Chronotope II: Time, Space and Genre in the Western Film

Abstract

Die Hard is fairly brazen when it comes to displaying its influences. Many elements of the narrative are straightforwardly imported from the Western, most prominent among these being the premise of the outsider hero who must battle his way through the ranks of the enemy until he faces a stand-off with the villain, whom he resembles in many ways and with whom he has formed a special bond of respect. The film constructs an amusing discourse foregrounding its own parasitical relationship to the classic Western. McClane’s code name for himself is ‘Roy’ after the cowboy star Roy Rogers; Gruber refers to McClane as ‘Mr Cowboy’; and the race-against-time structure recalls High Noon (Fred Zinneman, 1952), a film that is specifically referred to in dialogue between hero and villain. These and several other references1 acknowledge the massive influence of the Western form on the action genre, and it can be argued that across all genres, Hollywood’s defining principles of action, spectacle, tempo, drama and emotion have all developed in the wake of pioneering Westerns like Porter’s Great Train Robbery (1903) and Life of a Cowboy (1905). Perhaps no other genre can be as readily identified as ‘American’ as the Western, despite the notable efforts of Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa and others to wrest such nationalistic associations from the form.2