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.