On Music and Writing

In December, I began a standard ritual. It's a ritual I've been doing for over a decade – going through Pitchfork's year-end top 100 songs and listening to them, in order, from number 100 to number 1.

I'm not going to comment on the music itself. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad. Much of it is in-between. Some of it might be good, but it is not for me, or for people of my general inclination, but there are still reasons to qualify it as by and large good. These are not the issues I care to write about. After all, is there anything more tedious than an aging hipster bitching about contemporary music? (Answer: yes, there is, and it's an aging hipster glomming onto contemporary music in a pathetic attempt at youthful enthusiasm).

What I wish to write about, rather, is the writing about the music.

Consider their commentary on their number 1 for 2020, Cardi B's “WAP” (and Ben Shapiro's song-that-must-not-be-named, a fact which will forever be hilarious):

“...a Cardi verse somehow tributes the unsung uvula amid an imposing tour de force of lecherous metaphors.”

Really?

To a certain degree, I have a sympathy for the writers. If they want to say that a song is a banger, there are only so many ways they can. There are only so many descriptors, so many adjectives, especially when it comes to pop music that has its appeal in groove and hook more than anything else (credit where credit's due, Cardi has had some very clever lyrics in her day, albeit in other songs). When a music critic tries to review a DaBaby song, say, there's only so much you can milk out of the repeated phrase “I'm a young CEO, suge” before getting to the point where there's more analysis in your review than in the song itself. There's a reason that the absolute most common album review I hear referenced in conversation is a Pitchfork review of a Jet album that was just a link to a monkey peeing in its own mouth.

Furthermore, lyrical complexity doesn't really make the critic's task any easier, because the lyrics are inextricably embedded within the music. It's hard to think of a dumber Nobel literature prize than that given to Bob Dylan, because no matter how much 16 year old boys in Middle America (spotlight casually falling at my feet) would like to claim that Dylan's lyrics are poetry, they would be absolutely godawful if they were actually written down as poems. Consider Desolation Row:

“Ophelia she's 'neath the window

For her I feel so afraid

On her twenty-second birthday

She is already an old maid

To her, death is quite romantic

She wears an iron vest

Her profession's her religion

Her sin is her lifelessness.”

See? Just awful, high-school creative writing class shit. But in Dylan's voice with his spare guitar, it's heaven.

And when you think about those songs that form the soundtrack to your life, it's rarely the song in and of itself that you think of – it's the context. It's where you were, both geographically and in your life, it's the nostalgia of old friendships, first loves, long drives.

Yet in another era – not too long ago – poetry was itself a form of music. It was meant to be remembered and recited, with a rhythm akin to that of what we have formalized as music, and in oral cultures, there is very little distinction between poetry and music. A time before those of us in the industrialized world didn't have to deal with the shattered remnants of a dead God. When the stained-glass windows of Chartres were the most radiant thing one would see, when the emperors were still descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu.

And while such things are but distant memories, their residue is all around us.

We still seek the transcendent, and it is so often that that transcendence cannot be reduced to words.

It hits you as see the afternoon light moving across the corners of your room.

Survivor's Guilt

I try not to watch the news from America anymore. The abject horror simply becomes too much, and I've come to realize that basically, the country that I still, at least in a formal sense, call home, has completely given up. I saw, like a lot of people, the chart where four of the deadliest days in American history were in the previous week – exceeded only by 9/11, the 1903 San Francisco Earthquake, the Battle of Antietam, and the (weirdly forgotten) 1900 Galveston Hurricane. Which apparently excluded Gettysburg and the Spanish Flu, but point taken all the same. Meanwhile, my Iowa hometown has frequented among the most pandemic-ridden places in America, and thereby on Earth.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting poolside with a cucumber Italian soda, reading A Dance to the Music of Time, wondering whether to go to the little French bistro with the white tablecloths, now that it's the season for game and white truffles, or whether to keep it simple and just go to the sushi place down the street. And darling, do we have enough Campari for a round of Negronis?

It might (will) sound melodramatic, but I imagine that this is not too different a feeling from that experienced by the great wave of European intellectuals who wound up in Los Angeles in the years leading up to World War II, ready to be recruited by Hollywood and by the newly wealthy universities of the West Coast. Their home countries were ripped to shreds and turned to headlines, even as they had martini-lunch meetings with MGM.

I'm in this weird blank spot on the planet that's been relatively unaffected, despite a recent outbreak in a distant industrial suburb. My job continues unabated. I actually lost weight during the lockdown. Sure, I can't travel, and that's something of a raison d'etre for me, but really, how much of a complaint is that? Does it have any validity? “What a DRAG, I can't go to Sri Lanka this year...” This is where I'd tell myself to fuck right off.

So I tell myself to feel gratitude. But the flipside of that is that with everything I'm grateful, for there is an inevitable sense of survivor's guilt.

I've often been accused of fatalism, owing to the fact that I generally believe that we as individual, atomized humans are tossed about by grand physical, biological, historical, and economic forces that we have more or less no control over, and that the true horror and despair occurs when we are forced to confront our own essential powerlessness.

Meaning that even though I myself have escaped unscathed, what does that mean, when I look around and see nothing but prospects getting progressively dimmer and dimmer? If I were to return to America anytime soon – as I'd been seriously considering before – what would there be to return to? A diseased, economically depressed landscape, riven with political strife, operating solely for the enrichment of a callous ruling class. And then, this is compounded with the horror and the sneaking suspicion that most places aren't that much better off right now.

I try to donate to decent causes, to perform random acts of kindness. All of which ultimately feels less like I'm expressing any kind of agency and more like I'm paying indulgences.

And then I go back and repeat the cycle. I fetch my towel and my sunglasses, and my copy of A Dance to the Music of Time. Iced Americano, this time, though.

I close my eyes, the patterns of the tropical sun dance around beneath my eyelids. The sun's fangs drip with blood.

Ozymandias at Arecibo

It's remarkable how much of my education I can attribute to my childhood/teen habit of watching late-night television. Before the Internet, this was where the mystery lay.

I was seven or eight years old, watching the X-Files – a habit that helped instill in me a lifelong love of the weirdness and darkness lurking around the American fringe. There was a lot of snide talk about “little green men,” a lot of cagey dialogue, gray sky.

Agent Mulder ran along the edge of what was identified as the Arecibo Radio Observatory – white guy-wires criss-crossing the elegant curve of a massive, concave satellite dish, precise lines contrasted against the verdant Puerto Rican jungle.

 

Nothing seemed more indicative of the modernist idea of the future. It was the same impulse I'd registered in old atlases from the 1950s and 1960s, with their breathless prologues proclaiming exploration as the... dramatic pause... destiny of man, at a time when such grand notions could be contemplated. I'd registered this impulse in diagrams of orbital paths, the ocean depths, cloud patterns. Nothing seemed to be a purer representation of the human will to enter communion with the stars.

On December 2^nd, as I scrolled through the headlines of the day – continued political fracas and pandemic spread across America (expected, miserable), the transitioning of a pint-sized Canadian actor (and pausing to wonder, over my coffee, if any nerdy dudes were no longer able to masturbate to Kitty Pryde) – there it was.

My childhood image of scientific progress lay there shattered,the jungle lurking beneath the cracked concrete.

 

In 1960, construction began on the Arecibo Radio Telescope, designed to study the ionosphere as part of a DARPA project to allow for more effective scanning of ballistic missiles. As with so much American science of the mid-20^th Century, the spirit of discovery was facilitated by Cold War interests. And yet it became known not for any defense against the ICBMs that never came, but for its pivotal role in astronomical observation. This was where solid evidence of the neutron star was found, where the binary pulsar was first observed, and where, in 1974, Carl Sagan and others transmitted a radio frequency towards the Hercules Global Cluster in the impossible hope that some alien species would find it, decode it, and nod towards us as an intelligent species.

That kind of optimism seems, in 2020, to be so damn naive. And it's not just the fact that it's been a shit year (not helped by Facebook Boomer “2020 duhr huhr huhr” memes). It's the fact that this was a once-mighty site of scientific endeavor, slowly defunded as the American public sector was strangled to death by increasingly fiscally hawkish governments over the '90s and '00s, until it was a mere shell of its former self. In 2016, Arecibo lost its position as the world's largest single-aperture telescope to the new Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou Province, China, and in 2017, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, leaving millions of Puerto Ricans without power and water for months, even years, fully revealing the colonial nature of the island's relationship to the mainland. Cracks had begun to appear, and by the time Arecibo collapsed, plans were already underway for decommissioning.

It would be a hack metaphor if it was in a movie, wouldn't it be? The proud American institution crippled by the neoliberalizing state, before final humiliation by Chinese competition, a hurricane in all likelihood exacerbated by climate change, before finally giving up the ghost. Insert undertones of militarism and colonialism that existed since the beginning.

But if there's one thing I've learned over the last year, it's that things that would be hack metaphors in sci-fi movies are depressingly close to the reality we have, the reality of deepfake videos, Silicon Valley choked in orange haze, major news leaks coming through Tiktok, the Internet being dominated by clips of braying idiots demanding their right to not exercise pandemic protections at Yankee Candle, and Belle fucking Delphine.

Perhaps that's why I mourned Arecibo more than expected.

And perhaps that's why Sagan's hopeful message of 1974 seems more like a retelling of a certain Shelley poem:

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Pyrrhic Victory

“If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”

- Pyrrhus of Epirus after the Battle of Asculum, as reported in Plutarch's Lives

I have learned, over the past few years, to brace myself for the dumbest possible outcome in the world of politics. This isn't, I should stress, the worst possible outcome. It is the dumbest. If the worst possible outcome is goose-stepping fascists and a highly motivated cabal of elite operators relentlessly assassinating dissidents, the dumbest possible outcome is a neoliberal government in which austerity is accompanied by vague hand-waving towards social justice issues and performative identity politics, and some fat piggly-eyed pasty fuck with delusions of military grandeur in an improvised flak jacket spraying Sunday shoppers with automatic gunfire in an act of stochastic rage at a suburban CVS.

And this is what my crystal ball has been telling me for months – a wave of blue mail-in votes, followed by a wave of red votes on election night itself, followed by a narrow, tooth-and-nail Democratic victory. Presumably to be followed by weeks of protracted court battles, bursts of occasional right-wing violence, and four years of utter fecklessness (not to mention a probable repeat of the Republican backlashes of 1994 and 2010).

A summation from someone more educated than I:

“Right now, what we are facing is a catastrophe. A Republican Senate, a narrow Democratic house majority, and a Democrat president who did not win by a big margin, who will be reviled for various reasons from day one by Trump supporters and adherents to the opposite side, who has conservative instincts, who will now have both a scapegoat in Mitch McConnell for his refusal to do anything that might move the country to the left, anything that might improve the lot of the most vulnerable in this society, should he even have that inclination. Not only provide a scapegoat, but he will also have the opportunity to enforce what could be a brutal austerity regime in the midst of a continuing pandemic in the midst of an economic crisis. I mean, before this election, I had pretty much no hope for the Democratic Party, and after it, it's pretty much the same deal.” 

- Virgil Texas in conversation with Briahna Joy Gray, Bad Faith podcast

We live in a time when more Americans than ever before believe in, at least to some degree, what I believe in: universal healthcare, some form of UBI, a higher minimum wage, an end to military misadventures, the overhaul of the criminal justice system, a Green New Deal, and support for unions and worker co-ops to help resolve the contradiction between labor and capital. Let us be reminded, that no matter what the mealy-mouthed editorial boards of the New York Times and Atlantic tell you, it was pro-Medicare for All Democrats who managed to carry swing House districts, and that while Florida went for Trump, Florida also went for a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage.

And yet the gap between political will and political representation has rarely been starker. The ostensible party of the left is led by a senile puppet for the donor class and a fucking cop, advised by all manner of Wall Street cronies and liberal war hawks – people who would have been called “Rockefeller Republicans” in another era (and even Nelson Rockefeller was in many respects more liberal than these fucks). While the world burns. Literally.

OK, I voted for Biden, regrettably. It seemed like it wouldn't hurt, and I didn't see how a Biden presidency could be worse than a Trump presidency, even if I doubted it would be much better. A bit like the French communists in the Chirac-Le Pen election of 2001, who walked into the polls with clothespins on their noses.

I'm sure plenty of nice center-lefties would tell me – and I hear this dull wording again and again – that Biden had “the most progressive platform of all time.” Well, were his policies anywhere near memorable enough to excite voters? Or were they the sort of means-tested nonsense pushed by DC wonks? Were there even any attempts to convince anyone of these policies, or was the sole form of messaging “not Trump”? Do you even trust this putative platform? Or should I believe that Biden's and Harris' records speak for themselves?

And so we're left, as I said at the beginning, a serious case of the dum-dums. The notion that those of us on the left can in any way “push” Biden leftwards or have any leverage to do so (versus a well-organized apparatus to maintain the Democratic Party in its post-Clinton form as a neoliberal entity, and one willing to capitulate to Republican excess instead of actually building working-class politics) is absurd.

I'm sure I'll get people saying that this sort of doomer mindset is a product of my own privilege. To which I respond that standpoint epistemology is pearl-clutching masquerading as empathy, and is indicative of a gray-faced Protestant ethos suffused with late-capitalist narcissism.

So what is to be done? I really don't know. Fuck.

Death in the Age of Twitter

When I first heard about the not-untimely but decidedly time-unfortunate death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I did the worst possible thing – I went to social media. This is akin to checking WebMD when you experience an innocuous discomfort of one kind or another, and come out thinking you have lymphoma.

A depressingly large number of Twitter liberals' automatic response was (natch) to blame the left. The name “Jill Stein” was trotted out yet again as a reason for why the world sucks (much like Nader back during the Bush years), because instead of actually, you know, interrogating why people don't trust a party that has walked back every attempt at economic justice it's made by cozying up to Wall Street. Because if there's one thing you need in an election year, apparently it's by wagging fingers and alienating potential allies. If Trump is reelected, I'm fully expecting the Blame Bernie Brigade to come back in full force, and I'm expecting to be nagged for my lack of party loyalty.

And of course there were weird, angry takes (second stage of grief and all that). One that struck me as particularly bizarre was a seemingly widespread finger-wag against people using the phrase “rest in power” for white people. If you believe this, you have a stupid opinion. I hold you in a certain measure of contempt for having that opinion. Your entertaining this opinion and other associated flavors of histrionics and umbrage is a symptom of a broader problem with the American left. You might still be a lovely dinner guest though.

But ultimately, the depressing fact is that the Supreme Court was already lost for a generation ever since Brett Kavanaugh slithered his way into the chamber.

I also had to ask myself what Justice Ginsburg really did for the left, and I suspect many of her most ardent supporters would be hard-pressed to name actual policies she pushed through during her tenure (there were some of note, but they were relatively few). Rather, people are more familiar with her jeremiad dissents, which while eloquently phrased statements of purpose, are at the end of the day the rallying cry of the defeated.

And this is perhaps mirrored by the fact that, given the recalcitrant American right, the center left's response has been to less eloquently screech “THAT'S NOT FAIR!” at every repugnant thing McConnell and Co. do.

At the end of the day this is another reduction of politics to bien-pensant aesthetics. Lacking real victories, nice American liberals have simply been content over the past 20 years to rest on their own smugness. I remember the feeling of paralytic horror at watching The Daily Show in my teens, during the Iraq War, and the general attitude of “Well, look at THOSE dumbasses” towards the local yokels baying for Arab blood while ignoring the fact that the New York Times editorial staff and their colleagues (Frum, Friedman, and the rest) attempted to provide intellectual scaffolding for imperialist idiocy. At my most cynical moments, it's an attitude that seems to represent an almost Weimar-level phobia of and disgust towards mass politics, with results that invariably bite liberalism in its ass.

Putting one's faith in an unelected court is cheering on your champions rather than taking part in the process of mass politics (not that I'm a model, I just do my best to fund where I can when I can... oh, and join the DSA, folks). Indeed, Ginsburg herself was critical of the process of Roe v. Wade, pointing out that by settling the matter of abortion in the courts during a time of liberalizing abortion laws rather than in the democratic sphere, a backlash was invited without sufficient public consensus to act as a counterbalance. Unsurprisingly, Jacobin published a fair amount of good analysis on this subject.

But to be a leftist is, unfortunately, by and large, setting yourself up for disappointments. Consistently. As someone who believes that working towards a socialist society is the necessary fulfillment of the mission of the Enlightenment, I have to accept that I will be unhappy more often than I am happy with the world at large, and it's because I know how much better it could be.

Political engagement is, to a certain degree, an utterly quixotic mission that will drive you fucking insane. Even those conservatives who have scored so many global victories over the past several years can't escape. Their worldview is fraught with a wild loathing of the world as it has become, as it has transformed into something that deviates from their myopic perspectives. At the ground level, American conservatives seem in particular seem far more occupied with stomping their feet at the perceived transgressions of liberals and socialists (and being completely unable to differentiate the two) than actually forming anything like a coherent perspective.

A sheriff, spitting through his mustache: “You know if you'd told me 20 years ago I'd see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair, bones in their noses, I just flat out wouldn't have believed you.”

Tommy Lee Jones: “Signs and wonders.”

And so my conclusion is that an old lady who worked hard and did some good things has died. She will doubtless be replaced by some cross-clutching fuckwad who in any decent society would be stripped of their judicial power and forced to walk the streets wearing a barrel with shoulder straps holding up a sign saying “Will adjudicate for food.” But I can't perceive it as the apocalyptic event that so many liberals perceive it to be.

At this particularly stupid time in history, that baseline annoyance is to a certain degree something I expect. I had thought Trump and Hillary were the two worst presidential candidates of my lifetime. Nope, Trump and Biden. It can always get worse. I know that I will have a materially worse life than my parents. That sucks. But as it is something I have no control over, I accept it.

My only irrational hope left is that things will get better before the seas rise... too much... and that I can leave the world with it pointed in a different direction. Somewhat.

T.S. Eliot on the Subway

Sunset. The rainy season, Bangkok, walking through the crowds of masked commuters. A rope is lifted, and a certain number are let through the electronic gates and onto the subway platform. As we board, the announcement is polite and almost cooing in Thai, stilted in English “Please refrain from talking.”

It's a line that has haunted me since I first read it, and I had to look it up again.

    “Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

     And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

    And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

    Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.”

I was around 12 or 13 when I first read that, an early winter twilight falling over the prairie states, around the time I truly internalized how tawdry and depressing the world around me could be. T.S. Eliot wrote those lines from East Coker in 1939, fully aware of the much greater darkness the world was settling into once again.

I didn't know that then. I knew it from context. Paul Theroux was quoting it in a bit from The Old Patagonian Express, using it to describe the New York subway of the pre-Giuliani days – and even that, I only knew from transmitted experience, from reruns of The Equalizer and from cable viewings of the Death Wish movies, that showed New York as an ongoing turf war between gangs which somehow admitted both black-nationalist kids in leather jackets and sunglasses and white punks with pink mohawks.

I didn't know anything about T.S. Eliot's life, and nothing of his poetry other than bits of The Hollow Men and The Waste Land that I'd found in my parents' books. I didn't know that he'd written East Coker to expound upon his belief that science and material progress and art had failed to make people happier in any fundamental way. He was the scion of industrial wealth, his family owning a Saint Louis firm with the gloriously Victorian-positivist name of the “Hydraulic-Press Brick Company,” affiliated with the sunny, inclusive, progress-affirming Unitarian Church. And none of that really seemed to matter after 1,000,000 men got vaporized at the Somme. I didn't know about his stuttering attempts to turn himself into an English country gentleman, I didn't know about his bomb-dropping effect on literature in the English language, his fully-formed modernism signaling the rise of a new literary idiom.

I did know, though, that it resonated. Hard.

And it's a line that I think about in my darker moments, when the things that sustain me – whether that's art, travel, experience, hedonistic abandon – fail to suffice. When I am forced to confront my own atomization.

And I reflect on this line in particular because it seems so absolutely of the moment – the faces on the train, the growing terror of nothing to think about, the fear of not being entertained. All the new Netflix series look like garbage. You're scrolling through your phone when you're taking a shit.

It's an easy out to look back to a time -- around Eliot's own time -- when people often presume things were simpler, less alienated. But Eliot was looking back much further, to a time before the Industrial Revolution, when all reasoning was analogy, every moment was imbued with symbolism, and the notion of physical laws separate from the watchful eye of God verged on the inconceivable. To the time of the Medieval passion play and the charivari and the tales of the fisher king, when the sun rose and set through divine will.

It was a path already trodden by people like Henry Adams and D.H. Lawrence. Like H.P. Lovecraft, like Aldous Huxley, like Ezra Pound he saw the malaise of the present, mass destruction and new forms of totalitarianism, but lacked the confidence to move forward into the future, and instead fetishized the mythic past.

Lovecraft died, forgotten, a miserable incel avant la lettre a little before East Coker was published. Huxley quickly became a weird sort of proto-hippie, writing dull panegyrics to Hinduism and LSD. Pound disappeared down the rabbit hole of Mussolini worship and mental illness.

I read the full text of East Coker several years later as a college student, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Eliot's portent-laden avant-garde babblings suited the worldview.

But rereading the thing, I don't know how I missed the point. Eliot, having spent the interwar years saying fuck it all, seeing the rising tide of fascism, finally realized the world he lived in was worth fighting for, and he closes the text with uncharacteristic hope – I got the uncertainty of it, the dissociation, the clutching at straws. But then I read the last line as the train left the Sirikit Center station.

    “We must be still and still moving

    Into another intensity

    For a further union, a deep communion

    Through the dark cold and the empty desolation

    The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

    Of the petrel and the porpoise. The end is my beginning.”

A flower in a bomb crater, as it were.

I emerge from the subway at Asok, the electronic billboards leering, rain spitting. I shut my eyes, and I can almost hear the crash of waves all around me.

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.