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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?

The Nakatomi Plaza becomes the scene of Derridean différance, where boundaries collapse and meaning defers itself perpetually. McClane ascends and descends, through ductwork and shattered glass, traversing the building as though it were a Möbius strip of perpetual deconstruction.

This is actually superior prose to many of the postmodernist critics in the academy, so I think the predictions may prove correct. Who needs to pay Judith Butler when ChatGPT can do it better?