Bruce Willis' character John McClane

is a bastion of Wild West American machismo

He swaggers in, makes some cocky remarks,

and then uses his combination of street smarts

and - most importantly - brute force

to obliterate all the evil in his path

Now that technology is undeniably in control,

how is the classic image of the American man

--the one who shoots first and asks questions later,

the one who protects the weak

with his muscles and guns--going to survive?

In addressing and ultimately coddling this fear,

"Live Free or Die Hard" becomes a template

for how the most conservative

(and often reductive American ideas)

about gender and power can remain firmly in place

Do we want a world in which the men kill and grunt

as the means of proving themselves?

The violent, aggressive masculine power of McClane has now fully transfered to the hacker kid. He's become the prototype of a new patriarchal model.

He's got the geeky smarts that you'll need to dominate the future, but he's also got the brute force that makes McClane so unstoppable. After learning to honor McClane, Matt becomes him.

In the final moments, when McClane is threatening to beat Matt up if he puts the moves on his little girl and is groaning when she asks about this new boy, he is acting like a figure from ancient comedy.

He's the old fool--the blocking character who stands in the way of two lovers who will eventually get together. McClane used to be an action hero archetype. Now he's a comic one.

But it's okay. I mean, we've got Matt to be our new hero. And Lucy makes a point in the final scene of saying her last name is McClane.

Despite her sassmouth, she has stepped back into the patriarchy, too. Even if McClane totters around forever, his legacy lives on.

And maybe that's what all a cowboy wants... to feel secure in becoming a clown. It may mean begrudgingly handing the torch to someones who values book learning as much as instinctive intelligence, but what can you do?

However, do we really want the legacy McClane is leaving behind? Do we want a world in which the men kill and grunt as means of proving themselves?

Do we want a world in which the women talk about being independent, but really just want to be saved by a man whose name they can assume as their own?

I guess a lot of us do, because the story of "Live Free Or Die Hard" is as old as the hills. And just watch: I bet it'll get great word of mouth from people who say it's a great old-fashioned movie.

And that's true: It's old-fashioned in all the ways that keep power in the hands of the most predictable people.

"Live Free or Die Hard"

Pretty much since this franchise started, critics have been analyzing it, especially because Bruce Willis' character John McClane is positioned as a bastion of Wild West American machismo.

He swaggers in, makes some cocky remarks, and then uses his combination of street smarts and--most importantly--brute force to obliterate all the evil in his path.

In a July 3 story in the New York Times, Caryn James makes the excellent point that "Live Free or Die Hard" finds its terrorists in the people who would deny us access to technological information.

The central villain--Thomas (Timothy Olyphant), a computer whiz who used to be highly ranked in the American government--wreaks havoc on the country by systematically undoing everything that is run by computers.

He takes out the internet, the cell phone towers, and the TV satellites. Then he hits the computers that control water, electricity, and gas. "The loss of our information fix," James writes, "hits a very raw nerve."

I think that James' story is an excellent beginning to a larger question about the film and the moral universe it constructs.

In her closing paragraph, she cites the film's "blend of old-school action and new-school tecnhology," and her phrasing hints at what I see as the larger message of the film.

Namely: Now that technology is undeniably in control, how is the classic image of the American man--the one who shoots first and asks questions later, the one who protects the weak with his muscles and guns--going to survive?

In addressing and ultimately coddling this fear, "Live Free or Die Hard" becomes a template for how the most conservative (and often reductive American ideas) about gender and power can remain firmly in place.

WARNING: I'm about to give away almost every plot point of the movie. Don't read further if you want to see it later and still be surprised.

So let's start with how John McClane gets constructed here. At the beginning of the film, he's like a lame duck president. He's a senior detective in the NYPD, but all we see is how he gets disrespected by people younger than him.

For instance, in one of the first scenes--and this will become important later--McClane is spying on his college-aged daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) as she hooks up with a boy in a car.

We see the boy getting fresh with her, and she tells him to stop. She's smacking his hand off her breast when McClane yanks open the car door and pulls the young punk out of his seat.

But is Lucy happy about Dad's intervention? No! She berates him and makes it clear she could have taken care of herself.

Now, the movie has hinted that maybe she couldn't--the boy did get his hands on her--but she's not having it. She doesn't want her father-protector coming in to rescue her.

Not only that, she doesn't even want his name. Just like McClane's wife Holly in the first movie, Lucy is going by the last name Gennero, which is Holly's maiden name.

Uh-oh! The male patriarchal figure has swooped in to perform his time-honored duty of protecting the chalice of female sexuality, and she's rejected him!

And she doesn't even want his name! Another blow to phallic power! McClane ends this scene dumbfounded and frustrated, as though he can't conceive of why he shouldn't step in to play his obvious role of guardian.

You know... the role that has been given to knights and cops and white-hatted cowboys since forever.

And then McClane gets emasculated again in the very next scene. Snap! He gets a call on his police radio telling him he has to escort a twentysomething computer hacker (Matt, played by Justin Long) to Washington, D.C. McClane says they should send a rookie, but orders come back that it has to be a senior office.

So once again, McClane, despite his supposed position of authority, is not getting to be the protector. He's just chauffeuring geeks.

Throughout the film, McClane's usefulness keeps getting called into question.

The primary problem, which James hints at in her story, is that he's once and for all become too old-fashioned to guard the modern country. "You're a Timex watch in a digital world,"

Thomas sneers at him, and there are constant jokes about McClane not understanding these new-fangled gizmos like computers and video games.

Now this displacement appears in every "Die Hard" movie--remember Part One, when McClane can'r fathom Los Angeles?--but it goes deeper here. For the first time, McClane simply cannot stop the bad guys by beating the shit out of them.

I mean, his ass-kicking certainly helps, since there are plenty of scenes where he drives cars through walls and slugs people in the face and what have you, but this time, he has to have a partner.

And I'm not talking about the way Reginald VelJohnson's character Al Powell was his partner in "Die Hard 1," calling up on the CB radio will helpful information.

This time, there are things that only Matt The Hacker can accomplish. Taking down Evil Thomas requires a double team of muscle and technological expertise.

In an unusual move for an action franchise so closely associated with one character, we even see a couple of scenes where Matt is doing all the work. He's typing stuff really fast onto a keyboard, and McClane isn't even in the room.

This is not a tension the film ever resolves. It can't. The truth is, Baby Boomers are getting older, and the generations below them are about to move into more prominent positions of power in this country.

There's no fighting it. Eventually, even Jack McClane is going to be too old to save the day.

But take heart! Though it knows McClane can't go on forever, "Live Free or Die Hard's" major dramatic arc is about the transference of McClane's masculine archetype into Matt's lanky body.

Consider this: When we first meet him, Matt conspicuously stands against everything McClane believes in. He hates classic rock.

He loathes the cops, and he distrusts the mainstream media that McClane uses to get information. The hacker, just by his very work, is a symbol of anarchy against the established order embodied by McClane.

Equally important? Matt is shown as physically weak. There are jokes about how he's too out of shape to climb stairs that McClane can bound with no problem.

And because this is McClane's movie, we're invited to laugh at the youngster's fatigue.

Similarly, we're invited to sympathize with McClane's horror that the kid doesn't like Creedence Clearwater Revival. Who is this other? This kid? This anti-man?

Slowly but surely, though, Matt goes from hating McClane patriarchal authority to admiring it.

When McClane saves his life, the kid gives this big speech about how McClane is "that guy... that hero" that Matt himself will never be.

McClane counters by saying he's lost his family's respect in the process of being "that guy," but the seeds of Matt's transformation have been planted.

The next step comes when Evil Thomas starts destroying the country's computer systems.

Matt admits that he had fantasized about how cool it would be to just wipe everything out and start fresh, but now he sees the cost of such a maneuver.

Looks at the car wrecks and chaos all around him, he rejects the hacker's dream for the first time.

In response, McClane talks about how hackers and the like never remember the "good, scared, honest people" (something like that) who are at home with their families, huddled in the dark.

Whatever the wording, the message is clear: Rebelling against the authority of the government (and, by extension, McClane) equals disaster, and the people who rebel (like Evil Thomas) are... well... evil.

And here's the most important part: At the end of the movie, it's Matt who kills the last bad guy.

He picks up a gun and shoots, thereby saving the day. In the last scene, McClane tells Matt he has become "that guy." The hero. All because he killed the bad thing, which is the ultimate cowboy action.

In other words, the violent, aggressive masculine power of McClane has now fully transfered to the hacker kid. He's become the prototype of a new patriarchal model.

He's got the geeky smarts that you'll need to dominate the future, but he's also got the brute force that makes McClane so unstoppable. After learning to honor McClane, Matt becomes him.

My roommate shrewdly points out that this ending echoes that of "Die Hard 1."

The cop Al is shown throughout the movie as kind of a backwards disaster, having gone to a desk job after shooting a kid by mistake.

Al spends the movie proving he's smarter than the other cops who are trying to help McClane out of that hijacked office building, but he doesn't have the authority to act on his wits.

Al has to sneak behind the backs of his superiors in order to give McClane information.

At the end, though, as McClane walks out of the building with his wife--now back to using her husband's last name--it's Al who picks up a gun and kills the last baddie.

McClane's masculine power has transferred to Al, and in "Die Hard 2," he's been promoted to Sergeant. Again, if you behave like the patriarch, you get his privileges.

But there's an even more important wrinkle in "Live Free or Die Hard." Not only does Matt get McClane's authority, he also symbolically gets responsibility for young female sexuality.

The second half of the film's plot hinges on Evil Thomas capturing Lucy. That's really when McClane gets invested. Until she's been rescued, he talks nonstop about saving his daughter.

And it's no small thing that it's McClane's daughter. He has a son in the first two films, but the archetypal role of the son (the inheritor) is fulfilled by Matt. The boys need something to protect. Namely, Lucy.

It's clear in Matt's heroism-with-a-gun scene that's he also saving Lucy. And there are several scenes where the two youngsters--both captured by Evil Thomas, before Matt has become "that guy"--show each other their smarts.

Unsurprisingly, they have crushes on each other by the end of the movie.

Also unsurprisingly, McClane is having none of it. And it's that reaction that almost permanently sends the character into obsolescence.

Now that the Knight (McClane) has found a new Protector (Matt) for his chalice (Lucy), he doesn't have to be a knight anymore.

In the final moments, when McClane is threatening to beat Matt up if he puts the moves on his little girl and is groaning when she asks about this new boy, he is acting like a figure from ancient comedy.

He's the old fool--the blocking character who stands in the way of two lovers who will eventually get together. McClane used to be an action hero archetype. Now he's a comic one.

But it's okay. I mean, we've got Matt to be our new hero. And Lucy makes a point in the final scene of saying her last name is McClane.

Despite her sassmouth, she has stepped back into the patriarchy, too. Even if McClane totters around forever, his legacy lives on.

And maybe that's what all a cowboy wants... to feel secure in becoming a clown. It may mean begrudgingly handing the torch to someones who values book learning as much as instinctive intelligence, but what can you do?

However, do we really want the legacy McClane is leaving behind? Do we want a world in which the men kill and grunt as means of proving themselves?

Do we want a world in which the women talk about being independent, but really just want to be saved by a man whose name they can assume as their own?

I guess a lot of us do, because the story of "Live Free Or Die Hard" is as old as the hills. And just watch: I bet it'll get great word of mouth from people who say it's a great old-fashioned movie.

And that's true: It's old-fashioned in all the ways that keep power in the hands of the most predictable people. Mark Blankenship @ Pop Politics