Demented men as film heroes
Monaco, Jerry
This has been a season of demented men. They flicker on the movie screen, igniting our emotions, and then leave us in darkness. Rarely do they touch the better parts of our nature. Mostly...
...The vigilante film transferred the lone gunfighter to a modern urban setting, but he was no longer fighting for order against the criminal elements—he was rebelling against the liberal society...
...In the movie Falling Down Michael Douglas plays a laid-off defense industry engineer...
...Perhaps the filmmakers merely intended to represent the worldview of a paranoid unemployed white man rather than endorse it, but it's hard to tell the difference...
...In the end the Eastwood character walks into the saloon and coolly, methodically guns down the sheriff and all of his deputies...
...He abandons his car and walks into one of those inner-city neighborhoods the interstates were designed to bypass...
...In the fifties this character would have been the man in the grey flannel suit...
...The sheriff, played by Gene Hackman, runs the town as a petty dictatorship...
...He's stuck in a traffic jam and he's frustrated with life, mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore...
...We can expect this trend to continue...
...The wife has died and the farm is failing...
...Let us hope that future movies are not as mean spirited as this one...
...they blaze away at him but it has no effect...
...On the surface the argument of the movie is that the legends of Western gunfighters were created by popular writers of "true" fiction...
...Smith probably believed that his screenplay would tap into nineties exasperation the way Paddy Chayevsky's literate satire Network tapped into seventies alienation...
...All pernicious intent is denied by the filmmakers, but in truth they want to have it both ways...
...the transformation is frightening...
...To read the statements of director Joel Schumacher and the screenwriter Ebbe Roe Smith one would think that the film is social criticism at its best: our society frustrates hard-working middleclass guys and this film tells the story of one such man at the breaking point...
...Unforgiven is a powerful film, but its reputation as a revisionist Western is specious...
...Human events occur as if part of the natural order...
...Falling Down endeavors to be a vigilante film turned inside out...
...he asks the clerk...
...Today, Hollywood filmmakers have regressed...
...The demented man has become upwardly mobile...
...SUMMER • 1993 • 375...
...The new demented man was a rogue cop or vigilante: a person who used unconventional means to enforce "law and order...
...When Michael Douglas screams at the Korean store clerk, "You come to my country, you should learn my language," the people around me cheered...
...Ford's movie, more than Eastwood's, deromanticizes the gunfighter by showing how the legends are created to serve political ends...
...How much does this cost...
...Realizing he doesn't have enough change to make the call he flies into a rage and smashes everything in the store with a baseball bat he took from the store clerk...
...Just standing up for my rights as a consumer," he says as he smashes another item...
...In Unforgiven the only alternative to free-lance violence is the violence of petty dictatorship...
...There is nothing surprising in this movie except the beauty of its slow pacing...
...In reality Falling Down is not social criticism but a simple revenge fantasy...
...in the nineties he's a man about to go on a shooting spree...
...In the seventies and early eighties, he became a hero...
...Everything is predictable down to the fact that the Eastwood character starts guzzling whiskey (like Popeye with his can of spinach) just before the climactic gunfight...
...What makes Unforgiven different from earlier Westerns is its complete lack of morality: Good does not win out over evil because there is no good or evil...
...The movie goes to great lengths to show murder as unheroic: one man lingers on in dying for an excruciatingly long time...
...At this line the audience in my theater cheered and laughed as if on cue...
...Even a conventional Hollywood product such as Indecent Proposal does this in its own way...
...In the end the audience identifies with the fierce power of Eastwood's lone gunman...
...they think they can rule our passions with cheap applications of stimulus-response theory...
...There is nothing revisionist in this...
...He walks into a Korean grocery store, but the man behind the counter won't give him change without a purchase...
...That's too much," he yells...
...Its real interest lies elsewhere...
...another is shot while he is in the outhouse...
...After a prostitute is slashed in the face by two customers, her co-workers offer a reward for their murder, and Eastwood picks up his guns once more to collect it...
...Falling Down makes the assumption explicit...
...The same argument was made more cogently thirty years ago in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence...
...This worldview is consistent with Eastwood's previous films...
...In Unforgiven Eastwood plays an ex-gunfighter who found a woman to make him true and righteous...
...Until the very end the structure of the narrative is a series of near comic disillusionments...
...What makes the movie frightening is the psychological power violence holds for the characters, as if violence itself is the only explanation the characters need for their actions...
...there is no justice, no retribution that can heal society...
...He wants to make a telephone call to his ex-wife...
...As a result of the violence he endures and delivers the Eastwood character undergoes a transformation that can only be called spiritual...
...This is emphasized by the cinematography and the framing of the landscape...
...374 • DISSENT Falling Down is a manipulative film: all the cues are mechanically written into the script, and space is left in the dialogue for the appropriate audience response...
...he buys a soda and gets only a nickel back...
...But recently there has been a change in how such men are portrayed on screen...
...So it is appropriate that he should now bring the genre full circle...
...These newer movies seemed to recommend that Richard Nixon's "silent majority" should take up arms to overthrow the Warren Court's concept of due process...
...No longer an outsider, he has moved into the middle class...
...He has worked hard and played by the rules, and he has nothing to show for it...
...But things have gone wrong...
...It would be interesting to know if the market researchers in Hollywood have read it...
...Many of the best Hollywood films of the forties and fifties can be viewed as psychoanalytic passion plays, with pop-Freudianism as the ruling theology...
...The Eastwood character begins the movie looking like a tightly wound religious fanatic and ends it as a cool killing machine...
...The woman gave him religion and made him give up drink and killing...
...Ford also presents a rational argument for representative democracy and against frontier violence...
...It is no coincidence that Clint Eastwood, with his background in the Westerns, defined the urban vigilante genre with his Dirty Harry movies: Eastwood was consciously reworking the Western...
...Why does Unforgiven have a reputation as a revisionist Western...
...The Kid who rides with Eastwood romanticizes murder and violence and brags about all the people he has killed, but in the end is so sick with the bloody reality that he admits that he never killed anybody before...
...The characters don't even act from selfinterest but from a need to imprint their will on the world through violence...
...Earlier the sheriff explained to the writer that the man who has no fear, who maintains his cool, will win even against superior numbers...
...In his crew cut, horn-rimmed glasses, and a plastic pocket protector, Douglas looks the part of a down-and-out organization man...
...This was made explicit in a film where Sylvester Stallone pours gasoline on a group of criminals and incinerates them while reciting their Miranda rights...
...Or more accurately, the middle class is falling down to meet him...
...Falling Down is an essay in audience manipulation, but this is typical of many Hollywood movies...
...The Eastwood character's explanation to the writer is simpler: "I've always been lucky in killing...
...The writer who has romanticized the West in his stories discovers that all his tales are wrong...
...The demented man has a long tradition in the cinema...
...Mostly they engender fear and teach violence as a solution to the problems of society...
...The current tendency in Hollywood is to project middle-class fears of downward mobility onto the screen...
...Even the title of the movie is reminiscent of Barbara Ehrenreich's Fear of Falling, a book about middleclass anxiety and downward mobility...
...The vigilante films were part of an anti-sixties backlash, but they were also an updating of a Western genre—the lone gunfighter or sheriff who takes the law into his own hands to clear the town of outlaws...
...On one level Unforgiven seems to say that violence solves nothing: murderers and lawmen, the ministers of vengeance and pursuit, are equally unjust...
...In the past the demented man was someone who destroyed order: an outsider, a madman, a criminal, a sadist, or literally a monster...
Vol. 40 • July 1993 • No. 3
