Folks like the idea of being a vigilante, but once you have a taste for using violence to get your way…
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.
jbrains@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 3 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 3 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 3 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 2 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.