Falling Down
June 21st, 2009 by Hoopleton
“Walk away, asshole,” said the grinning blonde as she exhaled her cigarette.
“Excuse me?” I replied.
“I said,” she said, “walk the fuck away asshole.”
I had approached her initially to try and resolve what seemed to have been a huge misunderstanding between myself and her boyfriend earlier in the night. Apparently, in some cultures it is considered a grave insult to ask someone to remove their elbow from one’s back.
What struck me was not the words she used, but the fact that she grinned at me as she said them.
As I got home later that morning I was left to wonder why it was that people were so awful to one another. How come it seems more and more that the members of our society are so very bloody-minded.
I’m not one to believe in the myth of a nostalgic past, but I can’t escape the feeling that things in our society are increasingly changing for the worse. I can’t recall a time in history when people would walk into office buildings, churches or schools and murder one another en masse. When insulting someone in the most vile way possible passed for acceptable behavior.
I’m reminded of the 1993 action crime drama, Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall. In it, Douglas plays a laid-off defense engineer named William Foster who over the course of one hot Los Angeles day transforms from a generally decent human being into a maniac on a killing spree. What’s interesting is that although on the surface it appears to be little more than a popcorn blockbuster, the film actually offers an interesting commentary on the moral decline of our society.
Douglas’ character, Foster, is the archetype for the displaced American man. When we first meet him he looks like a 1950s stereotype. Rimmed glasses. Short-sleeve button down shirt and tie. Briefcase. Once a breadwinner, the king of the castle, he has fallen on hard times. His wife has divorced him. He’s lost his job. His car has broken down. There are holes in his shoes. He sits in his dead American-built auto, stuck in a traffic jam, as the people around him scream insults and honk their horns. It is at this moment that something in him changes. It’s at this moment that he realizes, perhaps for the first time, how ugly the world is and how powerless he is within it.
And so Foster gets out of his car, abandoning it in the street, and embarks on an odyssey through a world that would no longer give him the respect that he once deserved, hoping to reach his ex-wife’s house on the other side of the city in time for their daughter’s birthday.
In the film Foster encounters a series of seemingly trivial situations which drive him into a increasingly homicidal rage. What’s fascinating, as Rogert Ebert commented in his review of the film, is that there’s never a release. He never enjoys what he does. He’s scared and confused. He’s angry and disconnected. And in each encounter we are reminded, through Foster’s commentary, of the way things once were.
In a convenience store, after the owner refuses to give him any change for a phone call, Foster destroys many of the goods on display, remarking on the cost and screaming, “I’m rolling back prices to 1965. What do you think of that?” Then after a couple incidents with gang members he meets a homeless man asking for change and promptly picks his hard luck story apart. One of the most telling scenes takes place in a fast food restaurant, where, after he’s told that he’s 3 minutes too late for breakfast, Foster draws a gun (which he picked up from the gang members) and laments on the lack of genuine costumer service and the inconsistency between the appearance of the flat hamburger in his hand and the image of the big, juicy hamburger in the photographs on display.
Foster isn’t playing out a fantasy, he’s following a set of instructions programmed into him by television news and film. As he’s been devalued in society, he is transformed by that same society into what it does value, a maniac. He struggles against it, but ultimately is powerless to resist.
The two most vital scenes of the film take place toward the end. In the first, Foster meets a homophobic neo-Nazi who has been following the day’s events on a police scanner and considers himself a kindred spirit. To Foster the idea is revolting and he stabs the man (though it should be noted he does so in self-defense). In the second, Foster wanders onto a vast estate and meets a caretaker family whom he tells about his having been laid off by his defense-contractor employer when the Cold War ended. He also tells them of his feelings of being discarded as obsolete after so many years of study and work. When the husband offers himself as a hostage in exchange for his family’s freedom, Foster gets angry and leaves.
In these two episodes we see Foster recoil at being classified as the maniac that society has molded him into. He is a decent man, but in this new world that he inhabits he must either embrace his new role or be destroyed.
Ironically, the man who finally destroys Foster, Robert Duval’s character Sergeant Martin Prendergast, is but another example of the displaced, bygone American man.
Prendergast is on the verge of retirement. He’s another decent man, who doesn’t swear, is respectful and accommodating, and for these reasons is constantly mocked by his domineering wife and vile co-workers. At one point, his own supervisor effectively tells him that he’s not manly enough. Men swear, he informs him.
Throughout the film Prendergast is constantly just one step behind Foster, insisting on investigating the case despite the dismay of everyone around him. As we get to know Prendergast we realize that he too has just as many reasons as Foster to succumb to violence.
By the end Foster’s transformation is complete. The artifacts of his former persona (his briefcase, shirt and tie, etc.) have been replaced by a bag filled with guns and black BDUs. In the film’s climax Prendergast finally catches upto Foster and confronts him at the end of a pier (an obvious metaphor for the end of the world). There, after Foster is again rejected by his former wife, he and Prendergast discuss their mutual feelings of displacement. The cop mentions how the world has changed, how the water is no longer clean enough to swim in, how his daughter died and how powerless he is. Foster for his part finally realizes that he’s the villain in the story, and asks, “How did that happen? I did everything they told me to.”
In the final minutes Foster draws a toy gun, forcing Prendergast to shoot him. Although on the surface it seems that Prendergast is able to survive because he possesses more empathy than Foster, in reality Prendergast transforms as well. In the end he too becomes a killer, the decency in him drained away. Whereas at the start he was a kind man who could not even bring himself to use foul language, by the end that kindness is dead as he says to his supervisor, before a crowd of reporters, “Fuck you.” To this his supervisor grins sheepishly, as though to say, “Welcome to the club.”
Falling Down teaches us that in the modern world there’s no place for decency. In this new America one must either embrace madness or die. To revolt against the paradigm is to become an outcast. It is to become that which one abhors.
Ultimately, the film never explains why society is this way. Why people, like that woman from last night, would find so much joy in displaying their utter lack of civility. What it is that leads decent people to the breaking point. To the choice between inhumanity and destruction. Why, as William Foster might ask, have we all been lied to?
I imagine that more than anything else it has to do with overcrowding. Not that long ago it was still possible to escape. To find refuge from the noise and havoc of modernity. But as the population pushes past the 7 billion mark, as every square meter of the Earth is developed and populated, we find ourselves increasingly at the breaking point. We are constantly confronted by one another and in the resulting tension we fall back on our most violent inclinations. It is why seemingly normal people become mass murderers. Why students shoot up classrooms. Why devout worshipers become hatemongers. Why bankers and CEOs defraud investors. Why a person you don’t know can stare you in the eye, grinning, and say as naturally as could be, “fuck you, asshole.”
The world as we’ve constructed it is a crowded, stressful, impersonal place, drowning in the constant blaring static of our consumption and greed. In the resulting chaos few of us seem to possess the strength to remain upright.
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July 6th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
I recently saw Falling Down (FD) and will have to say that is one of the most underrated movies of the ’90s.
The symbolism usage in this movie was one of those things that kept you thinking after a movie. For example, Robert Duvall’s character (Prendegast) really did face similar downfalls as Douglas’ character (Foster). All these similarities relate to work, family and money (three top values of the “American Dream”). Prendergast’s family was not ideal (e.g., crazy wife and dead child) as was Foster’s family (e.g., divorced). As for work and money, Prendergast’s situation was pretty bad (e.g., he was retiring without pension and was looked down on by his superior). This was the same for Foster because Foster had no job and was “not economically viable.”
Ebert was right in that this movie cannot be seen in a superficial sense. One would have to see the deeper meaning in the movie. These two characters’ lives were similar and you would think that these factors would drive them to the same conclusion, which is to go off on people, like Foster did. However, that didn’t happen. Foster’s character had a sense of self entitlement because he was upset about how things turned out (self-entitlement usually precedes frustration). But the thing with Prendergast was that he “accepted” things. He went along with things and was “the nice guy” in that sense (recalling the part where his wife called him to get chicken without skin and he just smiled and mocked her nagging).
And this is where I think the point of the movie is: In life, you are told many things about what you can do to do well. For example, go to school, follow the rules, and get a family. We all take these messages to heart, hoping that it will lead to happiness. Foster and Prendergast’s lives were the counterexamples to this notion. They “followed the rules” (e.g., Prendergast has a family, worked as a cop (honorable) and worked ’til retirement, while Foster worked for the country during the Cold War and tried to have a family), but things just didn’t work out.
Where, then, do we go from here? I think that this is a question that many people in the U.S. today are facing. They did everything they could, but it’s not enough. The subtle lesson from FD is probably that none of us are alone in this. The best you can do is just to live with it and not let it drive you crazy (e.g., this is why Prendergast was the “good guy” at the end and Foster was the “bad guy”).
But this lesson may be too narrow because it raises the bigger question of whether this is just what life is about: Struggle, try not to go crazy and that’s it?
July 9th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
You make an excellent point… the film hits it on the head over and over again… we used to make things, we used to have purpose, but not anymore. Now so many of us find ourselves isolated, left with a choice between acceptance and madness.
July 24th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Hoop, you bring up an interesting connection when you say “we used to make things.” Where was anything being created anywhere in the movie? From the minimarket’s canned soft drinks, batteries, and donettes to the burger joint to the surplus store. Even down to the bank and the street vendors. It’s all just a service selling prior production. I live 7 minutes from downtown Los Angeles and I recognized practically every scene in the movie starting with the 110 Freeway at the beginning (same freeway/underpass I’d take to get their in 7 minutes) yet seeing these places through the lens and hearing your observations has cast a light I won’t be able to shed for some time. I need to go take a ride.
Thank you both for your observations.
August 20th, 2009 at 8:36 am
I recently revisited FD, having only seen it once on VHS a few years after its release. I loved the film then, but really appreciate it much more now. It can be interpreted many ways, and I think the most important message one can distill from it is that life is what you make it. Perception is everything. Yes, one may see that people lack civility these days but there are many others like you who know it is important to treat others with dignity. One of the things in life where I live that drives me into a FD-like state is that people drive their cars with such aggression and with no regard for other people on the road. I am tempted to fight fire with fire, to treat them the way I feel I am being treated, but I don’t. I continue on my merry way, signaling lane changes and stopping completely at lights and stop signs, etc. And while those other people turn into Fosters, I prevail as I maintain my cool like Prendergast. I wonder if the “F” in Foster stands for “Fail” and the “P” in Prendergast stands for “Pass”??? Anyway, I respect your opinion that we are all feeling crowded, but there are many many places to go to find peace, including, first and foremost, your own mind. My theory on the general lack of civility tends more toward the breakdown of the traditional family structure, lack of education, and the quest for wealth; all of which contribute to and fuel each other. Thank you for the insightful post.
September 7th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
I think it’s a mistake to see this movie as expressing nostalgia for a past where people were more polite or where the world was a better place.
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.
September 15th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
This movie also had 2 other interesting usages of symbolism. In the scene where a black man is protesting in front of a bank because he could not get a loan, his clothing is identical to that of Foster and his verbiage is very similar as well. This was perhaps saying that all of his, regardless of race, religion, whatever, are all in the same boat. We are all being beaten down by society.
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.
October 9th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
You maintain that Douglas’ character, Bill Foster, has been “transformed by … society into what it does value, a maniac. He struggles against it, but ultimately is powerless to resist.” I have to emphatically disagree. Foster was deeply imbalanced prior to snapping, and this is documented by film scenes.
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.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
In response to the last blog, I accept your point of view as perfectly valid and is probably the socially correct way to respond to the society we find ourselves in, but I disagree in your view that the Foster characters flaw is that he does not adapt to the society he finds himself in I agree his character has many flaws some which i am sure that many people share and I am not condoning the behaviour that he exhibits. The answer I believe is not as simple as he can’t handle things and turns bad. The environment and the denizens of the city are just as guilty. You are correct is saying that Prendergast’s response to the same pressures is more socially responsible but in a way he himself provides empty solutions his empathy comforts and endears himself to the other characters but does not relieve the situation. An example of Foster’s adaptability is with the deli owner initially he accepts the owners assertion of no change without purchase and offers to buy a soda when he discovers that the soda is too expensive to achieve his goal he offers compromise “i give you a dollar you give me fifty cents” and is refused. Okay after that his behaviour is out of control, but who attacked who first the deli owner is the one who draws the weapon. The same example is repeated with the gang members.
I agree with your assertion that society itself is not as depraved as we are led to believe. however the example here is not about decay of civilisation I believe it is about alienation. the character Foster is alienated by his family his mother and society in general. Completely isolated and denied regular interaction and emotional release his pent up frustrations are turned inward until he interprets every negative action from outside himself as an attack and responds in kind with a deluded sense of self righteousness. The main difference between him and Prendergast is that he is isolated and Prendergast is still connected through his old partner.
From this point it is almost a cautionary tale about marginalising people. For example maybe if one of the protagonists showed empathy for Foster the events would have unfolded differently.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
One point not made anywhere, then and now, is that this is *THE* quintissential modern Los Angeles movie: I was born in 1949, a *third generation* Angelino [that's CITY of LA---most people are thinking of the *County* when they summon up a mental image of LA] & raised in one of the areas that features so prominently early on—Echo Park/Angel Hill.
Not mentioned elsewhere is Robert Duvall’s remark about Angel Hill, “Used to be a classy neighborhood”. [proof of this can be found on selected Historic Old LA websites]
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
February 28th, 2010 at 4:38 pm
“Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos…And do you know what the funny thing is about chaos? It’s fair.”
April 4th, 2010 at 12:31 am
I just rented it on Blu-Ray having not seen it since I first saw it in the theatre. I actually remembered that Bill was really “forced” to be violent… but upon re-watching it, clearly that was not the case. With the first encounter of the convenience store keeper, he showed he was already violent, and of course, we learn from Beth that he had a history of it, recent as it may have been.
Still, watching it was great… and I agree that it is definitely under-rated. Thanks for your post!