A Liberal
Dose
April 6,
2023
Troy D.
Smith
“Falling
Down: What a 30-Year-Old Movie Tells Us About Today”
Recently, I used that famous blue/white dress photo to
demonstrate how hard it is to really see something from someone else’s
perspective. It’s not impossible, however, as our own catalogue of experiences
and knowledge grows over time. I absolutely saw that photo as white in 2015 -to
my surprise, it now appears blue to me. The facts have not changed, but I have.
I used the whole thing as a tool to explain why some
white conservatives are unable to see the racism that other people do. My
friend John Gottlied pointed out to me that my approach had been one-sided -and
I agreed. I actually had given a lot of thought to how it works in the other
direction, but being limited to 650 words sometimes prevents nuance or detail.
So now I am going to use a tool of my own trade -the study of popular culture
-to try to get at the other side. One of the best ways to understand people of
a certain era is to look at what entertained them, because it shows how they
felt.
In 1993, there was a movie called Falling Down. I think that very few people who saw it at the time
recognized just how deeply it was exposing the psyche of middle America, or how
prescient (or perhaps prophetic) it was. If you’re getting old like me, you may
remember the film, though few people under forty have heard of it.
It stars Michael Douglas as a defense engineer in Los
Angeles. When we meet him, he is stuck in traffic on a sweltering day, getting nowhere
when he clearly has somewhere to be. He kind of snaps (quietly at first), and
abandons his car and takes off through L.A. on foot. We later learn he was
fired from his job a month earlier because, with the Cold War ended, his job
was obsolete. He is also recently divorced and his wife has a restraining order
on him (fearing his anger), but he is determined to take his young daughter a
birthday gift. On his odyssey across the city, he descends deeper and deeper
into frustration and eventually rage at the way that city -and the country -is
changing, in his opinion for the worse. He ends up in a violent confrontation
with a Korean store-owner, whose accent he can’t understand and whom he
believes is overcharging for everything. He gets accosted by two Latino
muggers, whom he fights off. They come back with reinforcements and try to kill
him, but he is unscathed and winds up with their gym bag full of weapons. He
shoots up a fast-food restaurant that won’t serve him breakfast because he was
three minutes past the cutoff; encounters panhandlers, a sleazy Nazi who claims
to identify with his angers, and has confrontations with wealthy people whose
greed offends him.
He is presented in a sympathetic light. Disturbed as
you may be by his actions, it is impossible not to feel for Douglas. He feels
like the American Dream has been stripped away from him. “I’m the bad guy?” he
says at the end. “How did that happen? I did everything they told me to.” And
that’s just it. He is a leftover from a time that is passing. He feels
abandoned, mistreated, isolated, irrelevant, lied to (which he says often), and
hopeless. The detective trying to catch him, played by Robert Duvall,
understands -because he feels the same way. And so did a lot of people in the
audience. This movie could be called an expression of “white rage,” but it is
also middle-class rage, directed at both upper and lower classes. Douglas gains
a momentary feeling of power by lashing out against the system and burning it
down. His actions are wrong, but they come from a place of pain and do not make
him intrinsically evil.
Next time: Breaking Bad.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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