In light of the recent death of serious
candidate for Hollywood's bitchiest queen, Joel Schumacher, I
embarked upon a sort of Schumachathon, encompassing a revisiting of
three of the man's best films – 2002's Colin Farrell Shitting
Himself in a Phone Booth, 1987's
The Coreys vs. Vampire Kiefer Sutherland, and
a film that was held in high renown when it came out, but has
seemingly fallen out of favor. This is 1993's Falling Down.
For
those of you who haven't seen it, which is honestly probably most
people under 35, it's a rather remarkable tale centering on Michael
Douglas getting fed up with traffic one day and proceeding to go
beast mode on the citizens of Los Angeles. Identified at first only
by his vanity plates, “D-FENS,” he takes out his anger at a mix
of petty injustices, failures to comply, and perceived unfairness,
merrily shooting and baseball-batting his way en route to his
daughter's birthday barbecue.
There
is a list of zeitgeist-defining films out there – The
Deer Hunter, Do the Right Thing, Taxi Driver, Jaws, The Apartment
– but you don't see Falling Down
on those lists. It should be.
Who is
D-Fens, a.k.a. Bill Foster? In his black plastic glasses and flat top
haircut, he's a relic of Eisenhower's America more than anything
else, a former cold warrior and missile engineer laid off from one of
the many California defense contractors for reasons that are kept
mysterious, apparently even to him. His ex-wife has a restraining
order on him, and what we see of their home movies informs us that he
was more interested in maintaining the image of a HAPPY AMERICAN
FAMILY than actually trying to make his wife or child feel happy,
loved, or valued. He's moved back in with his mom, whom he yells at
for minor transgressions. Starting to sound like a familiar type in
2020?
SPAHLER AHLERT SPAHLERS AHEAAAAD
(although they're very, very minimal, but if you're a purist, skip
down a couple paragraphs) and all that.
And
when we look at his cross-city rampage, it starts with the petty,
understandable frustration of a traffic jam (oh how I've wished I've
had a steamroller...) and slowly escalates through his litany of
complaints: overpriced sodas, a Korean grocer's broken English (with
some fucking hilarious bits from Michael Douglas – Simmeringly. “Do
you have any idea how much money my country has given your country?”
Pause. Sheepishly but still simmeringly. “I don't know, but it's
gotta be a lot, you can bet on that.”), a lack of honor among
thieves, the time that fast food restaurants stop serving breakfast (a bit of r/fuckyoukaren over here),
cosplayer Neo-Nazis, the inconvenience of public works projects, the
selfishness of golfers, the salaries of cosmetic surgeons, family
court judges being family court judges... you get the idea, all the
complaints of a white guy who never quite made
it.
In
other words, he still lives in his American dream-image, unable to
reconcile the fact that the America he is experiencing bears little
in common with the America he was promised, and he proceeds to behave
like a jilted lover. It doesn't take too much imagination to figure
out how his story ends.
What
makes so much of the film so uncomfortable is that in many of his
encounters, he's not wrong.
The system is rigged.
Hard work is rarely
rewarded. Life is
increasingly dog-eat-dog. And anger is a natural response. He'd never
be self-aware or intelligent enough to use a term like
“neoliberalism” and he'd probably call me a dirty commie and
airhole me if I said anything like that, but like so many
reactionaries, he has horrifying solutions to real diagnoses. If
Travis Bickles in Taxi Driver
was the natural (and therefore insane) response to the decay and
urban crisis of 1970s New York, then D-Fens is the natural (and
therefore insane) response to the 1990s Los Angeles of O.J. Simpson,
rooftop Koreans, and City of Quartz.
Furthermore,
the grimly sweaty SoCal summer visual vocabulary and ominous pacing,
intercutting Michael Douglas' gore-spattered quest with retiring cop
Robert Duvall's attempt to catch him (a cliché to be sure, but a
well-executed one) perfectly
match the misery and anxiety expressed by every single character.
And so
I have come to believe that this is a movie that defines American
society, particularly in its moment, in a way few other films –
Network, Sunset Boulevard,
and Apocalypse Now
being three other particularly perfect examples – have.
Now
there are critics and cultural commentators who make the case that
there's no call for such movies in 2020, in a world in which
stochastic terror attacks by aggrieved white men plague American
life, with a tacit carte blanche from the fat authoritarian fuck
inhabiting the Oval Office. A world in which people like living alien
skinsuit Stephen Miller and totem spirit of Olive Garden Mike Pompeo
have their hands on the levers of power. To these critics, a film
that doesn't make hard-line moral prescriptions about D-Fens (even if
it doesn't outright glorify him like Death Wish
or Dirty Harry), and
presents him in a light that is at times sympathetic, is
fundamentally problematic. These are the same people who underrated
Joker as a
fundamentally immoral piece of film (although, credit where credit is
due, they're not near as obnoxious as the people who overrated
Joker).
And
yet I would argue that these same woke critics by and large are
stupid people with stupid ideas. Ignore them. They operate on this
sort of faux-Brechtian notion of film studies in which movies must
illustrate GOOD BEHAVIOR and GOOD MORALS, and if they show anything
else, these must be understood as BAD BEHAVIOR and BAD MORALS, rather
than understanding the historical, economic, and cultural context in
which such attitudes and behaviors arise.
By
reducing everything to morality, they, despite their protestations,
actually arrive at a remarkably conservative stance, in which
everything boils down to individual attitudes rather than systemic
realities. And they themselves are therefore symptoms of an atomized
culture.
And
it's Schumacher's refusal to let these contexts go unnoticed, his
refusal to completely castigate any individual (other than the
squirrelly neo-Nazi, whom everyone pretty much agrees got what was
coming to him), his visual examination of a protagonist who, while
sympathetic, is at the end of the day a pathetic, angry mess that
makes Falling Down an
imperative film, not just a brilliantly made one. Now go watch it.
