Falling Down

Do you remember that Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall movie from 1993 about the unemployed defense industry engineer who is socially awkward and going through a rough patch with a divorce and every other thing that can go wrong in life? He gets stuck in a Freeway traffic jam on a hot day and he has finally just had enough and walks away from his car and starts a mad rampage through Los Angeles where he gets progressively more and more violent and descends into the depths of a troubled psychosis. The story is one about simultaneous salvation for the aged policeman tracking him (played by Duvall), and growing hopelessness for the crewcut engineer who scorns everything about modern life and his growing lack of control over his own existence. I just watched this movie again the other day. What made me think about it was driving through L.A. on our way back from our recent roadtrip. I recently read about the latest inexplicable rally speeches given this weekend in Pennsylvania by Donald Trump and the first thing I thought of was that Trump has fallen down and is unable to get up. In fact, he is falling further and further to earth after having flown not just close to the sun, but right into the sun over the past nine years.

When you watch Falling Down, you start off feeling some degree of empathy or at least understanding for the very bad day that Michael Douglas is having. You want to be supportive because we can imagine running into a churlish bodega clerk, a disorderly group of threatening teenagers, an officious fast food restaurant manager or an over-zealous gun-loving neo-fascist Army/Navy store owner. At one moment of overt self-awareness, Douglas stops cold and says to no one in particular, “Wait, I’m the bad guy?” All through his journey, trying, as he says, to just get home again, he is certain that he is the victim and everyone else are the perpetrators of evil. The dramatic part about it all is that we can palpably feel Douglas’ descent further and further away from reality and his fall into utter despair as a he screams louder and louder at the crazed world around him.

The more I think of it, the more I think Falling Down is an almost perfect analogy for what we are witnessing with the Trump campaign. Some might think that the Michael Douglas character is far more innocent than Donald Trump, but I would say that from what we all have learned about Donald Trump‘s flawed upbringing at the hands of a harsh and demanding father and the passive and compliant mother, it is very much the sort of cauldron which can cook up a sociopathic persona like the Douglas character or like Donald Trump. In both cases, the protagonist sees himself as the good guy and fails to realize that his increasingly antisocial behavior towards a world that doesn’t love him in exactly the way he wants to be loved has brought out a brutality that makes him far worse than any of the antagonists he confronts and by whom he feels put upon.

The Duval character, who is a likable yet dedicated police detective, wants to move on to a peaceful life without responsibility for solving the ills of the world. His wife symbolizes the self absorbed nature of man that would prefer to ignore what goes on around her. As Duval goes through his presumed last day on the job, he begins to realize the importance of the role he plays in keeping the world safe. It seems to me that he comes to represent the very rule of law that we in this country have begun to take for granted, but which we ultimately realize is not a given and has to be continuously reinforced in order to keep our society in check. Duval proves to be more than a regular cop, but is somehow the embodiment of justice played out by a normal man who, while not without his flaws, wants to do the job that needs to be done without undo recognition or compensation other than the knowledge that he is doing the right thing.

In the end, Douglas realizes that he has fallen off the path of righteousness and become the source of harm. Duvall realizes it justice and the rule of law means something, and that preserving that is critical for the peace and harmony of society. We feel at the end that Douglas is an ill-fated and flawed man who at least recognizes that his rampage must end. Douglas feigns a threatening move and Duval does the deed of putting an end to this miscarriage of justice.

Now consider where we are in the Trump saga. His path of righteousness is well behind him (if it ever existed at all), and his gradual descent into his grievances has led to all manner of violence and chaos for our country and the world. His rhetoric is now completely unhinged and spoken from his gut. His crassness can be seen in his debasement of Arnold Palmer, in his hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where instead of praising his iconic achievements in golf and his good standing in his community, Trump chose to praise his manliness and his genitalia. Trump’s venal tendencies also came through loudly through his unflattering and derogatory description of Kamala Harris. Trump thinks that anyone who stands with him is good and “the best” and anyone who stands against him is bad and “the worst”. He seems to have no ability to recognize that his rhetorical hyperbole has not only lost its impact but that almost no one really believes any of it anymore. Nonetheless, it would not surprise me for him to stare blankly at his accusers and say, “Wait, I’m the bad guy?” Such is his degree of disconnectedness to reality.

As much as we want to take pity on a person who is the product of abuse, it is still hard to get clear of the fact that a human conscience should exist in every soul and that there should be some circuit breakers which make people realize when they cross the line from cute to deranged and when certain actions are simply evil and hurtful. The director of Falling Down leaves us with little or no sympathy for the Douglas character, and mostly, they leave us with a sense that there is nothing left in the world for such a flawed and troubled person. Therefore his demise is more or less perfunctory and leaves no ethical dilemma that we normally feel about a fallen soul who has some redeeming traits or at least the sense that he has some humanity still resident. Douglas is a tragic and lost soul with no redeeming qualities worthy of salvation.

That is exactly where we find Trump in this moment. His campaign is making excuses for him by saying that he is exhausted. Presumably they think exhaustion is a fair excuse for his strange comments and behavior. It may explain his 39 minutes of dancing to his playlist while he was supposed to be conducting a town hall Q&A. But it cannot excuse his Latrobe comments either about their patron saint, Arnold Palmer, nor his lies and crude and debasing comments about Kamala Harris. A common characterization of Trump is that he is unhinged. Michael Douglas became unhinged on his journey through the urban jungle. People also say that Trump is morally corrupt. Michael Douglas crossed a moral line when he shot a juvenile delinquent in the leg and then killed a fascist store owner. Those things cannot be undone. The things that Trump has done and said ranging from Charlottesville to Lafayette Square to January 6th show his fall towards violence and authoritarianism. His proposed actions after a successful election are worse yet and riddled with moral turpitude. His supporters suggest that he is just being hyperbolic and that he will not literally do what he says he will. Duval cannot trust that Douglas is redeemable, so he ends him. We cannot trust that Trump has any redemptive value, all we know is what he has done and says he will do. He is fallen and is still falling down even further. It is time to let him go over the edge.