『폴링 다운』(Falling Down)과 분노한 백인 남성의 로스앤젤레스 오디세이

Falling Down and an Angry White Male's Odyssey across Los Angeles

This essay examines Joel Schumacher's controversial film Falling Down (1993) which presents an angry white male's odyssey across Los Angeles. By portraying whites as a minority group in Los Angeles, this film stimulated whites' cultural and racial imagination in the early 1990s. In the first part, this essay pays attention to cinematic mechanisms in which the film viewers are induced to identify themselves with D-FENS (Michael Douglas), the main character in the film. Falling Down successfully achieved this identification by telling everyday experiences such as traffic-clogged freeways in urban life. In the second part, this essay employs the idea of "deterritorialization," which was elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari in their collaboration A Thousand Plateaus, to understand the reason why the white male got angry. By viewing Los Angeles in extreme long shot, this essay argues that D-FENS was alienated in a new urban landscape created by a series of urban restructuring in the 1970s and 1980s. In the last part, this essay employs Deleuze and Guattari's idea of "reterritorialization" to maintain that D-FENS tried to turn Los Angeles back to the year of 1965 which symbolizes a better time for whites.