I don’t like to use the word “God” because it’ overused in the United States … it’s been politicized and has become an attack–like if you don’t believe in Jesus, you’re not one of us!
–Falling Down director Joel Schumacher
Bar none, the movie that readers ask me to review more than any other is the 1993 drama-tragedy Falling Down. In this post, those readers will get their wish. Be forewarned, however, that my take on this film may reinforce the maxim “Be careful what you wish for.”
Almost universally hailed in the new counterculture as a based and red-pilled movie, Falling Down chronicles the modern odyssey of William Foster, a former defense contractor running the gauntlet of early 90s Los Angeles to make it home for his daughter’s birthday party.
This simple setup takes a sinister turn when the audience finds out that Foster recently lost his job and his family. His ex-wife, who has a restraining order against him for no established reason, calls the police to stop him from seeing his child.
But the LAPD is the least obstacle in Foster’s way. At every turn, he meets resistance imposed by the disintegrating social trust of a diversifying metropolis. Foster always tries to reason his way out of conflict first, but when his opposition inevitably proves unreasonable, he responds with excessive force as his second, and final, resort. Foster plays no favorites. Whether it’s a seedy Korean shop owner overcharging for a Coke, a couple of Mexican gangbangers shaking him down for trespassing on their turf, or a Neo-Nazi caricature just being batshit gratuitously nasty, Foster shows he is no respecter of persons. All receive a brutal comeuppance.
Credit where it’s due, Falling Down does accurately portray the rampant disorders caused by a predatory finance sector feeding on the middle class, elites importing incompatible diversity to crowd out less tractable white male Christians, and police becoming enforcers for both. What everybody misses is that the movie comes down squarely on the elites’ side.
Propaganda expert Devon Stack lays bare Falling Down‘s subtle yet devastatingly effective anti-white and anti-male message in his incisive review.
Perceptive readers will have noted Joel Schumacher’s self-applied Witch Test at the start of this post. His unabashed failure should leave you with no illusions about where he stands. Like Foster’s ex-wife and the mercenary with a badge she enlists to kill him, Schumacher’s deft propaganda piece readily admits that straight, white, Christian men are being pushed into the dustbin of history. And it delights in asserting that’s where they belong.
Falling Down works marvelously as a study in how the Death Cult has conditioned its main audience to hate themselves for decades. You can learn a lot about the enemy from watching it. Just don’t pay for it.
> soyboy voice
> no mention of the Seven Years’ War or the resulting debt that Americans caused for Britain
> *nervous laughter* “Don’t call me anti-semetic. And don’t call me homophobic, either.” *sweats profusely*
This is why Joel Schumacher gets away with it. We’re so fragile yet proud that your opening paragraph even includes a subtle trigger warning.
It was added due to my experiences sharing this opinion in the field.
And you made the right call. The problem is that the Internet “right” can become just as triggered as the SJWs.
This is one of those movies that everyone tells me I would like that I never bothered to watch, partially because I knew what the ending was and the something about it subconsciously hit me like a freight train, warding me off from it.
“Wait, he dies after all that?! Then that means he’s a loser.”
So if he is a loser, then why is this story being told? Why am I supposed to identify with and like it? The only way it could get more obvious with what they were doing is if they cast someone like Clint Eastwood in the role.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again that if you want an accurate story of the downfall of modern man and his hollowing out into a serving tray for consumerist goods for easy destruction then the best example of that is American Psycho. It thoroughly examines the entire process of what modernism does, and it never once comes across as browbeating the audience with the message.
Stories like this and Fight Club give me a message like “Yeah, you are being ruled and destroyed that people who hate you, but that’s okay. In fact, embrace it. You are already dead.”
How is that supposed to be inspiring?
Fight Club is another film that’s widely lionized in the dissident Right. I’d never thought of it the way you put it before, but I’m overdue to revisit it.
It deserves some praise for correctly identifying the problem with modern men, but deserves derision for its rather juvenile prescription for it.
On a side note, seeing the debt industrial complex get toppled is more cathartic than ever.
Remember that Tyler Durden plays on the insecurities of the other Fight Club members, calling them “slaves in white collars.” If Fight Club (the movie) gets anything right, it’s how it shows what happens when men don’t know any constructive ways to use their natural, God-given traits.
It’s one of those movies I saw when I was younger that struck me as “wrong” somehow, but I could never put it into words. Sort of like Pleasantville or American Beauty, which were both shown in school, by the way.
I don’t know about Pleasantville or American Beauty, but Fight Club and Falling Down have something in common: a homosexual at the helm. As gay men, both Schumacher and Palahniuk have rejected authentic masculinity, so it isn’t surprising to find that their movies about MGTOW (before it was a thing, I grant) are actually passive-aggressive subversions of masculinity.
I don’t know Pleasantville, but the idea of showing schoolchildren American Beauty is simply astounding to me.
My (very pseudo) Catholic elementary school was strict about not the class not seeing certain comedies because they were too dark. It was G rated or nothing.
My public schooling in upper grades had no qualms about anything short of pornography, unless you brought in magazines or tapes yourself. I suppose the difference is who brought in the filth.
Like JD: never saw it, never wanted to see it. The previews made it clear that it was not carrying a positive message for anyone. “Dude goes crazy and fights back against the System” is Hollywood speak for “Conspiracy Theorist”.
When Hollywood releases positive cultural messages, it’s by accident, not on purpose.
“It’s not happening, and you totally deserve it!” the Movie
I consider Falling Down and Fight Club as kind of “pagan movies” in that they nail what is wrong with the world but have nothing meaningful to say about how to fix those problems (just as how pagans were quite aware about the problem of sin and corruption, but had no good answers about how to solve them. As Chesterton said, they knew they were dirty but didn’t know how to become clean.)
Falling Down is different than Fight Club in that moral is pretty clear cut: D-Fens is in the wrong, the right thing to do is to suck it up and get screwed by the system like Detective Pendergrast.
What’s interesting about it is the comparison between what it could do then and what would be done now. There is no way that a modern Falling Down would let us even begin to sympathize with Foster ESPECIALLY in terms of the question of whether he was abusive to his wife in the past. The film leaves the question about where, if anywhere, D-Fens passed the point of no return.
The scene I find most interesting is the “not economically viable” scene. It’s the one that humanizes Foster the most, both showing the care he has for his daughter (buying the present) while also drawing parallels between him and a black man being screwed by the banks. It’s past the point where we are supposed to be questioning D-Fens’s behavior; certainly I don’t think we’re supposed to believe that shooting up a phone booth or taking a fast food joint hostage are justified (even if they are cathartic.) It doesn’t really fit the narrative at the end stressed at the end which is that D-Fens was in the wrong and that he shouldn’t have even gotten started on his actions that day.
The movie strikes me as one made by an artist fighting against his muse. In order for the movie to work it must address real problems that Foster is facing, but Schumacher doesn’t want to actually address those problems and would prefer to attack the audience for sympathizing with Foster. But he wasn’t able to completely commit to that narrative since developing Foster into a realistic character made a better story. Similarly Foster identifies (and Michael Douglas has said the same in interviews) that his point of no return was killing the Nazi store owner, despite that character being a ridiculous caricature that we can’t possibly be meant to sympathize with.
I guess what I’m saying is that the movie definitely is propaganda, and that most of the “based” content was in there to be defeated later. But it ends up doing a worse job at propaganda than was probably intended, since the story demanded otherwise. It’s mainly interesting as a comparison to modern entertainment: there was actually an attempt to make a coherent story with real characters. Now we would be assured that Dfens is evil from the start and the only complaints he would have would be cartoonish racial conspiracy theories that no one could agree with.
I’ve always seen it as “DFens was right and Schumacher knew he was right but was uncomfortable admitting that so he had to pull the BS about his anger issues making him the villain at the last moment”
If Falling Down was intended as a propaganda piece against white males then Joel Schumacher is a failure as a storyteller.
“But muh authorial intent! You’re not educated!”—English majors
I mean…
Devon’s line about “they carry on like Foster never existed” reminds me of your line in the Gen Y tale about how nobody ever saw Scott again and nobody really cared.
And for the same reason. Only his ex noticed his absence, and only because it interrupted her resource extraction. She stopped caring when she got all his assets.
You’ve identified another Gen Y vice: defaulting to a transactional view of relationships.
Even at the time of release, the media very much portrayed it as a film of “Take that, White Males! Your time is OVER!” It did reasonably well because a lot of the marketing sold it as a frustrated man who’s had enough of modern BS, but that also provoked reactions that the marketing was racist.