Falling Down - The Great American Lie

You know, nowadays we often talk about movies that have aged a lot, whether due to changing technology, fashion attitudes, or because the Zeitgeist they captured so perfectly at the time no longer exists, but there are other kinds of movies. that in reality have become more powerful, more moving. significant and relevant as the years have passed and one of those films is

falling

, an absolutely excellent 1993 thriller directed by Joel Schumacher and one of my personal favorites of all time, the film tells the story of Bill Foster, a working class man stuck in traffic in the middle. From an LA Heatwave who finally breaks under the pressure and flees the scene, what follows is an epic, moving and often violent journey through the City of Angels as Bill tries to return home in time for his birthday. daughter and, along the way, the film unfolds. some of the most scathing and brutal critiques of modern American culture, consumerism, wealth, inequality, social collapse, and social indifference you will ever see.

It's a film that, in my own clumsy way, I attempted to review several years ago while having a good stab at it. In explaining why I found it so shocking at the time, there's a lot more I want you to say about the deeper meanings and themes the film addresses so well and maybe even some misconceptions I'd like to address, so here we are. Staring down the barrel of the closest I'm likely to get to a video essay, this one may bore you to tears or you may simply find it useful and informative. I'm not really sure if I'm honest, but I'm going to do it. try it anyway, so grab your burger and let's start the first part, the American dream, to understand where this movie and its main character come from, you must understand the nature of the American dream and how it became the basis of the traditional American dream .

American culture basically symbolizes everything the country aspires to and stands for, only then can you see how it became the framework for the

great

American lie that permeates every aspect of the fall. Broadly speaking, the American dream is the idea of ​​upward mobility, a true meritocracy free from the constraints of oppressive class systems or government bureaucracy. The United States sold itself as the land of opportunity, a place where people They could come from all corners of the world to start anew and carve out a new future for themselves, to stand or fall on their own merits.

It was a world where even the average man could achieve wealth, success, and happiness with enough hard work, innovation, entrepreneurship, and old-fashioned "can do" attitudes, and it represents a kind of unwritten contract between you and the rest of us. society that if you just follow the rules you do the right thing, work hard and contribute and then you will be rewarded. It's a noble idea to safely aspire to, but like so many noble ideals, it's ripe for exploitation and corruption, which brings us neatly to the world of the fall, part two. On a hot day, the film introduces us to our main character, Bill, who is stuck in heavy traffic because roadworks are delaying everything and, indeed, the idea of ​​useless and unnecessary roadworks hampering people's lives. people becomes a recurring theme throughout this film and it's

great

to see.

Anyway, Bill's different reactions as he progresses, at first glance, Bill seems to embody the essence of the American dream, a typical white collar worker with a shirt and tie, a simple and practical haircut and glasses, the type of a solid and reliable middle-class guy who you can imagine working comfortably. office job in small town America driving home every night to his family in a nice suburban house with a fence, what you find instead is that the American dream has become a nightmare. Bill drives a shitty old car that barely runs with the air conditioning. He is constantly bothered by a fly and is surrounded by the stifling heat and pollution of the dystopian hell of Los Angeles.

Everyone around him is angry, frustrated and miserable because ultimately everyone is in the same situation as him, everyone is working hard through the heat and noise to work all day and jobs they hate just to make enough money. To get through the month so that everything can start again, everyone has been sold the same lie and these lies become a recurring theme throughout the film from the humble. convenience store owner who raises his prices to get more money from his customers to the fast food chain that advertises delicious, plump burgers only to serve cheap shitty food instead of the homeless man posing as a military vet to scam sympathy money from passers-by. to the construction workers who make unnecessary road repairs just to justify their budgets, they are all symptoms of a broken system, a broken society that encourages greed, selfishness and waste, and all in the name of money, all In this movie they are alone, no one cares. do the right thing or help others or contribute to a grander ideal, the American dream corrupted and distorted into a dystopian, uncaring nightmare world that only Bill seems to be able to see, for example, the scene at the fast food restaurant where Bill tries to plead his case to the terrified customer at gunpoint, you get the sense that he's really trying to make them understand where he's coming from to help them see how much they're being deceived and deceived by a giant corporation that could probably produce much better food for them, but choose. instead of announcing a complete lie and offering the minimum to maximize his profits and it's interesting when he says this that everyone else just looks at him like dumb, mindless cattle and the only person in the entire restaurant who responds to his plea like a little prank someone who hasn't yet been completely absorbed into the system or later in the film, when Bill stumbles upon a wealthy neighborhood while fleeing the police, cuts his hand on a barbed wire fence and angrily lashes out at the family that lives there, what he discovers. instead, they are actually just caretakers and the house is owned by a wealthy plastic surgeon.

The man at the top of this pyramid makes his fortune by turning people into something they are not. In short, he is a man who sells lies. to make a living and the thing is that Bill himself is not above these lies either, which brings me to the third part the briefcase Bill's briefcase becomes a fairly important object for him as a character, it is the only possession which he chooses to carry with him when he abandons his car and it's something he's willing to risk his life to protect when a couple of gang members try to steal it, but why doesn't it contain anything of value as we finally find out when he gives it away, so...

Why fight so hard to keep it, why not give it to you well? I guess there are two conclusions you can draw from this: It's a simple matter of principle for Bill, he's not willing to turn around and give away something he worked hard for just because two people decide. They can take it off. He's still fired up and angry after meeting him at the convenience store and probably isn't in the mood to be pushed around by anything or anyone. That's a pretty fair assessment, but I think the more interesting answer is what the briefcase represents.

Bill as a person, a briefcase is something carried almost exclusively by hard-working men, professionals who work in skilled jobs, intelligent and productive men who actively contribute to society, men who are economically viable, this is how Bill desperately wants to see himself. despite everything that is happening. although we eventually find out that is no longer the case and hasn't been for quite some time, Bill has been unemployed for months but still goes through the motions of driving to work every day wearing his office clothes, carrying his briefcase trying to maintaining the façade that he is still part of the machine that he is a functional part of society that is still economically viable lying to himself as much as the rest of the world the briefcase to him is more than what it contains is more than a piece of leather and metal is a symbol of everything Bill chooses to believe about himself, the life he once had and desperately wants to have again and it's interesting that he ultimately chooses to give it to a homeless beggar after trading it for a bag full of weapons because he recognizes that he is as useless to that man as he is to him now, little by little, he is letting go of the lies, letting go of the facade of the man he thought he was and accepting the man he is now and he is interested in how it is this. reflected in the weapons and clothing he carries with him and how they all follow a logical chain of events.

His first encounter at the store throws a baseball bat and without the baseball bat he wouldn't have been able to fight the two. robbers who tried to take his briefcase, which in turn throws a butterfly knife which one of them drops and without the butterfly knife he wouldn't have been able to take down the gun shop owner, which in turn allows Bill to change his shirt and tie to get more military style clothing and his ultimate weapon to take down Haiti's construction blocking the highway, the same thing that started this whole day for him, creates a good chain because of the storytelling instead of the feared thing and then Bill has a bazooka to explode. he killed the construction crew because he killed the gun store owner he killed the gun store owner because he had a hidden butterfly knife he had the butterfly knife because he took it from the two punks who tried to steal it he was able to defeat the punks because he had a baseball bat he had the baseball bat because he took it from the convenience store owner and it was only in the convenience store because of the road work that made it break in the first place good part four it's not financially The most moving scene in the movie for me is when Bill sees a man protesting outside a bank after his loan application is rejected.

A man just like Bill dressed in exactly the same clothes, a man who did everything he was told to do, followed the rules who tried to play the game the right way only to be defeated and cast aside by a system that only cared about him as long as he could exploit him as long as he was financially viable a man who was sold the exact same lie as Bill that if he just worked hard and did the right thing he would be rewarded for it in the end, but he wasn't and with Nothing Left to Lose and his entire world collapsing around him, he's fighting back the only way he knows how and it's no coincidence.

While this is happening, Bill takes a snow globe as a gift for the daughter he can't even see anymore. A desperate gesture from a desperate man clinging to something better and what a tune he is playing to the man whose entire life has collapsed when his counterpart is arrested and taken away across the street. Little me, a little, you know, Jesus Christ, remember when movies had this level of thought and complexity? Part Five presents Gast Bill's Nemesis in this film and in many ways. The other side of his character is LAPD Detective Prast, an aging cop on his last day before taking early retirement and heading to Arizona with his wife, a mild-mannered, soft-spoken man who avoids conflict and has accepted a desk job instead of walking the streets that everyone sees.

They consider him some kind of disrespect from his co-workers, assaulted by his domineering wife, and even his captain makes no attempt to hide his dislike for the man, but it turns out that he is the only one connecting Bill's and his various random crimes. very soon he's on the man's trail and it's interesting because the closer he gets to his goal the more clothes seem to come to life again because he's finally back to doing what he's really passionate about because the reality is, just like everyone else, has been living. a lie, not only has he been lying to everyone around him, but he has actually been lying to himself.

He took a desk job not because he was a coward, but because Plate, his unstable wife, who couldn't stand him being in danger, took early retirement and agreed to move to the middle of nowhere because that's what she wanted. . He tried to convince himself that he loved him too, but the more the movie goes on, the more it becomes until he finally admits that he did it all just for her. I mean, I suppose he did it out of guilt because he once convinced his wife to have a child against her better judgment, a child who subsequently died and for which he seems to blame himself and the following is completely my guess. part, but I always wondered if the movie was hinting that maybe his wife could have been responsible for the death because Pigas makes a point of saying that he always knew she wasn't cut out for motherhood and that she did it completely for him.

Alsocomments. What was strange, her daughter supposedly died from infant death syndrome despite being 2 years old and apparently strong and healthy, as I say, it's just a theory and the movie doesn't confirm it one way or another, but it does give food for thought, part six bill, they're all those you know, it's interesting how the discourse around this film and its protagonist has changed over the years, the general perception of Bill at the time was that he was basically always a villain at heart and the film tries to expose him gradually. because what it really is is stripping away the lies he tells about himself to show the violent, controlling man underneath, and the main thing they used to cite are the revelations about Bill's past that gradually come to light: that he's divorced, that his wife took out a restraining order against him and that even his own mother is afraid of him.

An entire movie showing a frustrated Bill arguing with his wife is further proof that the idyllic life he wishes to return to never really existed and that the man must be living in some kind of delusion. I'll be honest although I don't completely agree. With that assessment, I think what you're really seeing in that video is a marriage on the brink of collapse, two people who no longer love or like each other, trying and failing to put up a facade of happiness for the sake of his daughter. Yet another lie in the hopes that they can somehow make it true later in the movie, his ex-wife specifically mentions that Bill was never violent or aggressive towards her in any way and that she was personally against the restraining order because He felt it was an unfair punishment that would do more harm than Goods, but the judge said we should make an example of him so he can't come within 100 feet of us, that sounds fair, so basically Bill was ruined by an indifferent system that I saw it as simply. another case number to deal with instead of a real human being with thoughts and feelings of life and it doesn't take much imagination to infer that losing access to his daughter, along with the shame of a restraining order, put Bill in a downward spiral that ultimately unraveled his entire life, is just another example of Bill doing what he was told to do, following the rules and putting his faith in a justice system that he was assured was fair and balanced, but like everything else It turned out to be a lie and the people it hurts the most are the fools naïve enough to trust it, it almost makes you wonder how many other people have been screwed over and had their lives ruined because some judge decided to make an example of them.

It is also worth noting that Bill holds very tightly to the idea of ​​being a good man, a decent citizen who does not break the law but stands up for what he believes is right, fending off criminals who try to rob him and even murder him. Greedy corporations ruining their lives. consumers, unscrupulous businessmen who increase their prices and corrupt local governments that make life miserable for their own citizens just to justify their own existence. he has a moral code that he respects, he does not harm innocent people and he reacts with anger when the owner of a convenience store mistakes him for a thief and sees it as a complete insult because in his opinion he is not a criminal, he just does what he believes which is correct.

Another thing he clings to is the notion of being a proud American, a patriot, as if he were appealing to some old man. old-fashioned sense of shared national pride that no one else around him seems to feel anymore when a racist gun store owner mistakes his random crime spree for racially motivated attacks and assumes they're like-minded people. Bill's reaction is one of pure disgust, again invoking the notion that he's American and this other guy is something very different. When he's cornered at the film's climax, he explains with a kind of tired pride that he used to work for the film industry. defense helping to protect America, a noble profession that he believes should be rewarded with another lie that he was sold out, on the other hand, a more modern interpretation of Bill by today's big-brained individuals might be better summarized as boohoo, the straight white man is angry at the world because he doesn't have all the privileges.

Now hand me the world's smallest violin again. This is a flawed analysis because it misses the fundamental point that it is more than just the sum of its demographic parts. He is more than just the actor who plays him; He represents every person who has ever fallen and couldn't. rise again to every person who followed the rules and did what everyone expected and was punished for it, who did everything right and still was ruined by a system that was against them, who spent their entire life striving for something better alone to find out that. They were not economically viable.

All the people who bought the Great American Dream just to receive the Great American Dream can lie and I say this because I want to go back to the point I made at the beginning of this little essay of why this movie is even more relevant today than it was in 1993, well, I'll tell you why in a world where the gap between rich and poor has never been greater, where children are pushed into expensive universities to obtain useless degrees that leave them with debts they can never expect. pay six-figure salaries but can barely pay rent where the very idea of ​​owning a home is a crazy pipe dream belonging to previous generations where people are angrier, more isolated, more medicated, more exploited and more overwhelmed than anywhere another moment in human history, where young people are silently surrendering to a society that blatantly no longer cares about them, this film is more relevant than ever, that is what Bill represents, he is everyone because everyone has the potential to end up like him.

It really takes a bad day anyway that's all I have for today go now