Submitted 4 hours ago by Patnou@lemmy.world to [deleted]
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.
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 - 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.
They pretty much just did this. Please don’t watch it.
Arnie Hammer? Yeah I’ll pass
Oh shit, they’re letting the cannibal guy make movies again?
AND Uwe Boll!
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.
Cathartic revenge fantasy. Prime time for a remake.
Yeah, it’s totally the writers’ fault. Definitely not the executives that design movies by committee to extract maximum profit. No, Sir!
Oh yeah. Thing is both really applied back then as well.
bizarroland@lemmy.world 3 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.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 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.
jbrains@sh.itjust.works 11 minutes ago
Folks like the idea of being a vigilante, but once you have a taste for using violence to get your way…
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 1 hour 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.
bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 hours ago
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.
jpreston2005@lemmy.world 1 hour 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
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 43 minutes ago
soy lahttay accidently had oat milk which she actually ordered by the barrista was brown…sooo…