I’m sorry, Joel Schumacher

 

I watched Falling Down.

 

 

I understand why I keep hearing about this movie. It’s not a pleasant film to watch, and it has a surface meaning along with deeper interpretations.

 

_____
A white-collar worker (D-Fens) is stuck in traffic and decides he’s had enough of the daily grind. He gets out of his car and takes a walk across LA to go home.

His walk across the city of Los Angeles shouldn’t be complicated, but it becomes a journey through all the wrongs of modern society. He confronts the annoyances of everyday life and lashes out at them with a baseball bat, and later with a semi-automatic and a bazooka.

It’s just a walk across town. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but life itself seems to be attacking him.

At first it seems D-Fens is just defending himself against individuals who have wronged him for petty misdeeds, but as the movie progresses, these scenes form a larger picture.

He walks into a fast food place to order breakfast. It is only five minutes past the time they serve breakfast, so they refuse to serve him from that menu. After pulling a gun on them, it seems they do have breakfast offerings ready to go anyway. On the surface, you can interpret this as just some white guy getting angry at a mundane annoyance of modern society, but then he gets his food.

The hamburger.

What he gets doesn’t look like the picture on the wall. The picture looks plump and juicy, while the real thing is thin and flat and dry.

 

Expectation verses reality, but it’s not his expectation. It’s what he was promised. Reality doesn’t live up to that.

Is that really his fault?

 

_____
Things should be this way, but they aren’t.

Get an education, get a good job, get married, have a kid, prosper and be happy.

Our antihero has an idealized vision of how things should be, and he can’t handle it when life didn’t work out that way. But where did this idealized concept of modern life come from? Certainly not from within.

Consider the home movies. Yes, the home movies. He did what he thought he was supposed to do to make his daughter happy. He bought his daughter a toy horse, and yet she is crying. He did the work, and yet he did not get the result he expected. All he really wants is for things to work the way they are supposed to.

 

_____
He’s angry at the shopkeeper charging a markup, so he bashes the store with a baseball bat. As a consumer, he hates the markup he must pay, but smashing this store doesn’t fix how capitalism operates.

He’s angry at the roadwork that slows down traffic, but firing a bazooka at a bulldozer doesn’t stop pointless roadwork from happening.

Yelling at the individuals doing the work in no way solves the problem. All of his solutions are wrong, but he’s not alone in his directionless anger at things outside his control.

He’s angry at things he cannot really see or affect. The anger of a civilization often is undirected. As the cop says, if your kid dies from a drunk driver, you know who to be mad at, but if your kid just doesn’t wake up one day, who do you blame?

The way D-Fens thinks life works butting heads against how it actually does. Lashing out at the individuals in no way fixes the problems he points out, and this is what he seems unable to grasp. He’s not mad at anyone.

He’s mad at systems.

Pointing out the obvious wrongs around him makes him the bad guy.

Even facing rich old white guys who want him to get off their lawn. Getting mad at them in no way fixes the waste of land that is a golf course.

 

 

_____
Falling Down is a brilliant movie. Layered in meaning and subtle in presentation. Joel Schumacher should be remembered for this muted expression of anger at systems and how pointless it is for one person to lash out at individuals when the problems are so much larger than oneself. How buying in to the American dream, doing everything you were taught you should do, leads to disappointment.

“I built missiles to defend this country; I should be rich. Instead they gave it to a plastic surgeon.”

They.

Some unseen force he cannot name.

He did exactly what he thought he was supposed to do, and yet he is divorced and poor.

Who is to blame?

D-Fens got a good job. He got a wife. Had a kid. He was told he will prosper. So why did his daughter cry when he bought her the horse? She likes horses, so buying a toy horse should have made her happy. Why wasn’t his wife happy being provided for with his good job? Why did he get fired? Why did some cosmetic surgeon get rich while he, who contributed to the national security of the United States, end up laid off and moving back in with his mother?

Who are you supposed to be angry at when you do all the right things but nothing works out? The picture on the wall promised you this, but you ended up disappointed.

It was true 30 years ago. It is still true now.

So many of us were promised happiness if only we worked hard enough. Go to college to get a good job. Get married and have kids. All of these things will lead to a good life and make you happy. So we do them, and the results are different from the picture on the wall.

D-Fens as an individual is a criminal, but when D-Fens becomes society as a whole, he becomes righteous revolution against systems that prevent people from living good lives. Falling Down is evidence that we are not individuals looking out for our own self-interest. We are not in total control of our lives. Systems do exist, and when society gets angry enough, it will lash out against them.

This is the film Joel Schumacher should be remembered for, not Batman and Robin.