'I JUST PUT A DRONE UNDER HIM...': COLLAGE AND SUBVERSION IN THE SCORE OF 'DIE HARD'

Abstract

WHEN IT WAS released in 1988, Die Hard was regarded as just another action film, albeit a whopping good one. Time has proved that it was something more significant: Die Hard was not the first great blockbuster action film, but it swiftly emerged as a virtual template for those that followed. As with Singin' in the Rain (1952) for the musical, however, there was enough history behind Die Hard for the film both to epitomize and to comment upon the genre. Action films tend to be based on simple juxtapositions of hero and villain. As in musicals, so much of the film's running time is taken up with set pieces-songs and dances, chases and demolitions-that a fairly schematic plot, individualized only by local detail, is essential for narrative clarity. But while the identities of the key players in Die Hard are clear, just who is antagonist and who protagonist is not so clear, and music is one of the primary elements undercutting the nominal hero and elevating the 'villain' to anti-hero. Yet, as has been pointed out time and time again, approaches to film have traditionally been very visually orientated.' Even though film-makers have often compared their work to music,2 scholarly analogies have been to photography, painting and sculpture. This approach tends to negate music, not only because music is aural rather than visual but also because it evolves through time. In the past ten to fifteen years, more attention has been given to sound, but largely concerning the voice and usually in highly theoretical terms, drawing heavily on the formulations of Freud and Lacan.3 Although these psychoanalytical methods have shattered the hegemony of the auteur-based theories of early film studies and have focused attention on the receiver-subject, they are based on highly contentious theories that are at the very least deeply ingrained with patriarchal tendencies. Even within the study of 'sound', sound effects are generally ignored, and music tends to be separated from sound altogether. While protesting against the visual bias of film studies, many scholars of film music make the same mistake in reverse and examine only the music. In the past decade or so, there have been some attempts to deal with the interaction of sound and vision,

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