We could gender swap it and go with, like, a Karen who snaps because her coupon doesn’t get accepted because it’s one day expired.
And she just snaps and starts running people over in her SUV, pulling a gun on her kid’s teacher because the teacher gave her son a D when the Karen believes her kid should have gotten an A.
I know that sounds pretty idiotic, but like, Michael Douglas snapped because he wasn’t able to get a McDonald’s breakfast at 9:31.
You can read “Falling Down” as this tragic story of a normal guy pushed too far. Or you can read it as an entitled Boomer gone off his rocker over trivial consumerist bullshit.
So much of the movie is couched in racist/classist undertones - Douglas losing his temper with Korean and Hispanic immigrants, retail service and blue-collar workers - while presenting the main character as this righteous force of white masculinity that can only be defeated by an even more righteous agent of Law & Order.
Describing William Foster in the same terms as Redditors describe upper-class middle aged white women is pretty on-the-nose.
I don’t think Foster is portrayed as heroic.
Sure, he picks fights with people/things many viewers would like to be fought, from street gangs to Nazis, from corporate bullshit to inflating prices. But he’s also shown to be unstable and dangerous even when he doesn’t want to be.
His very reason for being in the traffic jam that makes him start off on his rampage is that he can’t face the fact that neither his company nor his family want to deal with him.
The more the movie goes on the more it drives home the fact that Foster is not someone to look up to. He’s always been unstable and entitled and now he’s finally snapped.
The cop is shown as more heroic but is really just used as a vehicle for suicide by cop. A suicide that is clearly Foster telling the easy way out of a life he can’t handle anymore.
I take Falling Down as a deconstruction of the kind of power fantasy we get when things piss us off. Sure, we think it’d be great to just blow up what we don’t like but the movie shows what kind of person we’d have to be to actually do it.
Bravo. That’s exactly it. When he sees himself in his home videos being a total control freak, forcing his crying daughter onto the wooden horse he bought her, I think that’s when he realizes he is not fit for this world.
He isn’t intentionally portrayed as heroic in the movie, but a lot of MAGA adjacent people have come to see him as heroic.
MAGA and adjacent think Homelander was heroic. Their grasp on morality is tenuous at best. Violence over virtue is their only belief system, and if it hurts people, who cares, they go to church so they can’t be responsible for the consequences.
Folks like the idea of being a vigilante, but once you have a taste for using violence to get your way…
Didn’t he snap because he was in traffic to work and his AC broke, and then at a corner store, the clerk wouldn’t give him change so he could use a payphone? The McDonald scene is iconic, but by that part, he’s already smashed up a convenience store and stolen a gun from a gang, so he was beyond snapped.
so really, the only time he actually faced consequences for flipping out, was when he did it to a large corporation?
Yeah that tracks
No, it was when he nearly muder-suicided his ex-wife and daughter.
a Karen who snaps because her
soy lahttay accidently had oat milk which she actually ordered by the barrista was brown…sooo…
It would be really hard to make the movie today without making the main character MAGA and making the frustration of the main character far more of a farce than it was in the original movie.
Once you make the character MAGA, you’re going to be seen as pushing an agenda no matter what you do.
He was proto-MAGA in the film. We just didn’t have a name for it then. He was a engineer working for a defense contractor whose life fell apart because he was an asshole, and there was a peace dividend. Instead of embracing change, or reflecting on macro-level impacts, he goes apeshit and takes it out on fellow citizens who he views as being out of step with his vision of the world.
It’s telling because my maga stepfather sees him as a hero. And I just have to wonder if he’s ever seen the end of the film.
This is a shockingly common view of this movie. In fact, most media that features a villain protagonist tends to have this problem. Look at Breaking Bad, Fight Club, or American Psycho.
They present the reasons why the villain makes the decisions they do, in a way that is sympathetic to the audience, then it turns into a bit of a power fantasy before their fall at the end. A lot of people seem to look at the power fantasy portion as fighting against an unjust world, rather than an abuse of normal people.
This is why Friendship is my favorite portrayal of toxic masculinity in cinema. It’s making the same points as a Fight Club, but the people who would normally identify with the protagonist craving a “macho” world are made to feel deeply uncomfortable instead.
I believe this was the point of Daenerys Targaryen, I think GRRM wanted to see at what point we would have to change our minds about her being good and righteous. There are many examples of redemption arcs, but she was the opposite.
The problem with Daenerys is that her turn wasn’t well written, so it didn’t feel earned.
In the TV-show, no, it was rushed and didn’t make a lot of sense. In the books, I guess we will never know, but the foundation is there all the way back to “Skahaz, I have changed my mind. Question the man sharply.” etc.
It would be really hard to make the movie today without making the main character MAGA
That’s one angle. I could just as easily see him as a scratched-liberal. Someone akin to Bradley Whitford in Get Out, who brags about having voted for Obama (twice!) and spouts indignation at corporate greed and military policing. But as the movie progresses, he becomes increasingly callous towards equally put-upon neighbors, family, and his working-class peers.
By the end, he’s demonstrating sneering contempt for a litany of people whom he blames for the current state of the nation - prideful gays, immigrants who won’t assimilate properly, minorities he repeatedly accuses of being anti-white, ungrateful young people, worthless civil bureaucrats, the homeless who refuse to get a job, the middle managers who refuse to give him a job, the vile foreigners who are stealing all the jobs - until he’s expressing all the same grievances as MAGA, but still reserving open contempt for anyone in a red hat.
A man driven to the point of ultimate alienation and self-destruction, because he cannot get off his high horse long enough to show compassion or comradery with anyone else.
So MAGA?
Eh. Think about how Ayn Rand hated Libertarians.
They pretty much just did this. Please don’t watch it.
Armie Hammer? Yeah I’ll pass
AND Uwe Boll!
Oh shit, they’re letting the cannibal guy make movies again?
Some of that plot sounds like You Were Never Really Here which is a great movie though, although less of a critique of modern society like Falling Down is, and more about a guy destroying a human trafficking network.
Oh yeah. Thing is both really applied back then as well.
Cathartic revenge fantasy. Prime time for a remake. But neither the A or B storyline would be as well written, because writers have lost a lot of skill
Yeah, it’s totally the writers’ fault. Definitely not the executives that design movies by committee to extract maximum profit. No, Sir!
