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.
bizarroland@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
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.
bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
jpreston2005@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
so really, the only time he actually faced consequences for flipping out, was when he did it to a large corporation?
Yeah that tracks
acockworkorange@mander.xyz 4 hours ago
No, it was when he nearly muder-suicided his ex-wife and daughter.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
a Karen who snaps because her
soy lahttay accidently had oat milk which she actually ordered by the barrista was brown…sooo…
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
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.
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
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.
acockworkorange@mander.xyz 4 hours ago
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.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 4 hours ago
He isn’t intentionally portrayed as heroic in the movie, but a lot of MAGA adjacent people have come to see him as heroic.
GreenBeard@lemmy.ca 3 hours ago
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.
jbrains@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Folks like the idea of being a vigilante, but once you have a taste for using violence to get your way…