27 years ago “Falling Down” predicted our dumbest timeline…also, it should’ve been a Batman movie
“Falling Down” landed in theaters 27 years ago this weekend aloft a wave of controversy. Part of this was bad timing. A mere 10 months after thousands had rioted in the streets of L.A. following the acquittal of four police officers for the beating of Rodney King, Hollywood executives felt the country might not be ready to cheer on Michael Douglas as he visited violence upon people of color as revenge for society daring to forget that, at any point in time, his desires and opinions as an average white man should be its chief organizing principle. They needn’t have worried. “Falling Down” was the №1 movie in the country for two weekends straight, a box-office smash.
I, an average white man myself, recently re-watched “Falling Down,” and I was surprised by both its prescience and that a movie this silly had ever been embraced as a serious sociological thriller. Then I remembered “Joker,” a comic book movie made by the writer-director of the “Hangover” trilogy that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated for Best Picture and the United States Army believed was such a potent piece of filmmaking that it was a threat to the safety of Americans. Those details alone, if pondered too long, could tip one into a madness deeper and more profound than the Clown Prince of Crime’s.
Viewing “Joker” through the mirror of “Falling Down” — like some modern-day Perseus, spying Arthur Fleck swaying forlornly in his white-tighties while you try not to turn to stone from boredom — you see our dumb, regrettable present reflected back at you.
In 1993, we worried minority communities might receive a blockbuster movie that celebrated white male paranoia, which is how “Newsweek” framed the movie’s point of view in its cover story about “Falling Down,” as a provocation. Twenty-six years later, we worried Incels, folkloric man-babies who thrive in the digital wilds as avatars of the darker and — if we lived in a less fraught time — hilarious impulses of men, would interpret another blockbuster about an angry white man as a call to action and emerge from the internet to get revenge on the alpha males who scorned them and the women who refused to fuck them.
At least, I think I understand “Joker”…it is about a disturbed man taking revenge on a society he felt abandoned him, right? I admit any nuance might’ve been whammoed out of me when Joaquin Phoenix, at the climax of the film, shouted the thesis statement, “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you fuckin’ deserve!” A line that, watching it in the theater, made me laugh — it’s “Joker’s” one good joke. I imagined Daniel Day Lewis at the end of “There Will Be Blood” bellowing, “Truly, the ruthlessness of capitalism lays low religion!” instead of “I drink your milkshake.”
Time has proven “Falling Down” to be far more dangerous than “Joker.” Like Arthur Fleck, Douglas plays an increasingly unhinged loner named Bill Foster, an out-of-work defense worker referred to in the movie only as D-Fens, the moniker taken from the vanity license plate of the car he walks away from in the middle of a crowded highway in the film’s bravura opening scene.
Why does he abandon his vehicle? Because it’s hot outside, damnit! His shitty car’s air conditioner doesn’t work. The Hispanic family in the car in front of him is blasting Spanish radio, some flashy pricks in a convertible are shouting on their giant cellular phones, and a school bus of racially diverse hooligans are zipping paper planes out the windows, out of which they’ve inexplicably hung an American flag, as if they got together the night before to plan what they could do to make a conservative middle-aged Boomer in the middle of a nervous breakdown ask himself, “Whither the American Dream?”
D-Fens first act of violence occurs moments later when he smashes up a Korean convenience store with a baseball bat because he’s charged 35 cents more than he thought was fair for a Coke. For good measure, he delivers a racist tirade about how the small business owner needs to learn to speak better English.
From a modern perspective, the white privilege on display in this scene is staggering: browbeating an immigrant, taking blinkered offense to paying once the prices that minority communities, shunted to this food desert by decades of racist policies, pay every day — in 2020, he would be dead from a thousand tweets before he left the store.
Afterward, D-Fen’s rampage intensifies. His targets include:
Hispanic gang members. He beats them up with a baseball bat after they try to take his briefcase, telling them, “I wouldn’t want you people in my backyard either.” He later shoots one of them in the leg.
A panhandler. In a fantasy many Boomers have no doubt played out in their heads, D-Fens filets the panhandler with logic, slicing through his self-delusions with real talk, and tells him to get a job. There is some irony here that anyone who has spent time in the comments section of a regional newspaper will recognize, given that D-Fens is also out of work.
A fast food restaurant. He pulls out a machine gun and fires it into the ceiling after the minimum-wage employees tell him they’re no longer serving breakfast. The Boomer-loses-it-over-customer-service angle of “Falling Down” predicted a lot of memes, from “Ok, Boomer” to Karen.
A road construction worker. Furious that a road he considered to be in perfectly fine condition is being repaired, he demands a worker admit that they’re doing this “to justify (their) inflated budgets.” Then he fires a rocket launcher at him. But ain’t it like the government to always be fixing the wrong goddamned road, tho?
A neo-nazi. Arguably the most problematic scene in the entire film, as it seems to exist only to contrast the racial resentments of D-Fens with the flamboyant bigotry of the Hitler-worshiping shop owner he stabs and shoots to death. You can practically hear the movie whispering to angry white men in the audience: That’s what a real racist looks like! You’re not like that; no, you’re like that handsome Michael Douglas up there. You judge people by their values. Is it your fault so many people with bad values are from big cities and foreign countries? Of course not, big guy. It’s not a crime to love America…not yet anyway…
D-Fens also gives an old country club golfer (elite) a heart attack and is mad about how nice a house a plastic surgeon (Hollyweird) can afford. Douglas, director Joel Schumacher and screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith all argued that D-Fens was the villain of the movie, except audiences disagreed. From a 1993 New York Times story about the controversy surrounding the movie: “At recent screenings, many in the audiences applauded when the crazed character played by Mr. Douglas beat up a Korean merchant for charging too much and then vandalized his store; when he shot a Mexican-American gang member; when he terrorized a fast-food restaurant after clerks refused to serve him breakfast a minute or two after the cut-off time.”
It’s not hard to understand the audience’s reactions. These scenes are cathartic, with the rising tension of daily stress giving way to violent, hysterical release — it’s an effective structure. Moreover, the movie’s purported hero, a good cop on the verge of retirement played by Robert Duvall, never questions D-Fens’ diagnosis that society is “sick” because it turned his favorite ice cream parlor into “some kind of Southwest American new age kind of thing,” a discovery that fills Douglas’s character with the same pain and sense of loss as Charlton Heston finding the Statue of Liberty buried in sand at the end of “Planet of the Apes.”
Not for nothing, but Duvall’s entire arc also builds to the crowd-pleasing moment when he finally regains his swagger and tells his harridan of a wife — who’s still grieving for their dead daughter, by the way — to “shut up” and have dinner on the table when he gets home. So, the two men’s points of view aren’t exactly oceans apart.
Watching “Falling Down,” I found myself wanting to defend its relentless energy and tonal incoherence, its switchbacks from pathos to comedy, from melodrama to thriller. Yes, it’s entitled, resentment-driven point of view is toxic, and you don’t need to wrap your head in tin foil and gird your loins against chemtrail attacks to access the clarity of mind necessary to suss out where that landed us. In an interview at the time, Michael Douglas said his character “wished or hoped for another time, when things made sense, when someone’s job was worthwhile.” We get it — D-Fens just wanted America to be great again.
Except, D-Fens is ridiculous. He self-righteously asks the Korean shop owner, “You have any idea how much money my country has given your country?” The owner says, “How much?” and D-Fens replies, “I don’t know. But it’s got to be a lot, you can bet on that.” He is a villain, yes, but he’s also an idiot. He abandoned his car to walk around Los Angeles with a hole in his shoe. He’s Don Quixote, racistly tilting at windmills, longing for a past that never existed.
Schumacher went on to make two widely panned Batman movies in the 90s, but “Falling Down” should’ve been his Batman movie. If Schumacher had channeled all the campy energy implicit in “Falling Down” and explicit in “Batman and Robin” into a satire about an absurd Dark Knight-errant who completely misdiagnosis society and spends his time monologuing and assaulting impoverished street-level criminals — oblivious to the structural advantages that delivered him billions while miring them in poverty — that would’ve been a groundbreaking comic book movie. I’d also love to hear Batman growl about Gotham’s ice cream parlors being turned into new-age shops.
Except we can’t laugh at D-Fens, or rather we can’t do anything but laugh at him, because, ultimately, he was triumphant. He’s never enjoyed more power, and the astoundingly dumb “Joker” is yet another proof point. While the animating worldview and targets of D-Fens are clear, “Joker,” for all its transgressive posturing, is so terrified of being misinterpreted it manages to be both overdetermined and infuriatingly vague, including: a mental illness that’s never diagnosed, a diverse cast that never acknowledges race, a widespread protest that’s never politicized, and class warfare that never bothers to critique class.
That careful bothsidesism didn’t work. We fought about it anyway, because now everything matters too much and not enough. We are all D-Fens. Ineffectual, absurd, raging against a society that requires the super-sanity of the Joker just to endure it.
