Schumacher's Falling Down

Schumacher’s Falling Down tells the story of William Foster, a defense worker passionate about the faults in society, whose frustration reaches psychotic behavior causing Foster to be violent andirrational. In A Place in the Sun, Stevens depicts the story of a poor young man, George Eastman, who gets a chance to work with his wealthy uncle, but gets tangle up with two women who drive him to hisdemise. In both films the directors focus on the importance of the environment and how it encourages the main character’s need to fulfill their unrealistic fantasies to justify their actions. From thebeginning of the films, Schumacher and Stevens work to build sympathy for Foster and George and encourage the audience to be complicit in their deplorable behavior, through ambiguity, motifs, and bytheir use of sound and cinematography.
Schumacher and Stevens emphasize the importance of their main character’s environment and use it as a way to build sympathy for them. The first scene fromFalling Down demonstrates the power Foster’s environment has on him. As Foster impatiently waits in his car the heat drives him mad, and the children screaming in the bus nearby infuriate him, the flybuzzing in his car annoys him, and the cars honking all around him make him choleric. To depict the sense of entrapment that Foster feels, the director changes cameras to encompass all the angles ofFoster’s point of view of the congested scene. As a result of being stuck in traffic for several hours under the hot weather, Foster explodes and leaves car in the middle of road. Such bold action is whatmakes the audience like him.
Throughout the movie, Foster says and does what many people think and want to do, but never have the nerve to say. In the convenience store, Schumacher, once again,makes use of the environment to characterize Foster. After Foster asks for change and the store owner tells him he must buy something, Foster goes indignantly to the refrigerator s in the back to get a...