How Men Were Enslaved By A Movie That Tried To Save Them

By Joshua Tyler
| Updated 1 hour ago

Noted cartoonist and persuasion expert Scott Adams pioneered the concept of two movies on one screen. Two Movies On One Screen is a term used to describe a phenomenon in which two people or groups witness the same events, facts, video, or information yet perceive and interpret them as two entirely different, often contradictory narratives or “movies.”

It’s exactly as if there are two movies playing on the same screen at the same time.

This kind of disagreement over the nature of reality is common, but rarely has it been more literally true than it was in Falling Down, one of the most controversial movies of the 1990s. To make its point, the film tried to use Two Movies On One Screen to persuade its audience to stand up for themselves, only to have the technique turned against it by the news media and used to destroy it.

This is the story of how Falling Down tried and failed to screenwash men into fighting back against the corruption and rot of the modern world.

Falling Down Is About Two Men, Not One

Others have tried to analyze this movie, but they limit their scope to scrutinizing the actions of its most violent character. That kind of analysis fails because Falling Down isn’t the story of one man; it’s the story of two, and unless you understand how those two characters fit together, you can’t understand the persuasion being attempted by the film.

Falling Down begins with those two men, stuck in the same LA traffic jam. The first looks around at the city’s accumulated filth and feels hatred, frustration, and disgust. The second looks at the same scene of rot and chuckles.

Two movies on one screen, and only one of those screens is showing the truth. Which one is it? By the end of the movie, one of these men will realize he’s wrong, and the other will be dead.

With those points of view established, Falling Down follows both through a world of heaped-on humiliation and contrasts their reactions. Its true intent is hidden behind the trappings of a police manhunt, but that’s not what matters. In reality, Falling Down is a carefully constructed Identification Reversal.

Constructing An Identification Reversal

An Identification Reversal is a psychological technique in which an audience is initially encouraged to identify with one character, viewpoint, or emotional response, only for that identification to gradually shift to an opposing or contrasting figure as the story progresses. It’s frequently used in film, propaganda, and persuasive storytelling to redirect audience sympathy, values, or self-perception over time. 

An Identification Reversal is not necessarily evil. Used right, it’s a valid way to tell a story or make a point. Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on what ideas you’re trying to sell with it. Follow along as I explain how it’s done in Falling Down.

Step One: Bond The Audience To A Character

Falling Down begins with the audience viewing the world from the perspective of a man played by Michael Douglas. He has a name in the movie, but he’s listed in the credits only by the name on his car’s vanity plate, which reads “D-Fens.”

The movie spends the first five minutes with D-Fens, sitting in his car, growing increasingly unhappy with the world around him. His air conditioning stops working, and his engine starts to overheat.

The street he’s stuck on looks terrible. The behavior of other motorists around him is base and appalling. He’s growing increasingly angry, and so is the audience, since we’re seeing it all from his tainted perspective

Fed up with the traffic and the trash, D-Fens abandons his car in the middle of the road and stomps off into the city. It’s framed as a heroic act, a refusal to continue complying with something so obviously and totally broken. We’re fully on the side of D-Fens as he walks through a neighborhood to a grungy convenience store, in search of relief from the heat. 

Inside the local Quick E Mart, he finds things as broken as they are outside. The prices are out of control, and the newly immigrated Korean store owner behind the register is rude and speaks only broken English. We feel his frustration fully.

It’s here that D-Fens first snaps. He lashes out, ranting about the unfairness of immigrants who can’t speak proper English, somehow taking over all the small businesses in his neighborhood. 

D-Fens takes his frustration too far, and while to modern audiences it probably feels like the moment when viewers would no longer be on his side, to 1990s viewers it didn’t cross that line. Tuned carefully to the limits of 1990s sensibilities, it goes right up to that line and taps it with a baseball bat.

D-Fens continues down that path from there. He encounters menacing gangbangers and other frustrations, raging against them and becoming increasingly murderous and unhinged, but only against targets that the audience may feel deserve it. His most violent act in the film is the murder of a Nazi who tries to assault him, and when it comes to hurting Nazis, audiences are always all in.

Step Two: Corrupt The Bond

With the audience bonded to D-Fens and cheering on his rampage, Falling Down begins working to destroy our affection for him. D-Fens begins to behave in a way that’s increasingly out of bounds. He targets and endangers people who don’t deserve it. He begins making threatening phone calls to his ex-wife and obsessing over his past with her. His own mother is afraid of him.

Gradually, we’re turned against the character we started out rooting for, as he’s revealed to be something far worse than we initially suspected. D-Fens isn’t just an average guy fed up with the world; he’s a mentally ill lunatic who’s been menacing the people he loves for years and probably needs to be put down.

Step Three: Redirect Emotional Energy To The Place Of Your Choosing

With the audience now turning against D-Fens, they need somewhere else to put the positive energy invested in their bond with him. The movie provides a place in the form of an alternate main character who’s been acting as a counterweight from the beginning. His name is Martin Prendergast, and he’s a cop played by Robert Duvall. Martin was in that same traffic jam with D-Fens, and the movie’s been priming us to hate him. 

When the Korean store owner, roughed up by D-Fens, reports the incident to the police, Martin asks a Japanese officer to interpret. The officer immediately berates him and accuses Martin of being racist for assuming a Japanese man can speak Korean. 

Unlike D-Fens, who pushed back when faced with racism accusations, Martin bows, scrapes, and apologizes like a pathetic, loathsome worm. To rub salt in the wound of Martin’s patheticness, after his apology for assuming his partner speaks Korean, that same partner then says to the Korean store owner, “gamsahamnida,”  which is Korean for “thank you.” He spoke Korean all along, but Martin, fully cowed, does not react. 

Despite being mocked by his colleagues for caring, Martin is hot on the trail of D-Fens. In the process of doing good police work, he’s abused, harangued, and humiliated by everyone around him. 

His boss treats him like garbage; his wife yells at him like he’s her slave; his incompetent, incurious co-workers treat him with derision and scorn. Martin chuckles dumbly and takes all of it. He’s a human punching bag. A natural doormat unaffected by the constant disrespect and cruelty being heaped upon him.

By the time D-Fens begins turning towards clear evil, the audience has grown to hate Martin. And so that’s exactly when the movie changes him.

Martin begins standing up for himself. He demands respect and dinner from his wife. He punches an abusive co-worker. Tells off his psychotic boss. He grabs his coat, hits the street, and decides to do what’s right, rather than continuing to chuckle and listen to his inferiors. 

In the end, Martin guns down D-Fens, rescuing his terrified wife and daughter, saving the day against the objections of the entire corrupt, broken LA police force. With that act, all the energy and attachment invested in D-Fens is transferred directly to Martin Prendergast.

As the credits roll, the audience suddenly has a model for resistance against the creeping rot of modernity. The reign of terror created by D-Fens is discredited and replaced by Martin’s measured response.

You started out the movie rooting for D-Fens; you end it wanting to be this newly awakened version of Martin. 

Falling Down Discredits Extremism By Advocating For Measured Action

It’s hard to say exactly what motivated director Joel Schumacher to make Falling Down. He’s the guy who would, just a few years later, put nipples on the Batsuit when he took over the Batman franchise from Tim Burton. His sensibilities are questionable. 

Interviews conducted with Schumacher around the time suggest he may have felt that degrading conditions in America meant a rise in right-wing extremism was inevitable, and so, rather than stop it, he’d hoped to channel that energy somewhere more constructive and less destructive. So Falling Down subtly works to inspire its audience towards action, rather than dissuade them from it, favoring measured action over extremism.  

That should have been viewed as a positive message. Falling Down discredits extremist violence while laying out a path for healthy, positive anger to improve a failing culture. 

The Dishonest Media Attack On Falling Down

That kind of real-world response might have worked, too, which is why the entire establishment, the same one that might have had its plans upset if people had listened, set out to destroy the movie advocating for it.

One of Falling Down’s early defenders was legendary film critic Roger Ebert. Writing at the time, he said of other critics’ reaction to Falling Down: “Some will find it racist because the targets of the film’s hero are African-American, Latino and Korean – with a few whites thrown in for balance. Both of these approaches represent a facile reading of the film.”

Ebert was right in his prediction and in his disdain for their shallow views.

When Falling Down hit theaters in 1993, the mainstream backlash started almost immediately. Many critics and commentators treated the movie less like a thriller and more like a political threat. Talking heads accused the movie of encouraging vigilantism and resentment toward minorities, immigrants, and the urban poor. 

The LA Times, for instance, called Falling Down, “the howl of a scared, white, urban middle-class man.” It then suggested vilifying anyone who liked the movie, saying, “We know who the real bad guys are.”

Others called it the story of “white men flailing self-righteously.” Several think pieces from the time framed the film as dangerous because audiences in theaters were reportedly cheering during the D-Fens character’s outbursts. To these critics, that reaction proved the movie was tapping into something volatile and evil.

All of those attacks were based on pretending that the movie somehow endorsed D-Fens and his actions, even though it carefully and intentionally does exactly the opposite so that it can clearly endorse the moment when Martin Prendergast finally stands up for himself. However, the attacks directed at the movie tended to gloss over the fact that Robert Duvall’s character is even in the film, despite the fact that Martin gets more screen time than Douglas’s D-Fens. 

The film’s attackers painted a picture of a movie that wasn’t on the screen, almost as if there were two movies playing at once. The one they watched, and the one that was actually made.

How Card Stacking Is Used To Control Your Perception

Some in the media were being honest, and in their delusion, really did see that other, non-existent movie on the screen. Many, though, were likely just card stacking to score social points for their political group.

Card stacking is a propaganda technique in which information is selectively presented to favor a particular viewpoint, while relevant facts, context, or evidence that would challenge or contradict that viewpoint are deliberately omitted, creating a misleading or one-sided narrative.

So Martin Prendergast was ignored, and a non-existent movie, which is only about D-Fens, was implanted in the minds of people who hadn’t seen Falling Down and wouldn’t know any better. Despite a lot of initial excitement and positive buzz for the movie driven by its trailers, “responsible” commentators encouraged people to avoid the film and condemn it as dangerous. 

That didn’t totally work. Falling Down still made a low-level profit, but was largely relegated to the cultural fringe as mainstream forces worked to shame its defenders. More importantly, it became a cudgel used to silence any objection by white men to the way the world was heading.

Falling Down, a movie that I believe was designed to motivate men to speak up, was molded by the establishment media into their weapon. And so Falling Down achieved the opposite of its intent. Rather than empowering real-world Martin Prendergasts it finished the job of silencing them. 

Jon Hamm Is A Modern Day Martin Prendergast, Who Never Stands Up For Himself

If you’re looking for proof of the news media’s total victory over Falling Down’s message, take a moment to check out AppleTV’s new prestige streaming show Your Friends & Neighbors. It has Jon Hamm playing what I’d call a modern-day equivalent of Martin Prendergast. Only unlike Martin, he never stands up for himself.

Instead, the character’s constant humiliation is treated as both appropriate and normal. Rather than following in Martin’s footsteps and fighting back against his abusers, he further debases himself by spending his off-hours robbing other equally tormented men.

Congratulations, culturally irrelevant men, you’ve been Screenwashed.