Review of Falling Down (1993) by Jake C — 11 Aug 2018

On one level, the movie-like so much of Douglas' other work in this period, from WALL STREET to DISCLOSURE-is expressive of a white male power fantasy, allowing the audience to enjoy its destructive, hateful impulses without real consequence. Douglas is a hypnotic and compelling everyman antihero on this front, who pushes (or is pushed into pushing) his otherwise "rational" positions to a socially unacceptable, if nonetheless wished for, extreme. Balancing black comedy with bleak commentary, it is no wonder the movie was such a success, offering viewers an escape from and a release of their own violent desires, subtly transforming their unconscious reactionary desire into the realm of nightmares, so as to disguise what they truly want from themselves, so that white audiences could eat their rancid cake yet still have it, too.

On another and less successful, if more morally sound, level, however, the movie pretty squarely, textually if not cinematically, makes Douglas' D-Fens out to be the unambiguous, if still human, bad guy. It's hard not to hedge on this point, because the film itself seems so much less certain of this real, authentic moral ground, less convinced that D-Fens is out and out a villain than he is, at some (the first) level, a victim, and that his anger is justified even when his actions are not. No doubt viewers and critics both at the time and today feel this way, hearing in D-Fens' rants their own discontent, and like D-Fens utterly missing the true causes of their suffering, laying blame at the wrong feet.

In this sense, the movie actually makes more complicated (and so undercuts) a rather straightforward morality tale, what the screenwriter has said is something of an allegory for the decline of American imperialism and its resultant lashing out of white male rage-a story even more relevant today, but here obscured by the enjoyment and fantasy the audience gets to participate while remaining at arm's length. D-Fens is part and parcel with the broken down system that undergirds and motivates his violent break down, cause of his own condition; yet the movie too easily allows the viewer to identify *with* Douglas, rather than identify D-Fens *as* the problem.

Again, I think that both levels are operating throughout the movie, and the elements for an insightful social and political critique are more or less here, but the movie misses that potential for authentic, stringent satire because it is too invested in Douglas as the star. What the movie lacks is a real world, complicated and nuanced and full of deeply human characters, with which the audience might contrast D-Fens' reactionary wrath. Instead of fleshed out characters who, in their mere being, would expose the falsity of D-Fens' acting out, and who could interrupt the enjoyment on display by giving weight to its violence, all Schumacher can muster are his own (racist) caricatures to fit a half-baked ideology. Perhaps this would have made for a less compelling or hypnotic blockbuster, but it would have also made for a more thoughtfully provocative and morally challenging film than this, which thinks its so much smarter and powerful and truer to the human condition than it really is.

What we end up with, then, is just the usual white, male, reactionary, masturbatory Hollywood narrative, and precisely the sort of squandered potential that D-Fens at heart represents. It is all too indebted to and stubbornly locked into its own narcissistic positionality, unable to see beyond the white male star as the one and only viewpoint from which to measure the rest of the world. No doubt that makes for a relatively engaging film, like all polished Hollywood blockbusters can be, but one that, like its main character, leaves you empty, even angry, and searching for real meaning in all this confusion. Good intentions, road to hell, and all that, ya know?