I particularly like the scene with the nazi shop owner. The protagonist obviously shares many of the same fascist views and the nazi even tells him “we’re the same” but, because he remembers from high school history that “Nazis = bad”, he sees himself as better based purely on symbolism and performance.
Douglas' character even worked for a defense contractor prior to being laid off in case the parallels weren't on the nose enough, lol.
An otherwise solid film that, like many other films (They Live springs to mind), the chuds chronically misinterpret as sympathetic to their false consciousness despite the film literally spelling it out for them how dumb they are at the end.
I think its because the film does ultimately frame Foster as a tragic figure, especially in the end. His actions and choices in the film are reprehensible but they come from an understandable anxiety that he has no path forward that resembles a life of dignity or stability. He's not unlike Joker's Arthur Fleck in that way.
Yeah, and the reason is that they're dumb as fuck. Falling Down is not about how mean the world is for poor, white dudes, it exposes their hypocrisy, and Douglas' character is not the hero of that movie, Duvall's is.
Douglas' character always came off to me as a pathetic reactionary as well, and to me it was always intuitively clear that it was his material conditions and false consciousness that drove him over the edge (even back when i was just a kid and wouldn't have been able to name or fully explain these concepts), but there's people who empathize with the marines from Starship Troopers unironically or think that Rohrschach was the good guy, so it doesn't surprise me that this character gets idolized like that.
It's also worth noting that i haven't seen the film in literal decades. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it was full of fishy takes and problematic assumptions in the subtext which would be glaringly obvious now, but just flew over my head in the early 90s (like, i dimly remember some 10 year old black kid being able to explain to Douglas' character how a recoilless rifle works, which at least implies some nasty, ridiculous "super predator" shit if you ask me).
empathize with the marines from Starship Troopers
Empathizing with people who get fed into a meat grinder for absolutely no reason?
Nah, there's people who fully buy into the propaganda in the film. People who get hyped up about feeding themselves into the meat grinder.
Duvall rocks in that movie and it’s the perfect use of “cop pulls the shit job on the day before his retirement” trope.
Me as a young chud shithead: "Falling Down is great and I love reading people's discussions of it."
Me as a college liberal: "Falling Down is bad and I refuse reading discussions of it."
Me as a working leftist: "Falling Down is great and I refuse reading discussions of it."
I remember it being a fun movie when i watched it in like tenth grade. I thought parts of it were funny in an unintional/bad movie sort of way. From what i remember of it, i can understand how it'd be seen as reactionary and I'm not too surprised to hear it's popular with chuds. I choose to remember it for the scene where he kills the military surplus guy after it becomes clear he's a nazi.
i came here just to link the exact same video. It's great, i think the movie is pretty clever but genuine reactionaries wouldn't see the criticism because their beliefs are too similar to the protagonist.
Except that's not what the review says, and that the film is exposing the nonsense behind reactionary minds.
What i liked about Sorry To Bother You was not so much the lack of subtlety as that it didn't only show problems, but suggested actual praxis as a solution. If you only show the problem and portray it as something inevitable that just can't be helped, you normalize what you're criticizing. You get people used to it, you create media that, in Mark Fischer's words, "performs its anti-capitalism for you". STBY didn't do that. STBY showed workers that organizing and practicing solidarity across marginalized groups is the way to go, while becoming a class traitor is something you'll end up regretting. That's an extremely rare thing in contemporary media, because superficial, ultimately performative and recuperatable criticism is much easier to neuter and sanitize.
I used to have a fun collection of sound clips on my dialup internet computer in high school, and one of them is Douglas's character breaking with the Nazi by saying, in a slow, measured tone,
"We are not... the same. I'm an American and you're a sick asshole."
Never failed to make me laugh.
relatedly, now that McDonkles serves breakfast stuff for 24 hours, it's easy to keep calm about shit.
the Korean shopkeeper is one of the most racist caricatures I've ever seen in a movie
Haven't actually seen it but everything I've read makes it sound like a blatant mocking of reactionary white grievance. Too bad about the "no such thing as anti-war movies" thing.
It’s got the same energy as Deathwish tbh.
A reactionary white dude snaps because of the unrepentant rot that is American Capitalism. The freeway is jammed, he lost his cushy defense industry job, the price of coke is too high, etc.
I don’t know if they used this dude as an inspiration for Douglas’s character but he reminds me of a mass shooter from the 80s that smoked a ton of people at a McDicks down in San Ysidro, California.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Ysidro_McDonald%27s_massacre
I thought it was a good movie because it kinda shows how chuds see themselves, or maybe it's about white panic, or maybe it's about how capital completely destroys you idk im not that smart
I've seen this movie a few times, its ... good but easy to see why chuds and misanthropes get tingly feelings about the rampaging guy.
