Falling Down: The Modern Odyssey

I recently appeared on Froði Midjord’s Decameron film festival to talk about Falling Down (1993) starring Michael Douglas. Of the dozens of interviews I’ve given, I think this is my best. There was so much to say about the film, in fact, that about half of what I had in mind got left on the cutting room floor—until now. I’ll summarize only very briefly the hour-long discussion before moving on, so you should watch the interview, which you can do here.

My basic thesis is twofold, that Falling Down is:

a)       A modern retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, and

b)      An almost perfectly constructed tragedy according to the Aristotelian model.

The briefest possible plot summary (with spoilers) is that one hot, L.A. day in 1992, Bill Foster snaps, abandons his car on the freeway, and embarks on a journey to see his daughter on her birthday, who has been kept from him by a shrew of an ex-wife. While crossing the city, he overcomes obstacles, usually in the form of a rainbow coalition including a miserly Korean shopkeep, Latino gangbangers, a cartoon Nazi, and all the annoyances of daily life. As he journeys “home”, his fuse grows shorter, his actions more violent, and his arsenal more deadly as he “levels up”, eventually deploying military grade munitions against a world that has discarded him. Meanwhile, the cop Martin Prendergast, due to retire that day, tracks him down and confronts him in a standoff that results in Foster’s death.

Parallels to Odysseus’ journey suggest themselves right away. The motif of nostos, or homecoming, is the engine that drives the narrative. And yet, there are differences too. Odysseus returns to a world essentially the same, whereas Foster returns to a world utterly changed—as his ex-wife constantly reminds him, “this isn’t your home anymore”. Both stories, however, are pervaded by oikophilia, the love of home. This is Odysseus’ motivation. He doesn’t give a damn about transcendence—he turns down immortality—he wants to return to his hearth, propitiate his ancestors, take up headship of his family, and rule over his kingdom. He loves all that is particular, native, “from here”—Odyssey is unintelligible without the love of the immanent and concrete. Foster, too, is motivated by oikophilia, but his is a fallen world where “you can’t go home”, because home is something foreign, both physically and metaphysically. This is a profound statement about the modern West; our tradition for a very long time now has been oikophobia, the fear of home—the hatred of all that is native, immanent, particular. Pace Devon Stack, Falling Down is not a subversive film, but one of the most right-wing films of all time—I said much else in the interview about this, including how Prendergast and the cartoon Nazi fit into this picture, and elaborated greatly on the above points. Froði goes to a lot of trouble in putting this festival together and I highly recommend watching it. I will confine the rest of this article to things not discussed in the interview.

Falling Down is clearly a retelling of Odyssey, and any differences with it are not simply incidental but are pure narrative inversions. For example, the wife. Odysseus’ wife Penelope has always been the paradigm of womanly virtue—this is what female heroism looks like. Accosted by parasites trying to get in her pants, having only her young son as a shield, she must ward off the suitors and maintain the integrity of her oikos, which she does by cunning and artifice; she is a perfect match for Odysseus. And yet she is a lone woman, isolated, unprotected. So, too, is Foster’s ex-wife Beth. A “strong, independent, modern woman”, she has all the boldness of a frightened bunny, constantly calling the police to come protect her. Whereas Penelope thwarts and defies the “authorities” (suitors), the utterly faithless Beth wields the authorities to thwart her own Odysseus. She took his child from him, took his oikos, even filed a restraining order to “make an example of him”. The police query this, asking if Foster has a propensity for violence. “You could say that,” she replies, but on further questioning it becomes clear he does not, but “he could, I think.” Replies the cop, incredulously, “you think?” In this woman we get an indictment of the modern relation between the sexes, which has completely collapsed into little more than a brief rut before going their separate ways. In short, Beth is the anti-Penelope. And yet she is not painted with an entirely unsympathetic brush—a testament to the artistry of this film. There are hints throughout the movie that she did and perhaps even does love Foster. As her and their daughter make their escape from the standoff, she looks back. In that moment you see she knows he will die, and is heartbroken. She is a “strong”, modern woman, but not with a heart of stone.

Falling Down does differ from Odyssey in one crucial respect—the hero dies in the end. Structurally, we have here a tragedy rather than an epic. Foster has done everything right. Here is a white, middle class, solid, dependable government man. He builds defence technology for his country, he does what he’s told, doesn’t stick his neck out, has bought into the political theology of his world. Like any tragic hero, he has done everything right. Every step of the way he has acted lawfully, in the wider sense; all that he does, all that he is, the Romans would call fas, religiously legitimate. Tragedy tells us that if you follow the rules, observe the rites scrupulously, propitiate the gods, and live a life of unblemished virtue—terrible things may happen to you. So it is with Foster. He is a complicated character. His first kill is the Nazi, so his violence is righteous, at least by the standards of our political mythos. And yet, he represents the past—a past of solid, dependable white males whose time is up—and the past is the one thing that can’t be changed, remains as a brute fact, can’t be transcended, and so is the ultimate enemy of liberalism.

Falling Down is not just a tragedy in the broader sense; the narrative of this film fits hand-in-glove with the Aristotelian tragic model. So well, in fact, that one wonders whether the screenplay writer Ebbe Roe Smith wrote it as a conscious homage to Sophocles. Every 15 minutes we have a catharsis as Foster lashes out with righteous violence at some subhuman who deserves it, often an ethnic minority—the “angry white male” could never be a charismatic hero like this today. And on his death at the end, the viewer feels the purgation of guilt and shame, washed off him like Foster’s blood into the Pacific.

Film is the natural medium for tragedy, which Aristotle tells us is dialogue driven, and a poor medium for epic, which he tells us involves narration, always clunky and hard to render on film. This dialogue driven nature of the film medium also lends itself well to fate, another important element in Aristotelian tragedy. Fate drives the film’s plot with admirable necessity. Aristotle tells us that tragedy must not be “episodic”. Each occurrence must be connected not with an and or a then—A then B and C then D etc.—rather with a but or a therefore—A therefore B but C therefore D etc. Aristotle would have approved wholeheartedly of the film’s tight construction.

The film also involves a clear reversal and a discovery, two crucial elements in Aristotelian tragedy, but I discussed this in depth in the interview. The last structural element of the classical model of tragedy I wish to draw out of the film are its dramatic unities. These are unity of action (the plot should depict a single action), unity of time (the plot should take place over no more than 24 hours), and unity of place (the plot should take place in one location). The film meets the first two unambiguously, and if a “single location” means one city, which it often did in terms of the unities, it meets all three. This austere concentration gives the film its power and a sense of claustrophobia.

When I first watched the film, I loved it so much that I went back a few weeks later to rent it again. Looking around the comedy section, I couldn’t find it, so I asked the clerk where it was, whereupon he pointed me to the drama section. The film is so wickedly funny that I thought it was a comedy, and only in the fullness of time have I seen its dramatic depth. Its dramatic unity, its seamless plot construction, its fatalism, its structural parallels with Homeric epic, make Falling Down a worthy successor to Aeschylus and Sophocles, I would almost (but not quite) say, to Homer—while the humour tempers the bleakness of a smoggy L.A. heatwave. We have here a small miracle that could not have been made even 3 years before or after—the Aryan Odysseus with a Cypress Hill soundtrack, homeless and doomed but, in Thermopylaean fashion, determined at least to go down swinging.

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