Schumacher: Falling Down (1993)

“A tale of urban reality” for the 1990s, Falling Down follows William Foster (Michael Douglas), a white middle class everyman, as he rampages his way across L.A. over the course of a single day, trying to make it “home” to his estranged ex-wife (Barbara Hershey) while pursued by a policeman who’s working his own last day before retirement (Robert Duvall). In many ways, it feels like a critique of the vigilante films of the late 1970s and early 1980s, although whether it’s criticising their ethics or just admitting that they are no longer pragmatic guides to action is quite unclear. In either case, the most dramatic departure from the vigilante genre is that Foster is already at breaking-point from the first scene, precluding any possibility of further escalation or intensification, and dooming his rage to become more and more anticlimactic as it proceeds. That’s not to say that Foster’s rampage becomes less intense per se, but that it moves further and further towards comedy, decelerating into a kind of picaresque impotence even as it aims for ever greater heights of vigilante immolation. Where vigilantes often felt like proto-action heroes, filling out the militaristic rearguard of white flight with promises of some as yet unimaginable action-spectacle, Falling Down is resolutely post-action, suffused with multicultural and countercultural fears that can’t be escaped or satiated. At some level, that’s because Foster can’t afford to move to the suburbs, but it’s also because L.A. is really nothing but suburbs, collapsing the distinction between urban core and suburbia that defined white flight in the first place. As a result, Foster’s seething rage operates as a kind of perceptual portal to early 90s L.A., a mindful attention to minutiae that transforms every establishing sequence into a kind of miniature documentary, a bit like Los Angeles Plays Itself in filigree. Devoid of a middle distance, most scenes are almost entirely comprised of close-ups and sequence shots that don’t establish so much as simply assume the fact of L.A., setting us adrift amongst connective tissue and immanent infrastructure – pedestrian L.A., the most L.A. might admit to a flaneur – as every racist, sexist and homophobic tirade collapses into a kind of consumer rage, directed both at minorities who are on the verge of becoming more conspicuous consumers, and at a city that seems to demand total consumption while resisting it at the same time. And it’s as a thwarted consumer that Foster offers himself up as a canvas for Schumacher’s delicious sense of camp - he reserves his best rant for when he narrowly misses out on the Whammy Burger breakfast menu - ingratiating us into a paranoid fantasy that may just be the most effective way to envisage this endless sprawl as a panoramic totality, a single film.