I took my wife to plenty of weird movies when we were dating. And because we were in our dating days (this extended into our early years of marriage as well), my wife likely felt obligated to entertain my movie choices, ones that she would swiftly shut down after ten years of marriage.
But back then? Alien: Covenant? Why not? Sabotage on my birthday? You bet! Riding our bikes a total of 14 miles there and back to see a late evening showing of X-Men: Days of Future Past? Hell yeah! (To be fair, we still talk about how much fun that one was.)
It wasn’t until later that my wife made it clear that a movie like Alien: Covenant terrifies her, or that she doesn’t like to see all that much violence onscreen, making Terrence Howard’s gruesome death in Sabotage particularly grotesque. To her point, she might have already fallen asleep by that point, so no harm, no foul there.
But anyway, I’ve been thinking about all of that recently after recently learning a little nugget about Minnesota governor and vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz, specifically about him and his wife Gwen when they were dating while both teaching at Alliance High School in Nebraska.
With Kamala Harris running an abbreviated, accelerated presidential campaign, the fire hose of background information has been nonstop, so it feels like this got lost in the mix, but Walz ended up asking out his smitten coworker, going on their first date to a local Hardee’s and to see the 1993 movie Falling Down.
Now, Falling Down is not exactly a first-date type of movie, though I might have disagreed had I wanted to see it when I was dating my own wife. It is, however, a very good movie. Starring Michael Douglas as defense contractor William “D-Fens” Foster, it’s about a disgruntled white man who finally loses his grip on reality while sitting in Los Angeles traffic on a scorching hot day. Fairly relatable, right?
Where it starts to go off the rails is when he simply gets out of his car on the highway and figures he’ll “walk home,” which we soon find out is a place where he’s no longer welcome for obvious reasons. Wielding a duffel bag of weapons, he terrorizes – and occasionally kills – his way across Los Angeles, meeting a wide swath of the city’s residents, all the while being tracked by a detective – played by Robert Duvall – who is, of course, on his last day before retirement.
Falling Down is full of great performances, and it’s an excellent movie that examines the “angry white man” archetype. Foster is perhaps dressed like he might work at NASA in the 1960s to further emphasize that he’s a man out of time, unable and unwilling to recognize the country before him. He just wants things to go back to the way they were, completely unaware that it’s an impossibility. His inflexibility and prejudices – ones he constantly claims not to have – destroy his life and are ultimately the end of him.
These are themes that weren’t singular to the ’90s and have only intensified in the following decades, bringing us to the election before us. Walz is now in the thick of making his case to help push the country ever forward, an eager foil to the William Fosters of the world today.
