What’s Wrong With the Street, Or, Why I Can’t Quit Falling Down
This article is the second in a series of four on the subject of free speech, privilege and reactionary politics as reflected in films with a very personal appeal for me.
I was a sophomore in high school in 1999 when the Columbine Shootings happened. Classes were different that morning. Lessons were semi-suspended. I remember calm and relatively mannered discussions taking place in classes about what happened. I remember being vocal in those classes saying that I understood what triggered the primal rage of the shooters.
They were picked on and nothing was done about it. Their outburst of violence was the result of persecution and bullying; being instructed in how to hate yourself for being smart, curious, non-conformist and different (all the best values), a process that stricture of the American school system affirmed in their own way (though I couldn’t articulate this so well at the time). What do people think is going to happen when persecuted individuals snap and strike back against the system?
For this, I was brought to the principal's office and had to agree to counseling where I was made to believe something was wrong with me for feeling for the loner kids who were driven crazy by constant harassment, humiliation and even assault at the hands of their peers. High school students can treat each other with obscene cruelty, a point which at that time was overlooked in discussions about the development of young adults. The impression the school’s administrators had was that I was taking the side of the killers of Littleton, Colorado - despite the fact that I also felt awful for the victims and hated what the killers did. This was before mass shootings would be as hideously commonplace as they are now and it was a pretty big deal to them that a student had apparently decided to express “sympathy” for the outcast assailants.
I hated the jocks, the proms and the unthinking school spirit. I saw people being picked on in my school and I hated the stupid people doing it and for the most part getting away with it. I remember a recital we all had to attend where the school’s ensemble were performing the opening dance from West Side Story. During the dance, one student in the ensemble - Larry - who was gay and openly displayed all the flamboyant behavioral and vocal characteristics associated with gay males, was picked up by a group and was supposed to be thrown into the arms of another group. But the group that was supposed to catch him purposely and collectively all walked away and no one was there to break his fall. It was an act of bullying that my schoolmates felt empowered to perform for everyone and it made me physically ill.
So later, I said in that discussion that I could see how people would snap considering the kind of humiliations they were made to suffer at the hands of their fellow students and a school system that was largely tone-deaf about the nature of it. And I was the one that they decided needed to be talked to. This was how my Jesuit high school, so clueless about the interior lives of its student body, chose to figure out for themselves what happened in Colorado.
So when I finally saw Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993), made six years before the Columbine shootings, I responded to it in a very deep way. I dreamed of walking into every corner of society where there was hypocrisy, bullshit and affronts to common sense and decency and telling them off. Though I could imagine violence in an abstract sense, I had no desire to own a gun and use it to threaten people. To this day, I’ve never been in a fight or done a physically violent thing to another person in my life. So Falling Down was kind of a fantasy I held onto for many, many years. I wanted to tell off everyone that annoyed me the way Michael Douglas, in a ferocious and weary performance as Bill Forster or “D-FENS'' did.
a lamentably prescient image in American media, recurring too often in real life
When I got older and my thinking evolved, I started seeing social problems for the complex beasts that they are, informed by numerous different viewpoints, agendas and motivations that make them complex. The seriousness of the maladies vary but each person’s pain is real to them. But in another way, I began to see that the social anger of D-FENS had its own hypocrisy. Scene after scene, he permits nothing to penetrate his wall of condescension and it’s in this respect that the movie avoids exploring the basis for any of his male middle-class dissatisfactions.
His series of violent outbursts and diatribes are the barest definition of Hollywood Wish Fulfillment, realized here in the most petty and fleeting way. It gets repetitive and the burnout becomes very apparent in the finale, when the unfulfilled promise of the movie’s overarching conceit stares the viewer in the face. Falling Down’s dramatization of American Failure runs on a lean mixture. The characters are never permitted to transcend their functions in this pedantic lesson about the social nightmare as it pertains to a very specific and already overexposed personification of quotidian outrage. That is to say, the Douglas character should be the least likely type of individual to elicit sympathy from a society already plagued by people with actual, serious problems.
Also....man oh man, do I love this movie. I love Falling Down.
Why do I give it a pass? I can’t bring myself to reconcile the weakness of its numerous structural and generic reflexes with the deep satisfaction and pleasure it brings me to watch it. And then, I’m plagued by a whole new set of problems: what do we do with dishonest or ethically specious artworks or entertainments that we love? What if my brain and my heart are on opposing sides of a movie? How do I tell who’s right? Does it matter? Can we do what so many other moviegoers seem to do when pressed to think deeply about cinema and use the escape hatch of “it’s only a movie,” to avoid having to face this paradox?
One way to approach this may be to look at the movie as a whole, something I think its cult following fails to do. It’s about two weary men, not one, and the other one barely gets talked about in serious discussions of the movie. D-FENS’s actions make more sense when seen alongside the context of the cop played by Robert Duvall. Detective Prendergast could be called D-FENS’s mirror image, an unspectacular man with a wasted life and career. He has a lot more to be depressed about than his civilian counterpart, but he’s hung in there.
His emotionally unstable wife (Tuesday Weld) appears to suffer from delusions, most likely stemming from the sudden death of their infant child, who one morning just never woke up. Duvall’s genius is present here in subtly suggesting feelings of guilt about that shattering moment in their lives in the way that he kowtows to her demands to call her by her cutesy private nickname and respond to her as if he were an obedient child.
This is the cleverness of the script by Ebbe Roe Smith, which is always wrong-footing us. In keeping himself together and taking care of the overbearing, impossible woman he shares a home with, all the while carving out a career as an apparently honest and decent cop, we should marvel at Prendergast’s saintly patience. Instead, we’re made to see the retiring policeman as less than a man for the way he has to respond to his needy wife; pathetic and pussy-whipped. We’re all but rooting for him in the moment when he puts her in her place, dominating her over the phone like a 1950’s stereotype.
Of course, in the end he turns out to be the better and more principled of the two men, despite his sad little life, which includes a crush on his pretty, younger partner (Rachel Ticotin) who understands him - feelings that will go nowhere. This in conjunction with his wretched boss, the goon police chief who in resenting him for his honorable virtues, took him off the street and put him behind a desk. The chief actually calls Prendergast a pussy, and has no interest in the vigilante case involving a guy who causes a ruckus and then pays for stuff.
Watching this again, I saw a great deal of empathy in the detective’s desire not to upset his wife. To keep the peace in his home as he did on the streets. She lost it when their daughter passed in a way that makes no cosmic sense and he’s quietly been holding their household and his professional sanity together ever since. D-FENS is walking around pointing guns at fast food clerks for stopping breakfast service and here’s this cop doing a lot more to keep it together in far more dire circumstances. Maybe the tragedies he’s had to endure have enabled him to see the big picture, giving him a proper perspective on what’s really worth worrying about in life. The sobering effect of tragedy.
He’s been through all this before. As a cop, he’s seen it day in, day out. His reaction to D-FENS’ justification for his actions makes this crystal clear. “They lied to you? Is that what this is about?... They lie to everybody! They lie to the fish!” He’s known for a long time what D-FENS is only just figuring out, and D-FENS lacks the emotional equipment to handle it. Only in the end does D-FENS realize the severity of his actions. He looks out on the water in a begrudging acceptance of his role in the social catastrophe, before turning the detective into the killer of an unarmed man.
Reviews of this movie either ignore or underplay the importance of the Duvall character, as does the cult fanbase for Falling Down. To a degree, I understand why: everyone’s eyes are on the main attraction. But maybe what it says reveals something about what grabs our attention in that we’re less moved by the man who’s been stepped on his whole life with greater cause to lose all hope but who still refused to sink into despair than the shirtsleeves guy who walks around enacting shortsighted fantasies about correcting the bullshit-addled world we’re living in. Why are there D-FENS T-shirts and other D-FENS fanart but nothing for Duvall? Again, I admit my culpability. Hell, I’d get the D-FENS shirt and not the Duvall one. He had better one-liners. I can imagine them placed under the likeness: “Clear a path, motherfucker!”
fanart for Falling Down, with the Duvall character absent
D-FENS is part of a long line of pop culture misfits who’ve gradually become folk heroes. Their likenesses wind up on T-shirts, bumper stickers and patches of clothing. They endure as meme fodder. Fans discuss their psychology obsessively. They’re held up as self-made models of civil disobedience, possessing a kind of DIY genius in gaming a corrupt system. Turning the tables on our oppressors by beating them at their own game. They’re typically white males, but in a bizarre way, they become beloved across economic, racial and ethnic divides.
Tony Soprano. Walter White. Al Swearengen, The Joker. They possess a feral intelligence. They act out our fantasies about circumventing the false and fruitless main path to the American Dream and carving it out on their own - The American Way. They affirm our cynical suspicions that it’s possible to be a leader in a world where nice guys finish last. One needs to be a not-so-nice-guy to get the job done, because goodness only leads to suffering, and crime actually pays.
I’m starting my own gallery of American anti-hero fanart.
Maybe these beloved American characters still manage to resonate with a diverse cross section of audiences because of a shared appreciation for how they subvert the relatively minor daily obstacles they come up against. In a compromised democracy, antisocial fantasies actually do bind people together, even though the ability of these antiheroes to get away with what they do for so long is probably due in some degree to the privileges afforded their race and gender.
But people get it. There’s such a profound lack of logic prevalent everywhere in our daily lives that so many of us just seem to accept, and the amount of self-interest and shiftlessness that is disinterestedly slowing the whole world down inspires and excuses a pretty powerful collective anger. It’s a very American impulse to just want to shoot out a pay phone and ruin some yuppie’s day. Hell, just tearing up and throwing away junk mail is pleasurable.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that there’s always another layer to the situations in which D-FENS finds himself. He retaliates against the Korean convenience store owner’s high prices by smashing his goods with a baseball bat. D-FENS seems racist: “What the hell’s a ‘fi?’ They don’t got V’s in China?” “I’m Korean!” the owner shouts back. But when the owner is recounting the incident to Prendergast later at the precinct, his version of the event demonstrates that he wasn’t listening to the point D-FENS was making.
No one stops to question what made the prices so shockingly low to begin with. Not one product in any given convenience store contains a naturally occurring ingredient.
Sure, it’s not a cause for violence. A store owner could charge whatever he wants for his goods and D-FENS, who insisted he just wanted to pay for a soda, could have simply taken his business elsewhere. But the owner’s life was never in danger as he would later tell Prendergast, framing the story in a way that plays up his victimhood. Then at the precinct, the owner personally gets into it with a Japanese detective who’s also questioning him and the script is reminding us that racial prejudice cuts across all ethnic and national boundaries (what Japanese and Korean people say about each other is as dehumanizing as you’ll find anywhere in the US). Nothing is more common and American, Smith’s script tells us, than hating and judging an entire group of people.
We’ve all been ripped off at a store. Buying a reasonably priced Coke isn’t going to solve our problems. Note the way D-FENS rubs the Coke can on his face in anticipation of the refreshment and satisfaction it’s going to give him. But anyone who’s ever had a Coke on a hot day knows that it never satisfies your thirst because it’s too sweet. You wind up thirstier than you were before. So you must keep consuming, tumbling down the rabbit-hole of bottomless desire that material goods claim to be able to satiate but never do. So too can D-FENS never go back to the way he was after the incident, deciding to continue his encounters in this vein. He consumes the people he perceives as obstacles with violence as casually as people consume Coke and cheeseburgers.
Remember when you paid 50 cents for a Coke?
The important element serving as the trigger in the Whammyburger scene is not that the restaurant stopped serving breakfast, but that the burger D-FENS does get is a dictionary definition of false advertising. Of course, fast food outlets serve cheap, low-quality, pre-prepared food loaded with artificial ingredients - something even people who enjoy eating at them would know. You have to pay up for quality. It’s here we’re learning something about D-FENS and his ineptitude. His blinkered expectations, looking for integrity and authenticity in places where it’s not to be found. It’s as if he’s never been on the streets before. Are we to assume he just drove to and from work each day and stayed at home? Of course, we know he’s an unreal movie character, meant to embody an idea about befuddled middle-class morality. But where has he been?
I love the moment in that scene when he wonders out loud why he’s on a first name basis with the Whammyburger staff as if they were friends. I've always hated fake pleasantries and small talk myself. I’m the type of person that walks into a room and just starts talking. I typically don’t even say hello. But then D-FENS goes back on this assertion as well. His pathetic attempts to smooth over the situation by chatting and joking with the diners, who are terrified and silent for an obvious reason, demonstrates his complete lack of awareness of the experience of others, as he’s brandishing a semi-automatic firearm that he (a defense worker) clearly does not know how to use.
When Predergast visits D-FENS’ sparsely furnished home and talks to his hand-wringing mother, we finally get a sense of the real problem and it’s here that I think I began to appreciate what director Schumacher was doing. We get the sense of a sheltered existence, of a mother who raised a child to believe if he worked hard enough and obeyed the law his whole life, he'd have it all. The mother still believes her son's job as a defenseman is something vital to the safety of the nation. She tells the detective he’s keeping everyone “safe from the Communists.” Still parroting the Reagan Administration’s Cold War paranoia, she hasn’t even been told by her son that he was fired a month ago. Where was he going at the start of the film?
And had they not been following the news? By 1993, it was clear that the Clinton Administration had begun a diplomatic relationship with Boris Yeltsin that resulted in Yeltsin’s election and re-election as President of Russia. They had effectively tampered with Russia’s election results to install a weak leader whose disastrous tenure weakened the country and strengthened the United States, something Clinton’s administration made no effort to hide. By the middle of Clinton’s first term, Russian Communism was no longer “a threat to our way of life,” whatever that meant.
So the bubble the Forster family lived in tells us a lot about how D-FENS’s rampage misses the big picture. He never wises up to the fact that Capitalism is at the root of nearly every obstacle he encounters on his allegorical exodus through Los Angeles. This is why the targets of his rage are oversimplified symptoms of much larger issues. Why does the picture of the burger on the menu look different than the burger you’re given? Because the photo is to get you to buy it and low quality of the food allowed for a higher profit margin for Whammyburger, which is under no obligation to do anything other than turn a profit for itself. Capitalism.
D-FENS is flummoxed when he finds out a mansion belongs to a plastic surgeon. His idea must be that income is directly proportional to the essentiality of the work. It would be great if we lived in that kind of world, where care workers and teachers and farmers made more than lawyers, professional athletes and CEOs. But we don’t. A plastic surgeon makes more because that’s what a shallow society deems a greater value. People complain about how much athletes make while literally paying draconian prices for a ball game and yet they’re against wage increases for low income workers including those who care for the disabled or the elderly. Why ignore the nobility of one while rewarding the frivolity of the other? Capitalism.
As D-FENS walks across Los Angeles to the home of his estranged family in Venice Beach for his daughter’s birthday, he slowly metamorphosizes into an urban terrorist, steadily upgrading his artillery. His assault with a rocket launcher at the construction site (aided by a black kid whom D-FENS in a nice touch appears to shield from the blast) will surely only prolong the closing of the street that’s blocking his path. He gets the road worker to admit (at gunpoint, making it automatically suspect) that the road work is a justification of the construction company's inflated budget, which it needs to continue to secure to maintain its high status. Spending for spending’s sake. Capitalism.
The gang member on the right bears a striking physical resemblance to one of Detective Prendergast’s subordinate police detectives, which if it was intended, is another great Schumacher-ian idea
And doesn’t D-FENS know that the reason those Latin gang members protect their stupid patch of turf may be due in part to the lack of options for education and regular employment, along with systematic persecution by law enforcement and a court system that sees their entire community as trash, criminals and terrorists? I too hate gang violence and gang members and they’re of course, responsible for their actions. But they are symptoms of larger institutional failure, people who cannot meet the demands the prevailing ideology is making of them.
Their violence as a kind of acting out is the sign of a powerlessness they perhaps can’t put into words - a certain form of symbolic deadlock. So those power systems need their scapegoats in order to function, a role which those same non-white, low-income urban inhabitants fill for them nicely. Fear of the violence of these hostile groups keeps the middle classes in line. By painting these groups as inherently bad, demonizing their otherness, Power has a distraction in place that can help it hang on to its power. Capitalism.
It’s interesting to note that the majority of D-FENS grievances actually revolve around the degradation of public space. The golf course where he causes some evil old millionaire to have a heart attack is just a larger, more arrogant version of the hill protected by the Latin gang. There’s the business with the construction site. A consummate Devil's Advocate with a filmography inclined towards ugly social issues, Schumacher’s deftly realized storytelling knows how to make those oppressive spaces speak to us. He and his cinematographer, Andrezj Bartkowiak, linger on shots of a depleted landscape basking in sunbaked tan hues that add an overcooked surface feel to the cracked pavement and cluttered environments. Dirty, hot and crowded. Graffiti everywhere. A neglect of structures and citizens alike. A tragic story everywhere you look.
Sure, we can call out D-FENS for the childishness of some of his outbursts, pointing weapons at people in order to get his way. We can call him naive and ignorant for not having read the Marxist literature that I’ve read or we can see him to some extent as a victim of the same system. Caught in the same habit of being made to exist in a state of subdued mental illness just to function in an increasingly ruthless, dog-eat-dog society. In his book, The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James presents a convincing correlation he’d charted between rising rates of mental distress and the increasingly neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like the US, Britain and Australia. The hero is lost in the dark. Only in the end with a gun pointed at him does Bill Forster realize he’s been lied to his whole life. His American Dream never came true because he was asleep.
In Fellini’s 8 1⁄2 (1963), a man dreamed of floating out of his car while stuck in traffic in a tunnel. In a 90’s American movie, the guy just gets out and wreaks havoc.
It’s true that his frustration with these small, inconsequential targets are also facets of his relative degree of privilege. Schumacher and Smith take a big risk in asking the audience to identify with this character but again, a good-sized element of the public is on the side of the betrayed prophet because he’s articulating rage at a very slippery form of social failure; albeit at that system’s victims, not its culprits. This is what makes him a tragic figure.
I’ve mentioned this in the last piece but I think it’s one of the fundamental truths of our time: at some point in our lifetimes, Power became invisible. It just disappeared. We don’t know where it is, but it’s there - still eating away at mass democracy (with our cooperation). Law enforcement and politicians are its servants, not its masterminds. In a peer-to-peer economy, we can never be face to face with our oppressors. So we lash out at the consequences of their hegemony: poverty, crime, consumerism, the owning class. D-FENS is ready to confront it, but he doesn’t know what he’s looking for, so he strikes back at its externalized symptoms. Art used to tell us about the realities of power (arguably its prime function) and now it doesn’t. Its current prime concern is self-expression.
That’s why it feels like a cop out that Smith’s script has to slowly tell us in the most simplistic way that the danger of D-FENS to the people around him didn’t start on this one searing hot day. We learn he’s been restrained from seeing his family by a court order for his violent temper. His wife, Beth (Barbara Hershey) fears for her safety. The most chilling moment in the film is a phone call where D-FENS says, “Beth, did you know that in some South American countries it's still legal to kill your wife if she insults you?” In a way, this development is responsible of Smith’s script in reminding us not to fall in love with this sociopath, unlike with say, Silence of the Lambs.
But sadly, Smith has to turn on his protagonist by simply having him all of a sudden start to threaten his wife. He begins talking to her like one of the Latin gang members who threatened him before (for whom insult is added to injury in showing their idiotic and tragic inability to use use their guns with acuity - taking out innocent members of their own community in the process). The film throws a troubled backstory at us that tells us to turn around on the guy and his feelings of impotence and obsolescence that likely many of us share.
Name one unthinkably shitty type of hate-mongering movie psychopath that hasn’t aged well.
We might ask how D-FENS would have made it through the day if he were black. We might imagine a more alarmed police force, acting in a more extreme capacity in its response, overstating the nature of the threat. I doubt he’d make it past the white supremacist army surplus store owner (Frederic Forrest) if he’d even got that far. That sequence is one of the other weak points of the script. It’s as if Smith needed to stop and assure us that D-FENS isn’t a white supremacist himself by placing him alongside a cartoonishly obvious example. Nick is a spitting 90’s Oliver Stone grotesque and though he too is part of the gallery of American failure in Falling Down. His function as a cynical contrivance of the plot temporarily derails the movie, in which all the other people in D-FENS’s way are symptoms rather than overtly subhuman villains.
Of course, one could say that all of the challenges to D-FENS’s journey home are cynical contrivances, each serving a generic function. They’re victims/obstacles that pop up conveniently at the right time when the story has another point to make about the social dissatisfactions of the middle class. And they’re each pathetic, unable to justify themselves. Their ineptitude and tacky presentation makes it hard to feel sorry for them.
Could we talk about this giant black ass in the background that’s advertising Sir MixaLot?
Maybe the conception is empty. Maybe the American movie trope of violence-as-catharsis does constitute a form of ideological blackmail. And the politics of resentment have a ring of hypocrisy that continues throughout the movie. But Smith, in an interview about his screenplay’s central theme, has the right idea: “To me, even though the movie deals with complicated urban issues, it really is just about one basic thing: The main character represents the old power structure of the U.S. that has now become archaic, and hopelessly lost.” Besides, there’s no release following D-FENS’s violence. We keep anticipating the thrill of it, but it’s not written or filmed in a way that makes us cheer. So it never satisfies him or us with any real depth.
Perhaps my excuse for the movie, in spite of the dubious nature of its views, is based on that old compulsion to find out what makes people snap, and how it felt being singled out at such a sensitive age for saying in that instance that I understood it. It may just be that part of me that has a soft spot for the Angry Prophet figure. Or, it may be that I’m blinkered in giving an honest appraisal of these shortcomings simply because it’s an entertaining movie and it looks cool, when in real life I’d be repulsed by the actions of a person like Bill Forster. That’s what movies do, don’t they? Make us a little more susceptible to the iron hand by cloaking it in a velvet glove.
Falling Down dramatizes a coming to terms with the death of the old power structure but never bothers to explore how the new one functions. It tears things down but cannot imagine anything being erected in their place. And yet, its sense of frustration at a world that can make us all feel unnecessary, each in our own way, suggests a feeling of futility in holding our oppressors accountable because we can never be sure precisely who they are from minute to minute. So citizens from all across the 99% wind up pulled into the mire of reactionary culture wars. Maybe that’s why I love it. It shows how people at the lowest rungs in the ladder get all the shit heaped onto them and their retaliation just circles around to other people on the lower rungs. It never goes back up the ladder.
Support Lee with Planet Nine below:
