Falling Down

If anybody here has the chance, check out the movie "Falling Down" starring Michael Douglass and Robert Duvall.

It tells the story of a middle-class family man, simply trying to make it home for his daughter's birthday party on a hot, muggy day in Los Angeles. He has been recently laid off and is angry, detached and unstable. And so he simply decides to leave his car in the middle of a traffic jam on the Freeway and commences on an epic journey through the pits of socio-economic decay to reach his ultimate goal. Along the way, he ends up destroying an Asian-owned convenience store, holding up a burger joint, hijacking golf karts and taking part in gang warfare - all in the name of getting home to see his precious daughter on her special day.

While on the surface this is simply the story of psychotic man, fighting his way through the scum of the earth to see his daughter, the film functions as a social and political commentary on the moral and cultural decay of modern America. We see first-hand how the likes of classism, racism and the negative effects of capitalism have the ability to neutralize the lower-middle class and reduce it to nothing but the stepping ground for the true power players in our country. Michael Douglass' character is representative of every sense of fear, distrust and anger we've secretly felt towards the world around us, and unlike most, acts on his emotions and primal rage. He goes to extremes to vent his frustrations and fight for justice against a corporate-driven, consumeristic America that imprisons the socio-economically depressed - all for the sake of promoting those already in power even more.

While the film is a tad outdated (it was released in 1993 so things have changed quite a bit since then) it is still an intriguing, thought-provoking expose of the interior workings of our socio-political framework. And most importantly, how the little guy ultimately gets the shaft at the end of the day.