Spring Break
Economic depression? Here's a vigilante cure
John Bryant
Issue date: 11/12/08 Section: Entertainment
Most movies want to envelope you in a fictional womb, a self-contained cosmos hurled out of the everyday. But few movies prod you out of this default cinematic stupor with the audacity to be insufferably relevant. Falling Down (1992) is such a movie, a movie birthed from and sifted through a particular culture moment. And with the current economic crisis, I found this movie echoing in my mind in a sustained vibrato whine. "Watch me," it squeals, "I am culturally relevant to today's events." So I indulged.
Falling Down is the story of a cosmically obsolete everyman, William Foster (in a terrifically unhinged performance by Michael Douglas), a cog in the machine of a futile bureaucracy, who is fired from his dead-end job. Smothered, alienated, appalled by the city, he snaps and is reborn a terminally pissed off vigilante. The movie takes us into his psychotic break as he sits in gridlocked traffic, with the city noise assaulting him from all angles and building into an insufferable cacophonic howl. He steps out of his car and begins his odyssey across a warped cityscape, a re-imagined Dante's Inferno. He is our hero, a man so generically white-collar his every mechanical movement seems mimicked from a file-cabinet. He traipses across a rotten urban landscape, the bastard child of an idealized Americana who is ready to strike back at all the crap. He will not take it today. He is tired of being dumped on. He is tired of being marginalized. Today he stands up for his rights as an American.
He first assaults a Korean store-clerk for jipping him on a soda (but still pays for the soda, mind you, he is just protecting his rights as a consumer). He then takes a baseball bat to the heads of two thugs trying to take his briefcase ("Can't a guy just sit down and collect his thoughts?" he says). Not satisfied, he shoots an AK-47 into the ceiling of a fast-food joint because they will not serve him breakfast ("Can't a guy just get a little breakfast?" he says). When a pissed-off yuppy screams at him for talking too long on the phone, William pulls out an uzi and squeezes a few rounds into the phone booth, pausing before offering the payoff line: "Phone's broken." When not fighting back against the system, he pauses to wax poetic about the downfall of society, how the American Dream rings hollow when a good, decent man cannot even make a living to support his family. His rage is the negative shadow of the American dream, a disillusionment channeled into middle class catharsis.
Falling Down is the story of a cosmically obsolete everyman, William Foster (in a terrifically unhinged performance by Michael Douglas), a cog in the machine of a futile bureaucracy, who is fired from his dead-end job. Smothered, alienated, appalled by the city, he snaps and is reborn a terminally pissed off vigilante. The movie takes us into his psychotic break as he sits in gridlocked traffic, with the city noise assaulting him from all angles and building into an insufferable cacophonic howl. He steps out of his car and begins his odyssey across a warped cityscape, a re-imagined Dante's Inferno. He is our hero, a man so generically white-collar his every mechanical movement seems mimicked from a file-cabinet. He traipses across a rotten urban landscape, the bastard child of an idealized Americana who is ready to strike back at all the crap. He will not take it today. He is tired of being dumped on. He is tired of being marginalized. Today he stands up for his rights as an American.
He first assaults a Korean store-clerk for jipping him on a soda (but still pays for the soda, mind you, he is just protecting his rights as a consumer). He then takes a baseball bat to the heads of two thugs trying to take his briefcase ("Can't a guy just sit down and collect his thoughts?" he says). Not satisfied, he shoots an AK-47 into the ceiling of a fast-food joint because they will not serve him breakfast ("Can't a guy just get a little breakfast?" he says). When a pissed-off yuppy screams at him for talking too long on the phone, William pulls out an uzi and squeezes a few rounds into the phone booth, pausing before offering the payoff line: "Phone's broken." When not fighting back against the system, he pauses to wax poetic about the downfall of society, how the American Dream rings hollow when a good, decent man cannot even make a living to support his family. His rage is the negative shadow of the American dream, a disillusionment channeled into middle class catharsis.
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