Joel Schumacher’s take on white male privilege relevant

Director Joel Schumacher died this week. He was 80 years old and best known for bombastic, glitz and glamour over substance blockbusters such as St Elmo’s Fire and The Lost Boys. But there was a film he made in 1993, shot the year before in Los Angeles just a stone’s throw from the epicentre of the riots that engulfed the city in flames after the whitewashing of the verdict against the members of the LA police department who had savagely beaten truck driver Rodney King.

That film, written by actor and playwright Ebbe Roe Smith, was called Falling Down and, 27 years after its release and in the wake of its director’s death, it provides a fascinating, flawed but still pertinent examination of the fantasy wish-fulfilment of the frustrations of post-ColdWar white masculinity that speaks volumes about where the US finds itself today.

Michael Douglas plays a man known as D-Fens, the letters of the vanity plate on his car, who gets caught in a traffic jam on a sweltering day in the film’s opening sequence. The pressure of the daily commute, combined with a general dissatisfaction with still to be identified failures in his life and a violent reaction to those caught in the traffic around him, lead D-Fens to get out of his car and start walking. When he’s asked where he’s going, he replies: “Home. I’m going home.” And so begins the day-long journey of one madas-hell-man who won’t take it anymore, which offers a parable of the put-upon, hard-working white American male who, in spite of his privileges, sees nothing but a world pitted against his values at every turn.

From the Korean grocer whose store he demolishes in an argument over the price of a can of Coke; to the stereotyped Latino gangsters who refuse to let him sit on their turf and drink that Coke; the whimpering employees of a fast-food chain who tell him that it’s two minutes past breakfast serving time and he has to order lunch; a neo-Nazi who overly identifies with D-Fens as a soldier of white power; to a couple of stuffy, clown-pants golfers who give him a hard time when he tries to cut through their course

— everyone and everything is against him.

All the while, as he transforms from pencil protector-wearing, baseball batwielding, angry Dilbert into camo-wearing, automatic riflecarrying Rambo, D-Fens seems to be an ordinary Joe trying to get back to his former wife’s house and deliver his daughter a birthday present.

However, Schumacher and Ebbe tried to walk a sometimes precarious line between the everyday frustrations of Douglas’s character while also reminding audiences he is an antihero who ultimately should be punished because he isn’t the good guy they said he was.

It turns out that the victim in the story is really his former wife (Barbara Hershey) who has taken out a restraining order against him and waits, terrified, with their daughter for her abuser’s inevitable return.

Falling Down may have polarised audiences with its stereotypical and racially dubious depictions of D-Fens’s perceived enemies and his conservative rage at his inability to accept the changes around him, but it also tried to say something about the dangerous ticking time bomb that its antihero and people like him presented to the US.

It is not a politically correct film by any measure but it is a frightening prefiguration of the unchecked performance of white American masculinity and its paranoid fears about its increasing lack of relevance to shaping US society. This seeded far-right conservatism and media outlets such as Fox News, the glorification of pundits such as Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh and the election of the last great white hope for making the US great again and returning it to a nostalgic but imaginary version of “home”: Donald Trump.

As the streets of the US once again burn and citizens shout in outrage against the hubris of white male privilege and its tragic consequences, Falling Down offers a cautionary tale of why it’s better to stay in the car, stay in your lane and embrace the changes around you, rather than falsely act out the fantasy that if you harness the demons within you can change the world into a throwback of a time that never truly existed.