under Hitchcock," and it's not until very far back in the film that he reveals something—to cover up his murder of his wife.
However, this innings is typical of Hitchcock's narrative, which is not as important in itself as it is on the characters and the audience.
We know the depravity of Scotty Ferguson: he went from being a weak man tormented by some kind of obsessive impulse to a sadistic masochist, into a male shell staring into the abyss,[6] and ultimately leading to the death of a woman who had previously tried to reinvent her as another woman.
It sounds like a romance drama, and it is. Following the tradition of '50s romance dramas, Vertigo is about an explosion of repressed desire that then re-emerges in the central character, usually a woman.
The romantic bitter lord in "Vertigo" is a man. This is also extraordinary, as its narrative ironically plays with Scotty and the audience's perception. We have to free ourselves from Scotty.
In the first part of the film, we try to identify with him; in the second part, we have to distance ourselves from him and evaluate him.
There is no comfortable closure: neither the character nor his world is redeemed at the end of the film. Scotty is completely abandoned, and he has an unbearable sense of loneliness and falls into despair. In short, Vertigo has its tragic side.
Modernity and its narrative expression, modernism, refers to the telling of a central loss through an ironic tone with a tragic whisper. Postmodernity believes that the center — the stories and cultural beliefs that are bound together — is gone, and decides to continue to explore it through the rhetoric and presentation of the crowd in an ironic and cynical manner.
"Die Hard" builds its own structure through the borrowing and use of the Haina Hundred Rivers and the innuendo of any suitable or inappropriate material.
It is a ping-pong tournament between pop culture memory and contemporary cynicism.
It is a trampling on any serious moral construct, not a sentimental affirmation of individual heroism. Like the general postmodern, Die Hard is a roller coaster of images, an intertextual feast, and a fast food of hesitation and confusion.
As a postmodern work, Die Hard attempts— and largely succeeds— into a film that is almost universally accessible: an action-adventure film, a political thriller, a cop-and-shoot film, a discussion about race, an ironic commentary on cinematic heroism, and a study of gender conflict in the late 1980s.
Vertigo is a film that is conscious of its seriousness, thinking about gender and male anxiety, slow, deep, and cutting-edge in form.
"Die Hard" is a grand, noisy, and fiery film, which is built by one of the oldest film narrative structures—the alternating between the chase scene and the chased scene—a kind of alternating action and reaction.
It's a bondage narrative that opens the way with violence and a hero who doesn't take himself too seriously, a hero who is more indestructible than John Wayne and Rambo but considers himself Roy Rogers.
Postmodern villain
Scotty is almost a tragic figure; John McLean is a confused hero. The villains who fight it are even more confused.
Scotty's enemy was none other than himself: his own weaknesses and insecurities. Gavin Elster, the man who lied, killed a woman, and destroyed Scotty's spirit, is in some ways an image of Scotty himself.
In Die Hard, the villain does exist, and it has the kind of meaning function that action movie villains have always had.
But keep in mind that everything in this film is not what it sees. John flew from New York to Los Angeles to visit his discordant wife, Holly, who worked for a wealthy Japanese company, the Zhongfu Group.
He met her at the company's Christmas party, which was attacked by a group of terrorists who killed their bosses and abducted the rest of them.
The 1980s was a decade of rapid change in attitudes towards foreigners and women. The latter find their own voice, and the men are uncomfortable with what the voice says. The former is also creating another kind of confusion.
The Japanese actually frustrated the Americans. We won an overwhelming victory over them in World War II. Now their economy is booming, and their products — from video recorders to cars — are almost everything in their hands.
They seem to be buying everything in the country, from studios (Columbia Pictures is still owned by Sony) to golf courses to major properties in big cities. They were seen as models of productivity and later demonized as a strange foreign culture.
They are still dark-skinned adversaries that remain in our memories, though they are not often spoken of. There are other enemies as well, and Die Hard seems to mention them all.
If the Japanese seem to be threatening us with economic takeover, Europe and the Middle East threaten us with terrorists: these people have unreasonable political goals and even more appalling means of achieving them.
We have responded to all of these situations, and we still respond to those cultures with fear and disgust — cultures that intimidate and threaten us, cultures that we have not yet understood, and cultures that branch out of the complex economic and political processes of our homeland.
Die Hard plays with these complexities and confusions and exposes them. Holly's Japanese company looks friendly, and her boss, Mr. Takagi, is a kind fatherly man. He spoke softly and possessed a rare self-deprecating character.
"Pearl Harbor didn't work," he joked with John, "so we're going to use tape recorders against you." In fact, the villain in the company is not this foreign boss, but another 80s paper tiger, Yuppy Ellis.
This yuppie is the old-fashioned cultural stereotype of the 80s, who was once called the "upstart" and became the object of resentment and sarcasm, aimed at the working class and the bottom middle class who were excluded from the economic boom of the 80s and 90s.
They are the subject of a series of "Yuppy Go" films— such as Fatal Temptation (director Adrian Lane, 1987) and The Lodger from Hell, in which the Yuppy characters have to endure humiliation and even violence in order to redeem themselves.
The Yuppy in Die Hard is a tearful fool who will show off his Rolex watch, seduce John's wife, and eventually betray both her and John to terrorists.
In return, the terrorists shot him – almost as expected. Mr. Takagi was also brutally murdered by terrorists, leaving everyone horrified.
This kind, civilized man stands against everyone other than John and Holly, and his killing reveals the ruthlessness of the terrorists— and turns out they are not terrorists.
In the middle of the film, the audience discovers that the crime leader Hans is not a political terrorist he disguises, but rather a villain who makes his men steal things from Takagi's safe. Suddenly, the film stripped away the political cloak of doubt and turned into a simple battle between good and bad.
Even without depoliticization, Hans's gang is a strange model of cross-cultural diversity: one of them is a violent Russian, a few Asians, and an African-American who is both a computer master and a ruthless killer. It's an international, multi-villain duo that reflects the film's unusual racial approach.
Racial characteristics in Die Hard
The main reference to racial issues in Vertigo appears in Gavin Elster's fantasy story about his wife, who says she is possessed by a 19th-century Spanish woman who is a routine figure with sexy and exotic marks.
While Scotty deepens his fascination with Madeleine, he also becomes fascinated by the "crazy Carotta", and Madeleine is the so-called reincarnation of this woman.
While some of the '50s films did deal with race, often in a very positive and liberal way, there was another form of apartheid. In many cases, race is ignored altogether if it is not the central theme of the film.
As a result, in many films, people of color either don't exist at all, or play the role of a squire, or become another reflection of the character's fragile imagination, as in Vertigo.
By the 1980s, race had become a deliberate issue in popular culture, almost always presented, albeit with varying degrees of sincerity and openness. We will return to the question of racial reproduction in the last chapter.
In a well-fitted postmodern mold, Die Hard plays this race card in an ambiguous and unapologetic way, with mixed and bad times, leaving us overwhelmed.
Picking John up at the airport is Mr. Takagi's driver, a young black man named Argyle (one might ask why a man takes a sock as his name), who sits in that limousine listening to music in the film and seems to have forgotten about the atrocities that are taking place in the skyscrapers above.
He seems to be falling into the long-standing stereotype of the "sluggish negro" – it wasn't until he drove his luxury car into the van of an evacuated criminal gang and became a hero.
At the beginning of the film, when John is forced by a criminal gang to an unfinished floor inside a skyscraper, another African-American appears: Police Officer Al.
He was initially treated as a clumsy good-hearted: he would buy junk food for his pregnant wife and drive the car into a ditch after learning of the situation inside the building. Despite this, he quickly stood out and became the only reliable representative of the authorities.
When the police arrived in droves, their officer proved to be an addict. Two FBI agents, Johnson and Johnson (one of whom was black), were also present, but they were also arrogant fools. The media representative turned out to be a mercenary dangerous person, and finally John's wife, Holly, punched him in the mouth.
However, Al endured everything in silence, standing on the street and talking to John on his mobile phone, maintaining a calm mind in the rising chaos, supporting the isolated John and providing us with an external perspective.
The cross-cutting between the two establishes a connection between the two and provides us with a guarantee that No matter how dangerous John's situation may be, he will be saved. Al became an image beyond the black cop, and this detachment was of great significance, because it left the racial question unresolved.
He became—after Takagi's death—a fatherly figure, John's stand-in father. He also became John's stand-in wife and stand-in mother, and fell into the trap of a protective black nanny.
Partner pieces
Vertigo was one of the most powerful explorations of the heterosexual scare genre in '50s films. Hitchcock revisits the problem in A Particularly Perverse Way in Psychopath, suggesting that male personality can be fully absorbed by maternal women.
By the '70s, Hollywood had found other ways to deal with the dilemmas men faced in order to meet the standards of image that culture had created for them.
One of them is a pairing film: in this type of film, two men — usually police officers — form a loyal alliance that supports each other and has a lot of fun, and anything but sex can happen between them.
Partner films will always insist that two male figures are heterosexual. They have wives or girlfriends. But women are on the periphery; true asexual love and unfettered pleasure stem from a relationship between two men.
This narrative structure avoids the painful introspection of male despair in '50s films, avoids racial issues through the treatment of black-and-white partners— providing a weak racial egalitarian mannerism— and avoids more complex explorations of male-female or same-sex relationships.
"Die Hard" is a great interpretation of the partner film. Al and John were given a multifaceted relationship. They were father and son, mother and son; they embraced each other like lovers.
At the end of the film, most of the villains are wiped out, and John walks out of the skyscraper; he and Al recognize each other through a soul-destroying alternating subjective lens.
Once afraid to shoot, Al redeemed his masculinity by shooting the last villain. John walked away from Holly and embraced El affectionately. When two friends express their love, Holly is on the edge of the picture, and she is marginalized.
The scene echoes an earlier scene in the film, when John and Holly make their first settlement in Mr. Takagi's office. Holly walked into the male space where John and Takagi and Ellis were talking. John and Holly had an eye exchange; the two walked over to each other and hugged each other.
In the scene at the end of the film, the same style is repeated, but the gender is reversed. John and Holly are reunited again, but now the eye exchange and the final embrace takes place between the two men. The camaraderie between the partners was confirmed.
If the movie ends there, there will be a lot of interesting questions, and the boundaries between partners and lovers can be confusing.
But keep in mind that this film does not allow any manifestos and ideas to emerge without their antithesis. And, while it may be postmodern, it also has to end up conforming to the meta-narrative norms of family life and heterosexuality.
Al gives him a hug after a while, he tells Holly to take good care of John, and ends the film with a picture of her husband and wife holding hands. John is saved, his marriage is saved, Al is redeemed, and the love between the two men is strong, while at the same time immune to some ridicule that thinks there is more emotional connotation between the two.
El went from being a potential lover to a protective mother. This little family is protected. After all, John's premise in Los Angeles at the beginning of the film is to visit his discordant wife and save his marriage.
After so many trials, he may now be able to think of himself as the heroic leader of his family.
He has proven himself. In the process, however, he has formed a close masculine bond with Al, and the film tells us that men need this camaraderie to be at ease and free, and ultimately to be free from the hurt of family relationships that are always difficult for men to maintain.
They are constantly telling us about this. Something in the partner's fantasy was so appealing and soothing that it remains a mainstay of film and television to this day.
The end of redemption
Scotty was not saved and protected by anyone. He wants to be the hero who saves the heroine in misfortune, but it is not the heroine but he is in misfortune. At first he follows a lie that Elster made up for him, and then he tries to reconstruct it by finding a woman who doesn't exist.
In the second part of the film, Scotty discovers Judy, the woman who "played" Madeleine in Gavin Elster's hoax. Scotty forces her to turn herself back into Madeleine. He denied her personality and tried to absorb her personality into his own.
They returned to the church in Spain, and she fell from the bell tower and fell to her death. There's no triumph over evil, or even the triumph of good, because Vertigo doesn't externalize moral structures to routine characters like Die Hard.
In the end, everything became evidence of Scotty's lack of moral center, a flaw shared by the '50s. In the place where John McLean dedicated love and friendship, Scotty was left with his own narcissism and madness.
Vertigo, like its title, is about an unshakable downward spiral.
There are a lot of fall scenes in Die Hard and Vertigo. Hans fell from a skyscraper. John fell from an elevator and broke through a window through a fire hose.
These fall shots cement his heroic image, even as he acts dismissive of it. Returning unscathed in blood after a struggle, he saved the hostages and appeared to be reunited with his wife.
The film silently acknowledges that these are fantasies, and their fantasy is comparable to Scotty's fascination with Madeleine/Judy. But Die Hard asks us to join the joke.
Vertigo asks us to observe Scotty's destruction of his life with pity, fear, and even tragic awe. The relationship between the audience and Vertigo is as serious as Hollywood has demanded.
We are asked to read the film carefully and understand its subtext; we have to keep an eye on it when it reveals to us the truth that it is not revealing to the central character.
There are no secrets in "Die Hard", only spectacles. Its inherent confusion about gender, race, state, politics, and authorities can only be regarded as a cutscene joke, and is only a fragment of related, disrespectful, and unrelated moments.
We can conclude from this that the Frankfurt School and the media critics of the 50s were right that there was an immutable gap between high and low culture, that the best "Vertigo" had hardly escaped the so-called middle-class cultural category of Dwight Macdonald, and that the top bad "Die Hard" was only an incurable mass culture.
Vertigo tries to be tragic, despite the fact that it is a romantic romance drama that is elaborately structured, dark, and complex.
Instead of reaching that height, Die Hard is content to accept its popular cultural position as a simple entertainment, as a straight-forward action movie or a satire, cynicism, or even irony about serious events. Its refusal to take seriously any question it raises is enough to underscore its lack of serious intellectual responsibility.
But our reading also leads to another path. By representing the different directions chosen by cinema – and by recognizing that they all seriously apply cinematic forms in expressive ways in addition to differing intentions – we find a common ground.
Then, by analyzing their proximity to their cultural contexts, and the ways in which they are expressed consciously or unconsciously, we find that both films can be understood as serious and imaginative statements made for commercial purposes.
We could argue that Vertigo is not as cynical as Die Hard because its structure and themes are more complex, requiring the viewer to devote more attention and a rational, sensual response.
Ultimately, it's a different way of articulating, a different way of informing that is determined by the filmmakers and their films. This formulation requires a difference in response to the way we choose to deal with the film.
This brings us back to the position of cultural studies. None of the imaginations that operate for different purposes and in different ways are completely pure or completely depraved. The audience's imagination responds to different films in different ways.
I find the ambiguity of race and gender in Die Hard to be extremely interesting and enlightening, and that the overall structure of the film has an irresistible confidence and charm in its mix and matching of humor, action, and absurd elements.
What struck me with Vertigo was the meticulous design and detailing of its structure, which greatly introduced me into the depth of insight into the fragile psychology of men. What's impressive about both films is that they deal with the culture in which they live in a delicate and poignant way.
On another level, both films are fascinating in their differences and commonalities, clarifying the way all films tell stories—sometimes the same or almost inconceivable stories are placed in different disguises and forms.
Even the two films we analyzed are so different sometimes coincide with some unexpected points of view. One reason is that stories are a finite resource; another reason is that the stories we also seem to want to tell us are limited; we need convergence and repetition.
We can find a sense of security in the same stories that are told over and over again.
Even more importantly, all stories are connected, and when we look beyond the old rift between high and low culture, we can know, respond to, and understand films that appear as different on the surface as Bruce Willis and James Stewart.
Edit: Xiao Jia
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