I don’t remember Falling Down being this racist.
Rutherford Falls co-creator Sierra Teller Ornelas (Twitter and Instagram) and Dino-Ray talked about the Joel Schumacher drama starring Michael Douglas and we went on one helluva journey unpacking this film about a white man who has a bad day in L.A. We talk about Ornelas’s love for Robert Duvall, the great POC character actors in this film and we compare Barbara Hershey’s character to Farrah Fawcett’s in the iconic made-for-TV movie The Burning Bed. We also spend too much time talking about Farah Fawcett’s catalogue of made-for-TV movies.
Falling Down was giving a combination of “January-6th-insurrectionists” meets “Karen-having-a-meltdown-at-the-Ulta-cash-register” energy. From bad choices in the portrayal of Asian convenient store owners to the stereotypical Black and Brown L.A. gangster trope, Falling Down is packed with racism, homophobia and everything else. It’s a terribly problematic movie and not so surprisingly, it is hyper-relevant to today.
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