Titus & Pete Spiliakos talk about Die Hard on its 30th anniversary. We talk about the everyman role that made Bruce Willis a star & how director John McTiernan arranged an entire story about arrogant, failing institutions--corporations, the media, the police, FBI, &c.--& the moral virtues of working class Americans like John McClane.
We also talk about the skill & care put into making the movie--the action, the design, the characterization, & the sequences in the plot. Die Hard redefined action just like it defined a sort of populist patriotism.
We then turn to how action movies failed as a genre & were replaced by superhero movies & the new situation--economic, political, social, technological--in which nobody finds it possible to imagine a working class hero. We try to show what middlebrow art does in bringing social concerns & storytelling together, as well as how it might be done again.
