Essay: 'Falling Down' (1993)

One-man riot

Photo: Warner Bros.

Michael Douglas spent the late 80s and early 90s playing flawed white men. In the 1989 black comedy The War Of The Roses, he was a wealthy, self-centered middle-aged yuppie divorcing his equally loathsome wife. He’s a jerk, but so is she. Kathleen Turner co-starred as his spouse, which was their third movie together.

Turner is the opposite of Douglas as an actor. Sultry. Cool. Glamourous. Certain and formidable.

Douglas won an Oscar for portraying a money-grubbing multi-millionaire rogue in the slicked-back hair stock broker drama Wall Street. That same year, 1987, Douglas played a husband who cheats on his wife and is stalked by the woman he seduced in the moralistic thriller Fatal Attraction.

Glenn Close should have earned an Oscar for playing the spurned lover who goes psycho on Douglas’ dorky philanderer. Close elevates an underwritten role, but her character is still a bogeyman. Fatal Attraction was an R-rated cautionary tale that taught a generation of fully grown men an obvious lesson: adultery is bad.

Douglas got hot and heavy with Sharon Stone in 1992’s Basic Instinct, a silly erotic noir with plenty of sex and violence directed by sophisticated shlock master Paul Verhoeven. It made Stone a superstar and further cemented Douglas as Hollywood’s favorite aging male Baby Boomer, an actor capable of being a sincere — and sexy — slimeball.

The classic Douglas character of the time was a mild contradiction: 49% creep, 51% good guy. The other box office leads of that era were action stars like Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Harrison Ford, who would also pivot from time to time into prestige dramas.

Tom Cruise’s career took off with 1986’s Top Gun, and he quickly took a few defining serious roles right after that (I don’t count 1988’s super-serious bartender melodrama Cocktail as one of those roles.) But Cruise was a younger man. Douglas’ contemporaries were some of the great actors of the 70s, like Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino. It just so happened that Douglas didn’t become a big name until the end of the macho conservative Reagan years.

If well-off whitebread fortysomething post-war masculinity had a mascot, it was Michael Douglas. He symbolized the ambitions and selfishness of the hedonistic Baby Boomers. That generation started as flower children preaching peace, love, and understanding and then inherited the world’s wealthiest nation from their parents.

I don’t want to suggest that all the spawns of the so-called Greatest Generation betrayed their youthful ideals, but treasure and might tend to corrupt. This is the human condition. Jesus taught generosity and charity, yet the Catholic Church is a multinational business organization that makes billions of dollars in revenue annually.

Douglas’ characters always seemed to have fun, even if they had to suffer for their moral choices. This is what maturity looked like to the Boomers, who spent their youths smoking grass and enjoying the sexual revolution. Maturity was watching dramas about yuppies paying the piper, and Douglas figuratively died for the sins of former hippies-turned-capitalists on more than one occasion. His anti-heroes were more hero than anti.

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And then, in 1993, Douglas starred in director Joel Schumacher’s chaotic Falling Down, a wild ride that starts as a dark comedy and then flirts with action before veering into grim social commentary.

It’s a movie about a nameless man with a 1950s crew cut who has had enough. When we first meet him, he’s seething in traffic, surrounded by people of color stuck in their cars. A pair of gay men bicker behind him in a convertible. Then he snaps and steals a bag of guns and goes on a rampage throughout Los Angeles, determined to crash the birthday party of his estranged daughter.

Near the end of the movie, he’s trapped on a pier. Robert Duvall, a good cop, on his last day on the job, asks him to put his gun down. “Let’s go meet some nice policemen,” Duvall’s character says. “They’re good guys.” Douglas replies, shocked, “I’m the bad guy?”

This is the most lucid moment in an otherwise confused and sweaty movie that isn’t exactly clear to the audience what it is: satire? A polemic? A monster movie? All of those? One thing is sure: Douglas’ character is a bad guy. He’s abusive. Violent. He is so self-centered he can’t see that he’s spent an entire day terrorizing his ex-wife, their kid, and an entire city. Petty resentments consume Douglas’s character, and destroying the world is the only solution that makes sense to him.

The recession of the early 90s is referenced during a vignette between Douglas’ madman and a furious black man protesting a bank with a sign that reads “Not Economically Viable.” Douglas’ white man briefly connects with this man from afar while he’s being arrested. They share the same anxieties.

But only one of them is wearing handcuffs.

The Los Angeles of Falling Down is a sprawling city on the edge, slowly recovering from six days of arson, looting, and violence the year before. The L.A. riots of 1992 were sparked when four LAPD cops were acquitted of the brutal beating of Rodney King, an unarmed black man they pulled over. The attack was videotaped, and it played on cable news over and over again. That footage is still unnerving to watch. To many, the video was evidence of police brutality. But it wasn’t enough. The officers who nearly killed King still got away with it.

That injustice was too much to bear. The community exploded. Falling Down isn’t concerned with recent history or racial politics. The cops are tough, but they’re not the problem. The problem is drugs. Guns. Gangs. And for one day, a white man thinks the system is unfair to him and only him.

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Falling Down was a subversive movie for its time—and it still is. Schumacher deserves credit for sneaking a direct criticism of straight white men into a high-concept and heavy-handed big-budget crime dramedy, which is probably the best way to describe it.

The movie isn’t funny, but that doesn’t stop Schumacher from trying to please any white dudes who may not quite “get” the point yet. There’s a scene where Douglas’ character uses a machine gun to intimidate an unhelpful fast food restaurant manager that’s played for laughs. What’s the deal with service workers making minimum wage, amirite?

There’s another scene where a street kid teaches Douglas’ lunatic how to use a grenade launcher, which is also supposed to be comedic. Ha, ha, this little black boy knows how to use military weaponry?

Douglas’ character — unemployed, unloved, and pissed off — is an updated version of Travis Bickle, the alienated vigilante played by Robert DeNiro in Martin Scorcese’s masterpiece Taxi Driver from 1976. Instead of being a listless vet who can’t connect with others, Douglas’s character is a dad. A suburbanite. A professional. Bickle escapes into the New York City night in a taxi cab, and Douglas’ character escapes from his car into the bright, hot L.A. morning.

He does have a name, but in the credits, Douglas’ everyman is referred to by his vanity license plate: D-FENS. You see, he worked in the defense industry before getting fired. His real name is Bill Foster, but that doesn’t matter. He is a mass shooter. A criminal. A monster. Douglas’ character thinks he lives by a code and murders a racist, homophobic Nazi sympathizer who tries to help him. The Nazi thinks he and Douglas’ character are the same, and Douglas’ character disagrees.

But they are the same.

They are both men willing to transform their rage and hate into violence; at that point, it doesn’t matter who you’re unleashing it on. Usually, it’s the vulnerable—those who can’t fight back. Douglas’ character could just as easily kill his wife and kid, but Schumacher and screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith give him a moment of grace before justice is served. They allow him to see the wreckage. The consequences of his actions. A sobbing child, an ex who hates and fears him. He is shown the truth. He is the bad guy. No one ever thinks they’re the bad guy.

When it comes to doing the right thing, the most important question you can ask yourself is, “Am I the bad guy?” Because maybe you are.

I don’t know if Schumacher and Smith knew they were making a movie that would stay relevant for the next thirty years. This is the Golden Age of Indignant White Men. The primary political question of today is, “Why are economically comfortable straight white men so angry?” And the answer is usually a variation on “because someone, somewhere, who isn’t a straight white man is having a nice life.”

I think it helps that Schumacher and Smith treat Douglas’ character sympathetically for most of the movie. We see the world through his eyes, and his world is one where he doesn’t fit in. It’s a world full of muscular gay men, Latina cops, and corporations looking to fleece the little guy. It’s a changing world, and Douglas’ character sticks out like a sore, nerdy thumb.

I recently rented Falling Down. I ignored it when it first came out because I was young and not interested in mad dads. The movie was a modest hit, but I had better things to do. That changed last week when I had nothing better to do than watch Falling Down for the first time.

It is not a perfect film. There are brief flashes of brilliance and long stretches of slick superficiality. The cinematography is superb; L.A. is broken, crowded, and beaten down by endless sunshine. The movie is a mess of themes and tones. Duvall’s subplot is pointless. He’s about to retire, his wife is crazy, and they lost a child long ago. I suppose he represents the nice, loyal guy. Which is whatever; I’d watch Duvall eat tacos for two hours. Douglas’ performance is confusing, too. Is he a holy clown? A Joker-like psycho? A victim? Bad guys always think they’re the victim.

I suppose it’s difficult to play an allegorical figure, but Douglas imbues him with his signature mix of charm and sleaze. But he nails his character’s tragic realization in the final act. He is surprised and hurt. “I’m the bad guy?”

Yeah, you are. Sorry.

I don’t know if Douglas knew at the time that he was critiquing his previous roles. In Falling Down, a Baby Boomer lashes out for no good reason. Maybe he thought he deserved more from this life? Who knows. But to watch Falling Down in 2024 is to recognize that the lead character is a fed-up middle-aged, middle-class cog who wants America to be great again, whatever that means.

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Photo: MGM Studios