Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Falling Down in Contemporary America

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.