’I'm the bad guy?’Falling downand white masculinity in 1990s Hollywood

Abstract

Abstract Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1993) fuses two parallel but overlapping crises: one concerned with representations of white masculinity, the other construed in terms of post‐cold war American history and economics. This duality is articulated in two narratives predicated on very different notions of gendered identity. It can be seen that one of these narratives comes from the male transformation films of the early 1990s, while the other, derived from Rambo: First Blood Part II, takes masculinity as a given in order to carry out a symbolic resolution of a historical problematic. Alongside this narrative hybridity Falling Down courts both politically correct readings and reactionary ones. The film adopts a discourse of positive images, constructs male identity as defined by relations with others, and defamiliarizes universalizing tropes of masculinity, yet it also appeals to pejorative symbolisms of gender and ethnicity. I argue that the double narratives of Falling Down fail to re‐establish essentialist notions of white male identity. Instead, narrative resolution is only achieved in the film's closing scenes through presenting economics as more determinant than ethnicity or gender.