Here's the Dark Movie Donald Trump's Campaign Most

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Mar 1, 2016 at 10:58 PM

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Here's the Dark Movie Donald Trump's Campaign Most Resembles
It's no longer a comedy.

FALLING DOWN, 1993

BY STEPHEN MARCHE
MAR 1, 2016

Last week, Etan Cohen, co-writer of the 2006 film Idiocracy, tweeted what many of the movie's fans had been thinking for months:

Etan Cohen ‎@etanjc

I never expected #idiocracy to become a documentary.

With The Donald so close to taking the Republican nomination, which could nearly be his by the end of today, no satire could possibly keep up with reality.

A major party is about to select as its candidate for President of the United States of America a man with a spraypainted helmet for hair, who says things like "I love the poorly educated" and "How stupid are the people of Iowa?"

He literally calls his opponents pussies and has appeared on WWE. So there would be more than a passing resemblance between President Trump and Idiocracy's President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, played by Terry Crews.

Sadly, I that comparison no longer works. Donald Trump is not the face of a future idiocy; he is the face of a long-forgotten evil. He and his supporters more closely resemble an altogether darker figure from Hollywood's past: William Foster, played by Michael Douglas, the anti-hero of 1993's Falling Down.

For those who don't remember or never knew, Falling Down, directed by Joel Schumacher,was a minor hit in 1993. Douglas, sporting a buzzcut and a crisp white button-down, plays a laid-off, divorced missile engineer who leaves his car in the middle of a Los Angeles traffic jam, determined "to go home," and spends a day walking through his diverse, troubled city.

Over the course of his wanderings, his frustrations boil over and his violence escalates. He beats a Korean storeowner who charges him eight-five cents for a coke. It's not the money; it's the way the storeowner pronounces "five." "You come to my country, take my money and don't even learn my language?" Douglas-as-Foster yells.

In the the movie's most famous scene, Foster arrives at fast food restaurant three minutes after breakfast has finished and pulls out a machine gun when they refuse to serve him. He declares to the terrified customers: "I'm just standing up for my rights as a consumer." It is a twisted take on middle-class white entitlement under threat.

To its credit, the movie portrays Foster's entitlement mostly as self-deception. When the police finally stop him, he asks incredulously, "So I'm the bad guy?" When informed that yes, he is the bad guy, he responds pathetically "I did everything they told me to."

Falling Down is about a toxic mixture of self-pity and the hunger for order. But both the movie's creators believed that a man like William Foster was an anachronism; the world had passed him by.

They were wrong. Donald Trump has tapped into a certain resentment toward the cultural shifts afoot in the U.S., and it is enough, probably, to launch him at least to become the Republican party's nominee.

Matthew MacWilliams over at Vox found, pretty definitively, that the strongest correlation to Trump support was authoritarianism. "People who score high on the authoritarian scale value conformity and order, protect social norms, and are wary of outsiders," MacWilliams writes. "And when authoritarians feel threatened, they support aggressive leaders and policies."

That could be the typical Trump supporter. Or it could be the main character from Falling Down.

At one crucial juncture in the movie, Foster enters an army surplus store run by a racist conspiracy theorist who has heard about his rampage and heartily approves. "I'm with you, don't you get it?" he tells Foster. "We're the same, you and me." Foster disagrees: "We're not the same. I'm an American. You're a sick asshole."

Such skewed logic is present, though in a far less overtly violent tone, with Trump. He wants to ban Muslims and build a wall; refuses to turn his back on the KKK; and won't disavow Benito Mussolini, whom he quoted approvingly this past weekend.

To be clear: we're not suggesting that Trump or his supporters will conduct or endorse such brutal violence. But we've moved way beyond Idiocracy, a movie about a future where a bunch of idiots can't figure out that watering crops with Gatorade will harm them, Starbucks gives hand jobs, and the most popular film of the year is called ASS.

It imagines a time where everyone is dumb but basically sweet. President Camacho wants the best for people. I doubt we will be able to say the same about possible-President Trump. At this point Idiocracy looks less like documentary, and more like wishful thinking.

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