The End of The Great American Dream

Critical Drinker revisits an interesting movie from 1993, Falling Down, staring Michael Douglas, as Bill, a man who has been left behind by life.

This movie is interesting for several reasons. It was mildly successful at the box office, and the key to that was that it was made for $25 million in 1992. It brought in 96 million at the box office, which even including the cut theaters take, and the cost of marketing means that it made a few million dollars for the people who made it.

It was also an interesting study in what it would take to push someone over the edge, from a law-abiding citizen, to an outlaw with nothing to lose.

As the Drinker notes, this has ramifications for the world today.

I say this because I want to come back to the point I made at the beginning of this little essay. Why this film is even more relevant today than it was in 1993. Well I'll tell you why.

In a world where the gap between rich and poor has never been wider, where kids are pushed into expensive colleges to get useless degrees that leave them with debts they can never hope to repay, where people are making six figure salaries but can barely afford the rent, where the very idea of owning a home is a crazy pipe dream belonging to previous generations where people are more Angry, more isolated, more medicated, more exploited, and more overwhelmed than at any time in human history, where young people are quietly giving up on a society that blatantly doesn't care about them anymore this movie is more relevant than it ever Fucking was.

This is Critical Drinker's video Falling Down - The Great American Lie