The film, Falling Down, depicts California (Los Angeles) through several happenings and experiences of the actors (D-Fens), among all of the disunited worlds of the metropolitan area (California) in the impossible unlimited expanse and the hardened main access road that bears important traffic of the Los Angeles broad highway built for high-speed traffic.
Falling Down seems to be connected towards the residents or inhabitant of California (Los Angeles) or people residing in big and accommodating metropolis. The racial tension shown in the film is apparent from the beginning.
The production of the film Falling Down is a good indication that its reception was affected by the post-riot climate, particularly because the state of disorder brought to the forefront the problems of racial, social, and economic tensions depicted in the film and vice versa. Moreover, Falling Down describes a threatened or attempted physical attack on the nervous system and an influential imaginative re-creation of the sensory and emotional nature of Los Angeles at a particular historical point in time.
In so doing, the movie Falling Down draws the viewers in with the discovery of the supernatural disturbance linked with the present day re-composition of space-time-being in post-cold war and feature of the end of a century in California (Los Angeles) (Aaron 40).
From the film it will be observed that signifying series of occurrence have snapped, and California is left without a frame of reference with which to make sense of this misrepresented grammar of metropolitan life. Falling Down further depicts that California for a limited time loses his ability to manage his immediate environment and to design his status regarding the outside world.
Falling Down is a complicated visible symbol representing an abstract idea about an irritated Anglo American, D-Fens, who is mad as hell with the state of things, in Los Angeles in particular and with the United States of America in general, and is about to get even. The convert of Los Angeles, California is linked with discourses on the “third world” and “discovering” of the face of the city and the nation.
The film depicts how California has had all it can take to the city’s independent promiscuity and its disagreement with previously distinct cultures. While Latino immigrants feature in the film’s background, as with the live coverage of the riots, their silent but observable presence on the other hand does the ideology work of pointing to the conversion of Los Angeles (California) as a particularly marked aspect of discourses on urban disfigurement, moral decay, and national decline.
Falling Down is a reenactment of the strong and active attempts then currently in progress in Californian cultural politics to re-territorialize this uncontrollable and disturbing cultural flow by remapping the boundaries of what constitutes the official and legitimate public sphere.
This entails confirming the cultural and racial dominance or leadership of the Anglo American male over a bewildering proliferation of multiple counter publics. This cinematic management of the appearance of the inhabitants represents an essential characteristic of the state development: to reform the states organization. The following composite is drawn from the opening scene of the film (Aaron 28).
Falling Down depicts the past artistic structure, which created a positive response to the context of the action in Los Angeles (California), the limited-access highway commute between the standards and conventions of the middle class private area and the industrialist civic area which has also been disrupted.
Falling down offers an accurate insightful discovery of a detailed study about human experience of the economic system based on private ownership in California, its misrepresented organizations of sentiment, and the stage at which the system of production and management as well as social changes of regional amalgamation are being experienced by the reduced employee (Aaron 30).
Falling down is a multifaceted illustration of a middle-class defensive reaction to the dynamic cultural constituent of the mainland American extensive mental perspective and its simultaneous irrational depictions of the increased migration movement within California.
It depicts a portion of accepted ethnicity that grew from and boarders into the society happening to change its position in the modern international world classification. But it fails to cross-examine the role of the project to defend American “national security” in the “third world” of the American city California.
Falling down further depicts California’s opportunity to increase what is needed in representing people’s reactions to topography namely, the understanding of private political task for the public creation of liberty as what must be jointly formed (Aaron 53). This is a clear mistake in the public perception of an urban city like Los Angeles (California), a state based on two industries, and a city in serious economic unstable situation in excess of the clear breaking up in the political hostility period.
Falling Down shows how foreign intervention by the United States has played a large role in producing refugee and immigrant flows to cities such as Los Angeles. This could be seen in the film when D-Fens (actor) misrecognizes his role when he threatened the Korean immigrant grocer with his baseball bat while saying, “Do you know how much money this country gave your government?” (Falling Down 1993).
Thus, while falling Down does engage the present day re-composition of space-time being through D-Fen’s displacement from the economy and his disorientation in the cultural and physical Landscape, this “tale about urban reality” ultimately veils the reality of (de) militarization.
Falling down describes California’s refusal to connect between the city topography and the artistic setting with the political system of production created to expose the “misrepresented perception of things” as an consequence of migration and transgression. Indeed, the biographies and spatial journeys of both the downsized defense worker and the Salvadoran refugee are linked precisely around the cold war.
While Falling Down describes a nation that is collapsing, the problem is how it attempts to put that world back together. Falling Down reframes polyphony of contemporary discourses on migration, economic turn down, metropolitan brutality, racial discrimination, industrialist self-indulgence, and government misuse into a structured rule and order description.
Falling Down depicts the comprehensive social control carried through related idea, the social control of the home setting. Furthermore, the film depicts the low concentration of war strategies of the political hostility which have increased in the outlawed internal metropolis.
In line with the above, Falling down describes the role of the security industry in the production of the Salvadoran refugee which could not be more well-defined.
In conclusion, while Falling Down is one more episode in the history a gentleman traveling through a shocking countryside. Discourses about immigration, racism, and inner-city violence are all considered within the ideological frame of criminality. Moreover, the film depiction of California’s project of local law enforcement now has primacy over global defense because state defense is set in a new governing tradition that is not a social order but guilt.
As a filmic representation of a particular historical juncture in the development of the American city, Los Angeles in particular, Falling Down hit a raw nerve and entered a zone of heated cultural debate about crime, urban decay, and immigration.
The film took the philosopher rhetoric in the air to a new level. Simply put, the message of the film to impressionable viewers might be: with increasing number of hostile dark skinned immigrants who do not speak English, who are parasites on California’s economy, and who break U.S. laws, reject Western Christian morality, and take away jobs from hard working citizens (primarily white men), U.S. citizens have to take the law into their own hands, entertaining drastic measures to ensure that places like Los Angeles will not become suburbs of the Third World.
The films depiction of California illustrates serious and significant contradictions. For example, the narrative of philosophical theory contradicts what is very often characterized as the narrative of the “American dream,” which goes like this: in order to find better jobs, to take part in the experiment in democracy, and to educate their children, people from all over the world bear the suffering of personal sacrifice, including at times dangerous travel, to come go to California (U.S.), where they hope to experience freedom and liberty.
Works Cited
Aaron, Baker. Bad: infamy, darkness, evil, and slime on screen. New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003. Print.
Falling Down. Dir. Joel Schumacher. Alcor Films, 1993. Film.