Times past it did not seem difficult for film-makers to get it right:
Think “Act Of Violence”, “Night Has A Thousand Eyes” and “Criss Cross”—and these three from 1948 alone.

For some reason almost no film has captured modern [post-1960]L.A. as sharply in its apocalyptic alienation as this one.
L.A. when it *sucks* has a sucktitude factor that is whole orders of magnitude above that of New York or London, and they’ve had their sucky moments.

But this film had a look that imparted the tactile suckness that is really unique:
And I mean *beyond* the story/performance/direction elements—the D.P. captured that ominously toxic pinkish-grey sky with the *suffocating* heat/humidity—you could SMELL the sucky atmosphere, feel the greasy sweat that makes the lightest clothing cling to the body like a wet fleece blanket.

The D.P. is Polish, and that seems exactly right—the only other film of modern LA getting the sucky ennui right is “The Outside Man” [1971, French, dir: J. Deray]with J.L. Trintigant ["A Man & A Woman", "And God Created Woman" etc], Roy Scheider and some old noir stalwarts. Two of the three from 1948 cited above were directed by Europeans[R. Siodmak, F. Zinneman], come to think of it!
And L.A. *does* have uniquely intrusive suckatrons—in NYC they’ll go so far and not beyond because here everyone knows “you never know who the other guy is”: Keeps everyone within certain mutually understood limits.
Not in LA—there’s no limit to the comprehensively assaultive barrage of suck that is as much a part of LA as the smog.
That’s why I haven’t lived there since 1978.
Just a thought about an element that I felt was crucial to this film’s success—and it *does* succeed:
That said, there are certain structural weaknesses, but citing them would be small-minded and frivolous and futile, because all is forgiven for any film that can set its stage amidst the exactly-right atmosphere that has eluded every other LA movie over the years , and this film stands alone in that:
The atmosphere is a character as much as D-Fens Foster—moreso: None of the story would have been remotely credible without it.

Matthew H. Davidson
mhantholz@gmail.com

This isn’t the tale of two men corrupted by a dystopian-hued modern day; it’s the tale of a man who could change and a man who couldn’t.

In old videotaped footage of an early birthday of his daughter Adele, despite the birthday infant crying and wailing, Foster demands his wife place the daughter on the riding horse he’d put together, responding profanely in frustration and pushing the point until the wife looks in a steely fashion at Foster, saying she’d not allow him to press his point at the expense of his daughter’s happiness.

It’s a demonstration of Foster’s tragic flaw: he cannot accommodate the differences between the world as it is, and the world as he has preconceived it to be.

In the video he watches, we see that a pre-snapped, still-married-and-employed Foster cannot adapt to the fact that the happy image he had preconceived (prior to the birthday party) of his daughter playing on the toy riding horse he laboriously built wasn’t going to happen (because his daughter was crying and wailing) – and not only can Foster not adapt to it, but he then attempts to force wife and daughter to make the situation conform to his preconception, without regard for their emotional welfare.

We see this in the movie’s start as well. Foster has, at the movie’s beginning, been laid off for nearly a month from his work as a defense engineer at Knowtech – yet he’s continued making a pointless commute each and every day.

This even shows up in Foster’s death scene as well. We see him form a “happy preconception” of his death: a heroic shootout between “sheriff” and “bad guy” that leads to his daughter receiving a financial windfall from his life insurance. Det. Prendergast, as played by Robert Duvall, bluntly tells Foster he has a choice before him, and we see that the statement isn’t considered by Foster for a moment. Prendergast’s next attempt – reminding Foster that he’s throwing away the chance to see his daughter grow to adulthood – is also discarded without a moment’s thought.

Adele obviously still loves her father, and Foster’s just seen that moments before, from her happy exclamation upon seeing him running towards them on the pier. That child – as (importantly!) explicitly acknowledged in the final moments of the film – is going to have to soon face the truth that her father is dead, and based on that love we see, it’s going to hurt Adele like hell.

Like with the toy-horse birthday party footage years earlier, Foster’s rigidity shows no real consideration for the emotional well-being of his daughter – he has a preconception of how it’s to be, and that preconception doesn’t change, even with that rigidity certain to end up causing his daughter lifelong emotional pain when having to deal with her father’s homicidal rampage and suicide-by-cop that was based, in large part, on his separation from her.

You suggest that Prendergast is “but another example of the displaced, bygone American man” that Foster supposedly represents.

No: Prendergast, rather, is the counterexample to Foster’s flaw. Both are cut from the same jib: both remember nostagically the past as a golden time. But where Foster has a preconception and tries to force the world to that preconception, Prendergast has, in part, been dealing with a different tragic flaw: he was too adaptable.

He came from the other end of the spectrum, in which he adapted too much to the whims of the cruel around him. We see this in the way he is taken advantage of by his colleagues, and how his desk sergeant has felt about him. We see this in how he tells us he reacted to his wife’s mental illness the night before he got himself reassigned to desk duty (whether said illness was real or, as I feel is suggested by the final phone conversation we see him with his wife, feigned – “well, shit” we see her say quite unhysterically after he’s hung up).

Prendergast’s journey throughout the film is a positive one because, unlike Foster, during the film’s progress, he changes. Prendergast becomes less adaptable to the inconsiderate whims of others – as we see when he belts the co-worker who insulted his wife, tells his sergeant “fuck you very much”, stands up to his wife in the midst of her fit, and successfully manages the extraction of Foster’s wife and daughter from the hostage situation.

He becomes stronger, and that strength derives from him finding a happy medium between, on one hand, being entirely unadaptable to the difference between the world’s reality and your preconceptions of the world, and, on the other hand, being so adaptable to the world’s reality that your identity is completely lost.

Those elements that you choose to stand up for are part of what makes you you, and if you stand up for nothing, then you act as the reactive milquetoast we first see Prendergast as. When Prendergast finds who he is and makes the choice to stand up for those things, he comes more and more alive, a process we see throughout the film.

You cast the film’s end in a dystopian mold, saying Prendergast has become at film’s end a killer with his decency drained away. I disagree, and, importantly, I feel the film’s final moments support that disagreement.

Prendergast encourages Foster’s wife to allow the formation of a happy memory for Adele (her birthday party) prior to the news of her father’s death being broken to her. He then sits down and jokes, teasingly, with Adele about his name now being Mud. These are hardly the actions of a man who has now inheirited the mental factors which took Foster from rigidity to homicide; these are the actions of a man who has plummed his own depths and declared his allegiance to himself, in his decision to reject the retirement his wife guilted him into and return to the beat of real detective work, work at which he has just reminded himself that he is good.

The central theme of Falling Down, you conclude, is that there is no place for decency in the modern world, and that a modern-day America requires either the embrace of madness or death.

I’d disagree; I don’t think the film supports that bleak thematic supposition. I think the central theme of Falling Down is this: you must decide what is important to you and hold allegiance to that, but if it too deeply conflicts with what the world truly is, you must be ready to adapt yourself to that.

Foster wasn’t forced into his death. He made multiple decisions stemming from before the movie’s start, right up to his death, that led to his downfall – and most of those decisions were decisions his mind might not have allowed himself to realize he was making, decisions that were decisions not to change behaviors and circumstances he had lived in for years … despite changing circumstances that demanded those behaviors and circumstances change in order for him to survive.

I can say that with certainty, having been faced with one of Foster’s decisions myself. What do you do when given the unpleasant circumstance of being declared no longer economically viable? Like millions of Americans, I faced that myself and haven’t yet had the chance to re-enter the job market. I’ve not clung to a rejection of reality and daily commute to nowhere.

Prendergast made multiple decisions stemming from before the movie’s start, that eventually led to a fulfilled ending – when we leave him, we see him in a far more assertive relationship with his wife (I charge that he has lost no “decency”, but has instead reversed the dominant and submissive roles in that relationship); we see him most likely returning to beat work, a role in which that day he has shown talent and enthusiasm; and we see him in a far more self-assertive relationship with his supervisor and co-workers.

It’s easy to say that the modern world doesn’t allow people to be decent. This was a belief I found very attractive for much of my life, until recent months. The problem is that it’s a generalization – and, like most generalizations, it’s easy to make but usually less nuanced than the reality.

It’s a popular generalization that’s reinforced by the lazy, pessimistically biased sensationalist reporting that’s now deeply inherent to nearly every media outlet, local or national, by which we can get daily news. Y2K never hit. Bird flu didn’t wipe us out. Swine flu’s shaping up to be no more deadly than the normal flu. And hundreds of thousands of times, people do acts of selfless generosity to each other both big and small. As someone who lives in one of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, I should be able to be witness to cruelty aplenty, but I’m not. Instead, I’ve seen decency aplenty.

Mankind’s always trended from chaos towards order. We routinely killed and raped in our earliest origins, and now we’re landing our own mechanized creations on other planets in the solar system.

It’s easy to find evidence of mankind’s indecency, especially thanks to the steady diet we’re fed of it from all media. But it only takes minor retraining for your eye to become witness to mankind’s essential decency, too.

Also in the Whammy Burger scene there is a man trying to walk quietly out of the restaurant when Foster began his rampage there. In the very next scene pendergrast is getting off of an elevator, going to a swanky restaurant. If you look very carefully in the elvator you will note that another person in that elevator is the same man (actor) who had just tried to leave the Whammy Burger. Symbolism – life can just as easily leave us eating in a fastfood joint as it can raise us up to the high life.

Certainly, Foster believes that, but the evidence points to the reverse: the old video (from when he had a job, wife, child) shows him as emotionally unstable. In fact, he’s lost his job at the missile plant because the US no longer feared nuclear annihilation.

Thank you both for your observations.