Falling Down was not a great movie, nor was it an unwatchable movie. What it was, mostly...

Question

Falling Down was not a great movie, nor was it an unwatchable movie. What it was, mostly...

Falling Down was not a great movie, nor was it an unwatchable movie. What it was, mostly, was a movie that seemed important enough to be featured on the cover of Newsweek, even though it could never possibly be made today without a rewrite of almost every scene.

The plot of Falling Down followed a character played by Michael Douglas, a middle-aged white male who gets stuck in traffic, experiences a mental breakdown, and attacks Los Angeles by himself. The most memorable moment involves Douglas entering a fast-food restaurant and trying to order breakfast, only to be told the restaurant stopped serving breakfast at eleven thirty a.m. and was now offering lunch.

He responds by pulling out a TEC-9 machine gun. There is a ludicrous Metal Gear quality to the narrative-the main character acquires increasingly powerful weapons as he moves from location to location (he starts with a bat, uses the bat to get a knife, miraculously acquires a bag of guns, and eventually ends up with a rocket launcher).

In the end, Douglas is killed in a suicide-by-cop scenario.

Falling Down has aged poorly. It's saturated with details that now seem unthinkable: the fact that Douglas's character claims to be against racism while killing minorities, the fact that the film was sometimes publicized as a comedy, the fact that it received mostly positive reviews and was briefly the number 1 film in the country. Contemporary critics tend to be appalled by the film's themes and won't even engage with the premise, often unaware of its unusual scope of influence (it inspired a song by Iron Maiden, a video by(…)

…Foo Fighters, and a character in The Simpsons). What makes Falling Down generationally noteworthy, however, has less to do with its reactionary politics and more to do with the way it allows the viewer to sympathize with a violent person who overreacts to mundane inconveniences. The abstract rage Douglas feels is not depicted as reasonable or justifiable but is still supposed to be relatable.

The main cover line on the issue of Newsweek featuring Douglas's face screams "WHITE MALE PARANOIA" in capital letters, but the subhead is more generous: "Are They the Newest Victims—or Just Bad Sports?"

The protagonist in Falling Down was not presented as a sociopath damaging the world. He was presented as a man pushed to lunacy by a world that isn't perfect, but is by no means unlivable. Douglas is infuriated by exterior problems that barely qualify as problems, the manifestation of flaws in his own interior life.

Within the framework of his belief system, what is happening in society is only happening to him. He is a terrorist and he is a superstorm, and if we forget the explanation as to why that was supposed to translate to other people, it's because the explanation was never there to begin with. It was just something to harmlessly consider, for 113 minutes, until there was something better to complain about.

Based Klosterman

I never worked a day in my life (25) but do wagies really burst into uncontrolled rage when they get stuck in traffic for a moment?

a moment

I thought that was mitocondria in the thumbnail.

poltards are back to the Starship Troopers/Falling Down/They Live agitation thread cycle.

the fact that Douglas's character claims to be against racism while killing minorities

But he never kills any minorities. He shoots that one gangbanger non-lethally after the attempted drive-by on him.

Liberal journalists tend to completely miss the fact that this movie is absolutely fucking hilarious. Easily one of the most quoted movies between me and my friends.

This. This tells me Klosterman has an agenda for sure because he didn’t kill anyone but the Nazi.

Yes. I was very close to ramming a car off the road for driving slow as fuck when on the way home from work close to midnight earlier this week.

t. wagie who works shifts

Commuting is singularly one of the most infuriating things one must routinely experience in the pursuit of a wage. It’s bad.

He also fails to grasp that the events of the day and the encounters with strangers are not why he loses his shit. He lost his job and family. That’s the root of his anger; not race. Most of the people he fucks with are white

He was presented as a man pushed to lunacy by a world that isn't perfect, but is by no means unlivable. Douglas is infuriated by exterior problems that barely qualify as problems

He can't even walk across a fucking backlot without getting mugged by violent brown people.
This seems to be the distinction here, there's people who appreciate what Falling Down is saying and then there's other people, for whom drivebys are just part of the hustle and bustle of life in the big city, for whom overcrowded systems full of people who hate each other and wouldn't piss on one another if they were on fire are just the natural condition. We (Falling Down likers) know how much better the world could be if people just tried a little harder to not be pieces of shit, while They have fully assimilated to living in hell so DFENS's actions seem unreasonable.

youtube.com/shorts/4FDL6-sP1ag?si=sy9DCxGBWsv06gM1

I aint clicking that shit nigger

I'm a NEET too and I get annoyed when retards walk too slow in front of me. Can't imagine waiting for lights as well on top of that.

Yes. My drunk-driving grandfather was a much better driver than the monogoloids currently wasting time and gasoline on MD 32.

Those phones were barely the start of the 90s, they were closer to an 80s style

Let me tell you man. I got my license at 27. So I was a fully fledged adult with a job and an apartment up to that point, my worldview was pretty seasoned, I wouldn't have thought of myself as naive. And what I thought then was that OK, people aren't perfect, but ultimately people are good, given the chance they'll generally try to do the right thing for the right reasons. And that all changed once I got my driving license. Everyone out on those roads is a savage. An incompetent entitled asshole who will fuck you over given the chance - for no reason. There's no incentive to cut you off, it's not going to get them where they're going any faster, and even if it did there's no conscious evaluation taking place here. They just see that they can cut you off, they feel protected from harm by the car they're in and insulated from repercussions by the law, so they cut you off. There's nothing in it for them but they do it anyway. All drivers are like this. And when you experience this daily you come to realise that it's a microcosm of society, traffic is a particularly revealing case but it's just portraying the behaviour that any given person exhibits at any given time of day in any situation. People are scum, the average person is a snarling selfish dumb animal that's only kept under control by the law and the fear of social reprisal, and that expecting anyone to just be basically decent is completely futile, because not only is it beyond them, but they are aided and abetted by a complacent society whose collective attitude is "Well, that's life I guess, haha" because it knows the truth as I've laid it out here.

Multiculturalism caused this. I have seen a steep increase in selfish driving as the amount of shitskins has increased in my nation.

Thanks for reminding me that I should finish this. I got 3 chapters in and enjoyed it, forget why I put it down.
He's right though, Falling Down is poo poo.

cuts you off

You mad bro

High trust society requires complete assimilation. Multiculturalism by definition includes competing groups

I have unironically been stuck in standstill traffic for over 2 hours. That shit drives you nuts. Especially if you know Shekelstein will reprimand you for it once you get in

Yeah we should kill all minorities.

No, just stop mass migration

People are shit

customer gets $13,000 in parts and $1200 in labor

drives off happy

does a chargeback for the full amount claiming he had to get extra work done (his invoice had the date and unit blacked out)

we respond to chargeback saying as much

they reverse it

he just tries another claim and we're forced to resubmit our response

nearly 15K jumping in and out of an account at the whims of some truck driver

ree

the writer has an interesting CV

Floundering is a 1994 comedy film set in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The film was directed and written by Peter McCarthy in his directorial debut and stars James LeGros, with appearances by John Cusack, Ethan Hawke, and Lisa Zane. The film is told as a narrative delivered by the main character John under the pessimism of the early 1990s.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floundering
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebbe_Roe_Smith

AND kill all minorities.

and he has empathy for the not economically active black dude

I don't know who this Klosetfag guy is but most of the characters he has positive interactions with are all black. The guy who's "not economically viable", the family he bumps into after the golf course and the kid during the rocket launcher scene. I think the people he was nastiest to were the rich guy on the golf course and the nazi shop guy who were both white.

aged poorly

Definitely one of the easiest tells for 'nothing this person says has any merit'. Just someone parroting the zeitgeist of the day to you.
A temperature taker. Like a woman, just concerned with other people's opinions and whether they have the right one at the moment.
Even the scene the author concedes is the most famous scene in the film, the breakfast scene, he's turning a gun on a white middle management goober.

I hate when writers just rewrite sentences to reach some quota.

Peace was never an option.

I am actually yes

DFENS is played by Michael Douglas, which is not the actor's real last name. His father Kirk Douglas starred in the miniseries The Holocaust that cemented it as the core imagery and narrative of WWII in America.
Director Joel Schumacher, who admittedly made some notable movies like Lost Boys, Tigerland, St Elmo's Fire, and kink-slop like Batman & Robin, is not white.

This is why there is a demarcation line scene featuring a ridiculous NeoNaz military surplus owner, it's very eat cake have it too, where Falling Down is a portrait of a conquered middle class white male minimized in the landscape of a "multi-culti" melting pot he can't digest, a gentile who ironically spent his life careering in the private MIC only to wander through an America turned warzone, its transformation largely manipulated by unnamed, unseen Zionists and Communists, who would ironically soon melt and rebrand as the Neoconservatives after 9/11 to plunge America into Middle East wars that secure a supremacist ethnostate called Greater Israel.

Chuck Klosterman intentionally neglects all of this, choosing to lazily run the baton of "Douglas" and Schumacher across the finish line in a conquered America where even Falling Down isn't permitted as a character portrait or pseudo-neutral mirror of the white middle class.

Klosterman knows his readers have the mental retention of a cocoa puff, but his thoughts about Falling Down are entirely hypocritical in view of his contrarian defense of the Unabomber's violent reactionary legacy against the same cultural dystopia and manufactured decline that Falling Down halfheartedly portrays, in a previous essay.

Klosterman is a couch potato who hustles in the psychoanalysis of "pop culture" dug out from the couch cushions of Generation X, he is a stationary janitor of a mess his people made. Quite the grift.

And a white golfer also has a heart attack after encountering the MC. The author doesn't mention that either, eh.

enjoyed it

why?

Transparent versions of objects are kino.