'Falling Down' feels like a trailer for Trump's America

Falling Down is the second Michael Douglas movie that I've revisited this year that holds up far better than it should and speaks volumes about the current climate even if it never intended to.

In this 1993 movie and Disclosure, which came out in the following year, Douglas plays a privileged white man who casts himself as a victim and walks through the world with an unearned sense of entitlement.

In Disclosure, he played a high powered exec who learns about rape culture the hard way, when the tables get turned on him by a woman who has more agency than him.

In Falling Down, it's a more complex character and performance than it appears to be on the surface. While Joel Schumacher is a director who never makes anything subtle, he was on to something with this film, which on first viewing played like an over-the-top screed aimed at politically correct America, but now plays like the heralding of the Trump era several decades early.

As a great, recent LA Weekly piece made plain -- the Michael Douglas character is the villain of this film -- whether the audience knows it or not.

He curiously thinks of himself as above the fray -- although he is a violent, prejudiced abuser, who from the very beginning of the film thinks of himself as righteous and aggrieved. He snaps not because of some great slight but because he has to sit in traffic (his license plate pointedly reads 'D-Fens') with the rest of the rubes.

In the first of many meltdown scenes brilliantly acted by Douglas, he suggests a Korean grocer's prices should return back to 1965 standards, which immediately called the Voting Rights Act of that same year to mind. Its passage is likely when Douglas's character probably believes the country starting going downhill.

Just like alt-righters today he would never comfortably identify as a racist -- in fact during one crude scene opposite a more overtly proud fascist he balks at pure, unadulterated hatred and asserts his authentic patriotism, and yet he is just as profoundly sick a character, harassing his ex-wife who has a restraining order against him, and collecting weapon after weapon -- each one more deadly -- with every intense encounter.

Certainly, the movie invites audiences to like, even root for Douglas' character. He can be likable and quite funny at times, but he is contrasted with the far more decent Robert Duvall policeman character, who, while a cliche, makes the case for dogged professionalism over wounded white male pride.

When Douglas' character goes fully mad -- dressed in all black -- and stalking the streets of L.A. (the film was shot amid the 1992 riots), he's an intentionally ludicrous, subversive comic figure. Like a lot of blissfully ignorant Americans he doesn't want to be bothered with nuances, bureaucracy, hold-ups or problems. He wants what he wants when he wants it and is convinced that the only problem is all 'these people' -- usually black, brown or other -- in his way.

It's a chilling portrait of what happens when this particular brand of toxicity gets out of control -- it's no coincidence that a mass shooter was inspired by it. This can be dangerous material if it's not seen as the social satire it is.

Douglas' character, a domestic abuser without a job, living at home with his mother, who describes himself as "not economically viable" certainly fits the profile of the kind of mad men who are terrorizing this nation every day.

When he is told he's "sick" his kneejerk reaction is to call his surroundings "sick" -- it's the kind of shameless lack of personal responsibility that is the hallmark of the age we're living in. Meanwhile, Schumacher never made a better film, and its unnamed protagonist should give audiences chills for decades.