Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down!

The other night I was watching the movie, Falling Down, with Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall. I've seen it at least ten times, mostly because I identify with the Douglas character. I wish they had left out the whole wife-terrorist subplot of course. But I digress.

In the movie, Bill is having a really bad day. He's been laid off from his white collar job of several years with the Department of Defense ("under-skilled and overqualified, or the other way around"). He gets stuck in traffic on a blistering hot day - the air conditioner in his car is broken and the window won't roll down. His revenge against the traffic jam: he leaves his hunk of junk right there in the middle of the road and takes off on foot to go home.

From there, Bill experiences every irritating thing average conservative Joe & Jane America does but Bill is finally beyond pissed and takes care of things his way. His first encounter is an immigrant merchant that can barely speak English (when the merchant demands an inflated "eighty-fie-cent" for a 12 oz soda, Bill says "Fie? What is fie? I know there's supposed to be a 'v' in the word, the word is fiVe. If you're gonna come to my country at least have the grace to learn our language!") Bill then gives the merchant a lesson in customer service etiquette ("I'm just standing up for my rights as a consumer!") and economics ("I'm rolling back prices to 1965!").


Bill then deals with - and defeats - the various scuzzballs that infect our planet: gangs (he ends up with their gym bag full of guns), a professional bum in a park, generally stupid people at the Whammy-Burger, a neo-nazi homophobic skinhead (whom Bill dispatches with a butterfly knife supplied in the gang's bag), and a wealthy, cranky old fart on a country club golf course that yells at the wrong guy in the wrong mood at the wrong time (the old fart yells at Bill, who is simply trying to pass through the golf course, "Fore!" and launches his Titelist at Bill's head. Bill ducks the shot, jumps up and whips out a machine gun from his gym bag, and yells "FIVE!". The old fart drops dead from a heart attack).


By the way, Falling Down was released in 1993 - Stage I of the Clinton regime.


This movie is not for everyone. Even if you fast-forward through the boring parts (wife-terrorism and Robert Duvall), it's filled with violence and profanity. And it's difficult to not cheer for Bil, even though he is deliberate in his violence against stupid people (hey we can fantasize, right?) Again, if the producers of the movie had left out the entire Robert Duvall storyline, including the wife-terrorism and stupid ending, this guy Bill could be any one of us, right here, right now, ready to snap due to what I have coined "global incompetence".