Ode to Falling Down: you beautiful brute
Flicking through my YouTube feed the other day I came across a retrospective review of the 1993 film, Falling Down.
If you are familiar with Falling Down, I basically spend a while explaining the plot - so scroll down to the poster image below.
If you aren’t unfamiliar, Falling Down is a kind of action thriller centring on Michael Douglas’ unnamed character, who spends the film having an increasingly worse day. It sounds more like the plot of a Will Ferrel or Adam Sandler film but, trust me, it’s no comedy. The man starts by abandoning his car after it becomes stuck in what seems like regular traffic hell on a stinking hot day. The A/C gives out and that’s enough to get our man to grab his brief case and walk away. Abandoning a vehicle on a freeway will be just his first and least delinquent action of this day.
(Actually, if you are a male and concerned with your personal development and are unfamiliar with Falling Down, examine your life choices immediately!)
It is revealed that today is his young daughter’s birthday and he is trying to deliver her a gift. He moves across a hot, dirty and unfriendly Los Angeles. This is the LA contemporary with the Rodney King riots. It’s tense, neglected and menacing. Within a few minutes of screen time, our man will fight a colour gang, smash up a convenience store, acquire a bag of guns from said colour gang when they come back for revenge and then promptly use them to solve a problem with a pay phone. He pulls the guns again on fast food chain workers when their products disappoint him and on golfers when they order him off their course. This causes one of the aged golfers to have a heart attack. Our man taunts him as he watches him die. He tries to buy shoes at an army disposal store and thinks he has found a kindred spirit in the owner. Within minutes though, the disposal store owner is revealed to be an unhinged neo-nazi and our man is left scrambling to rationalise how he is unlike this guy even though fate has clearly brought them together - with gusto.
He escapes the Nazi after things get weird, like rapey weird, and he is forced to fight his way out. He leaves that guy dead too. Like some kind of 90s video game, our man acquires even more firepower in the form of a shoulder mounted rocket launcher. Just what he, and the people of LA, need right then! He continues his trek to his daughter.
Only, the cops are after him now and have been talking to his ex-wife and his mother. Robert Duvall plays Pendergrast, a detective on his last day in the force. Only one day until he retires with his high-maintenance wife to a town in the middle of the desert whose only claim to fame is rebuilding the original London Bridge across a muddy dam. The title, Falling Down, now starts to make some sense.
Turns out, Our man has been on a losing streak lately. He was a respected and moderately successful engineer working on missile projects for the military - and his pocket pens, sensible brief case, short-sleave-and-tie combo and flat top haircut also suddenly make sense. Though he walks the LA streets in the early nineties, he looks like something from a NASA promo film from the sixties. We learn he's lost that job and has been unable to find another. From this point forward Douglas’ character is called D-FENS after the number plate on the car he abandoned. It is also revealed he and his wife, played by Barbara Hershey, are estranged and it is intimated that she has a restraining order against him that forbids him from visiting her or his daughter. Conflict is afoot, methinks.
Coming across extensive roadworks - possibly the ones that caused the original traffic delay at the start of the film - D-FENS decides to fire his rocket launcher randomly at it. He does this with the help of local kids who have learned how to deploy the weapon from video games and TV.
The cops work out where he is headed and rush to warn his ex-wife. She is already scared to death as our man has been calling her demanding to see his daughter. She runs from him to the end of a pier and seems trapped. Pendergrast corners him and manages to get his wife and daughter to safety while keeping D-FENS on the pier.
With the law just about on him and his paternal visit goal denied, D-FENS is forced into a reckoning.
He asks, “Am I the bad guy?” Pendergrast assures him he is and that he is going back to the station.
D-FENS then asks the question the whole film revolves around:
“How did that happen? I did everything they told me to.”
Possibly realising it’s all over for him and only years in prison await, possibly just wanting to be a smart arse one last time, D-FENS pulls a toy gun and Pendergrast shoots him dead. He also decides not to retire to the shitty town with the old bridge, finally standing up to his overbearing wife.
His life is renewed while D-FENS’ is over - he dies a bewildered, violent, angry, frightening curse on anyone near him. He can’t believe it but it’s his reality.
It wasn’t a massive hit when it came out. It really couldn’t be. Coming out in the same year as polished cookie cutters like Indecent Proposal and Mrs Doubtfire, it wasn’t the slick, by-the-numbers escapism so popular at the time. Quite the opposite! It was gritty and uncomfortable and gets darker and darker as it goes. Its universe is dark and pessimistic. Its realities and their payoffs are brutal.
Like all works of art, though, it stays with you. You ruminate on it later - in this case thirty years later. You consider D-FENS’ arc - and you also ask yourself “was he the bad guy?”
Well, let’s look at him.
He is angry. The world just isn’t doing what he wants it to do. He’s unemployed, driving a shitty car, separated from his family. He’s been a ticking time bomb for years.
He was entitled. He felt it was his right to see his daughter even though his wife clearly says “you can’t come here!” You get the feeling he has a legal restriction, but in the film, like in life, they only go so far. If the guy just wants to straight out ignore it and risk the consequences, what’s to stop him? We never quite find out what caused this restriction, though we do see a home movie where D-Fens is at an earlier birthday party and becomes angry at his wife and daughter for not doing exactly what he wants exactly when he wants it.
He is ego-centric - AF! Every situation he comes across is all about him. Every interaction, every word - it’s about what is going on in his own head. The fact breakfast is no longer being served at the hamburger joint is a personal affront! Actually, Pendergrast starts off in a samilr place - but by the end of the film he’s joking with a kid.
He is violent. Though he probably wouldn’t see himself that way, punchin’ and smashin’ just comes so damn easy to D-FENS. It starts with baseball bats - but he’s soon firing rocket launchers at inanimate objects out of pure anger and resentment. And, as a direct result…
He is dangerous. He doesn’t want to just take it anymore - and who can blame him - but he has zero idea of any healthy, reasonable or, for that matter, effective way to respond. He knows what he was taught and is unable to absorb anything else.
But that’s toxic masculinity isn’t it? There is one main reason he simply can not or will not learn or take another path. If he does he won’t be on top, the one calling the shots, the head of the household, the king of the hill. He should be up there, godammit, and it is entirely the failing of the unfair world that he isn’t. As his anger and darkness grows, he gets more and more violent and dangerous, to the point where he pursues and involves his wife and innocent daughter in an armed standoff. Some protector. When the pennies drop that he will now be held to account for his day, he opts for suicide by cop. He simply isn’t able to face the consequences.
How did that happen?
If we look at what D-FENS does during the day, he is expressing long term disappointments, pains and anguish in physical form. Psychologists will call it acting out. All that repressed grievance and his inability to do anything about it just make the violence so easy for him.
I think that’s a similar position in which a lot of guys, young and old, find themselves - albeit without firearms, without Robert Duvall and, sadly, without Barbara Hershey. That difficulty, when the world just doesn’t conform to what has been taught to us, especially when that teaching gave us an expectation of some kind of position, some sort of prestige that the world flatly refuses to offer up. The disappointment, the affront, the anger. It shouldn’t be this way - yet, it is.
But then comes the kicker. It’s usually our own inability to work out what to do about it - what positive action, internally or externally, we can take that leads to the acting out. Doubly so, when that action might involve us modifying, broadening and generally brightening up our own ideas. The perceived disloyalty of looking at our own forebears, our own leaders, and saying “I think you got it wrong.” We can look at everybody else’s forebears and tell them with great detail how they got it wrong, yet we can’t do it to our own, even though their errors become ours.
But we owe that to them. They started the journey towards a better life, for them and their families. But they were human, like you and me. They weren’t infallible - even if they claimed to be. We owe it to the preceding generation who were doing the best with what they had to do the same - and that will definitely involve a few course corrections. The odd modification.
D-FENS couldn’t do that. I see many men around the world who are similarly incapable - now, but maybe not always. I also see a few being conned shamelessly by the likes of Tait and Trump as a result. I see the retreat into dubious rabbit holes and carefully crafted fantasy worlds where they are still completely right and it’s everyone else that has the problems. I see them steadily ceasing to function in the real world. I see that making them angry and resentful. I await the falling down.
It’s such a great film. The creeping darkness, the fragmentation of one man’s world in such a complete fashion, the dark humour, Douglas and Duvall’s contrasting performances… Barbara Hershey… but mainly Duvall and Douglas. To me, the “message” of D-FENS is to be a Pendergrast in a world of D-FENS’. Be the one who evolves, changes, learns and adapts despite the overt crappiness in the world around him, and the demons in his own soul. Pendergrast ends up as a protector, a force for good and renewed as a person - D-FENS ends up an anachronistic blight who dies alone with a water pistol in his hand.
