Theory

The latest season of Daredevil is pretty good and has a great magic moment. I’m not sure if this season counts as the fourth season of the Daredevil series or if it is its own thing that just happens to be continuing the previous story. The scene I’ll be discussing takes place in the third episode. Matt’s team needs to bring a witness to the courthouse. The opposing team is trying to prevent this at all costs.

Die Hard (1988) is a classic action movie. Go watch it if you haven’t already seen it. Otherwise this post won’t make sense. There’s a surprisingly long section on wikipedia discussing the motifs in the movie. It touches on issues of masculinity, corporations, and xenophobia, all of which are too complex to discuss on this blog.

This post will focus on the scene where the protagonist John McClane approaches the main villain Hans Gruber who has taken Holly, McClane’s ex-wife as a hostage. There’s been plenty of action movies which end with the villain taking a person hostage such as True Lies (1994) and Air Force One (1997) but what makes Die Hard worthy of discussion on this blog is how this scene relates to principles of magic.

Real magic doesn’t exist. Therefore, every magical effect has a flaw. A common argument people make when they want to denigrate an effect is to focus soley on the flaw.

Discussing the method to a trick isn’t inherently bad. In fact, it is necessary to understand how practical the trick is and whether it fits in the environment you’re working in.

The issue is when people use the existence of the flaw as a thought terminating cliche. An example argument tends to go like “This trick uses a gimmicked device. The gimmick is obvious. Therefore this is a bad trick.”