In 1993, an issue in Newsweek centred on the topic of white male paranoia. Reading the central article thirty years later, it remains one of the most provocative issues as it covers a deeply loaded topic, which is that white males remain a dominant force in Western culture and have now played a victim in a multiracial society that continues to progress. The piece’s author David Gates claims that white males tend to be ignorant, incurious and privileged, and are at worst, at a war against everybody else. This kind of perception continues to have significant cultural sway among legacy publications and internet blogs. and anyone who has read this kind of takedown before will be familiar with some of the tropes presented in the piece. One of which is that white males are aware of their inherent flaws, and refuse to address that. The second is that if they do, this large demographic is more likely to take it on their own terms, and eventually lean towards fringe ideologies. They talk about the negative portrayals of white males on TV, black-on-black crime, etc. The author implies that rhetoric means that they are going to harm others, particularly other races. But it also refers to William D-Fens Foster, a character from Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down, who was on the cover of the issue and serves as the piece’s inspiration.
William Foster is a white-collar defence engineer in his late 30s living in Los Angeles. Played by Michael Douglas, Foster is bitterly divorced and has long tried to get in contact with his estranged daughter, despite being placed on a restraining order by his ex-wife. During a heated day, Foster gets stuck in traffic and abandons his car to contact his former family. But this is only the beginning of his meltdown, as he sequentially unleashes his rage against, but is not limited to; a Korean convenience store owner, two Hispanic gang members, a fast food franchise manager, a man waiting at a phone booth and a construction worker. Each of these happened irrationally, as we witness a man, a product of the Cold War era, indirectly respond to the rapid change that Los Angeles is undergoing.
Falling Down was polarising upon its release and continues to be controversial to this day. Initial reviews have called out Schumacher for somehow endorsing this character’s antics. Gene Siskel described it as “intellectually sloppy” and slammed Michael Douglas for playing a “revenge-of-the-nerds fantasy,” but his At The Movies co-host Roger Ebert defended Falling Down, saying that “it would be a shame if it was watched on a superficial level,” meaning that it is the onus is not on Schumacher or Douglas, but the professional critics who are tasked to interpret it in good faith.
The film’s current reception since its release has remained the same, if not intensified. April Wolfe, a screenwriter for the 2019 Black Christmas remake, praised the film in LA Weekly for being morally complex, while Glenn Kenny has labelled it “a proto-MAGA parable.” But both retrospectives take a painstaking attempt to connect it with right-wing movements, whether it’s the dread of Donald Trump or men's rights activism. But depiction does not always mean endorsement and dismissing the film’s value because the character reminds you of the most hateful people on the planet would mean refusing to grapple with the fact that it was a product of its time, containing a grain of truth that remain complicated for the viewer.
Falling Down was shot in the midst of the LA Riots, and was released in the aftermath. These events have been disruptive in its development and caused further delays to production before it wrapped up right after.
There are many scenes associated with the riots, one of which involved Foster’s altercation with the Korean grocer. At the time, the tensions between Korean Americans and African Americans were at an emotional peak. The manslaughter of Latarsha Harlins by store owner Soon Ja Du preceded the LA Riots; and during the uprisings, these immigrants armed themselves on the top of their venues’ roofs, whenever the police were absent. The Korean Grocers Association took offence to the depiction of a grocer. Likewise, organisations like the Korean American Coalition and the Asian Pacific American Resolution Dispute Centre, threatened to boycott the film, leading Warner Bros to cancel any distribution of Falling Down to Korea. The head of the Asian Pacific American Resolution Dispute Centre asked why the film wants them to identify with Foster, who rampaged the convenience store, simply because the price of a can of Coca-Cola going up, and refusing to comply with the owner’s rules.
During this moment, Foster is a character whose existence will have a grain of truth for a specific subsect of people. Detractors are correct to point out that his remarks towards the grocer - where he tells him that “you come to my country, you take my money and you don’t even have the grace to speak my language” - were indeed racist. But he’s also in the position of noticing the tough impact of inflation affecting ordinary Americans like him. Screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith is not demanding the audience to openly root for Foster, but so much as to understand him. Throughout Falling Down, D-Fens is the main antagonist, as his violent shadow self slowly reveals itself until the bitter end. Schumacher and Roe Smith make it explicitly clear that while his responses to legitimate issues like economic displacement and the emptiness of consumerism are direct overcorrections, being unaware that he’s taking it too far. It’s all fair and good to complain about construction being unduly done, but holding a rocket launcher does not present you as a likeable person.
Race certainly plays a significant theme in Falling Down, but D-Fens does not always think about it first and foremost. He is seen signalling solidarity with an African-American redundant employee being arrested for protesting near a corporation. The man dresses in Foster’s satire and holds up a sign saying “I am not economically viable,” which is something he relates to. But one particular moment that demonstrates his moral limits is when he becomes disgusted with a neo-Nazi shopkeeper, who openly discriminates towards everyone, whether it’s a gay couple or a Latina female officer. As he refuses to go along with the shopkeeper’s ideology, Foster asserts himself by saying that America is the land of the free and ultimately kills him. One might argue that the shopkeeper deserves it for his retched views and the way he treats other people, but Falling Down presents Foster as someone going past the law and losing all sense of order that he once upheld.
Detective Martin Prendergast, played by Robert Duvall is presented as an antidote to Foster, whose lives aren’t that dissimilar. Both have their dignity taken from them, but looking at Schumacher’s visual direction, you would think otherwise. Predengast is often surrounded by colleagues who have some degree of respect for him during his final day at the Los Angeles Police Department, whereas an unemployed Foster walks alone during sweltering heat looking for his estranged family. Yet by design, the detective is not compellingly defined as his counterpart. He is presented as the true audience surrogate, someone who endured the brutal nature of life and comes out looking sound. The intertwining between Foster and Prendergast does make the film’s pacing inconsistent, but it allows an interesting contrast between both characters.
Foster sees the idealism in normalcy, as we see him watch old videos of him and his family happy together, only to have it spoiled by his tantrums. These reminders become painful to him, revealing that he wasn’t the perfect father he thought he was. What makes this character so tragic, yet also threatening to the film detractors, is how he looks average. In a world of casual and carefree residents, he stubbornly abides by the white-collar appearance that was once considered to be the ideal man in a past era. He is unaware that he is causing harm, not just to his family, but to anyone else that irritates him. As soon as Foster finally reaches his daughter and Predergast confronts him, he doesn’t realize that he’s being the bad guy.
Falling Down comes from a lineage of movies with male antiheroes and villains who are alienated by the world they live in. But what distinguishes Foster from Travis Bickle or the Joker, is that he’s mild-mannered and is less prone to become fanatical. He’s capable of sympathising with others but has trouble restraining his emotions. Foster is far from a political ideologue but is motivated by the loss of modernity he once had benefitted from that later cultivated the greediness of others in its current age. Foster is controversial with some critics, because of their fear that audiences will respond to the film by feeling validated by him and mindlessly ignoring his faults.
Michael Douglas has called his performance as Foster one of his favourites and his father Kirk Douglas has defended it. In an interview commemorating the 30th anniversary, he didn’t mind if fans of the film reacted overzealously. And why wouldn’t they? Even if some take this interpretation too far, it does have a grain of truth. When it came out, the 90s saw a plethora of pop culture that questioned whether the American Dream was even real. The influence of Falling Down was felt following his release, as it inspired the character design of Frank Grimes, a one-time character from The Simpsons who appeared in the polarizing Homer’s Enemy. Like in Falling Down, the episode’s narrative layers are similarly complicated, as Frank Grimes served as a critique of Homer’s mediocrity, that Springfield’s absurd tolerance of his sloth drives him mad.
Roger Ebert’s review shows that Falling Down didn’t risk being the kind of film that validates anyone’s preconceived beliefs, because it’s hard to boil down through genre. As he notes:
Because the character is white, and many of his targets are not, the movie could be read as racist. I prefer to think of it as a reflection of the real feelings of a lot of people who, lacking the insight to see how political and economic philosophies have affected them, fall back on easy scapegoating. If you don't have a job and the Korean shop owner does, it is easy to see him as the villain. It takes a little more imagination to realize that you lost your job because of the greedy and unsound financial games of the go-go junk bond years.
Falling Down doesn’t endorse the white male rage that its fans and critics have recognized in themselves or through other people. It’s far from dangerous and nor is it manual for anyone to react to a world that doesn’t make sense. To make a reading of it based on a current-day culture war avatar does not make conversations better, but makes the viewer feel comfortable. There are more people like D-Fens that people are happy to avoid because it’s easier to point out how unstable they are and lost they are. Their issues aren’t properly addressed by the people who trust them, and hence, there will be more movies like Falling Down in the future.