Falling Down

In the film, a man sits in his car behind a line of stopped cars on the freeway while a broken car is towed out of the way. It is a very hot day. He becomes agitated and angry and finally leaves his car, just walking away. He determines to walk to his wife's home, from East Los Angeles to Venice. As he encounters different people along the way, their antagonism brings out his defenses and his anger. He becomes incensed at a grocer because the grocer is overcharging for soda, and the man reacts by smashing up the store. He is attacked by gang members and fights back, eventually taking several guns which he will use later. When denied service at a fast food restaurant, he shoots the place up with a machine gun. He meets a Nazi store owner and kills him out of anger. He leaves a path of destruction as he makes his way across town until he is finally killed himself. There is a great deal of criminal behavior portrayed in the movie, not all of it related to the actions of the main character. When he first explodes in

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ree of the aggression that stands out all around him. There are good reasons for seeing some of the behavior of D-Fens as driven by social learning. The environment in which he lives is the subject of this film, and it is an environment that is tense, irrational, in flux, and often violent. D-Fens is so called because that is his license plate, and it is his place because he has worked in the California defense industry, an industry that has fallen on hard times, with massive layoffs and business closures. In his travels in the film, he encounters a number of people more violent than himself--the gang members from whom he gets a bag of guns, the hate-filled owner of the army surplus store. As a rule, social learning theory points to the three sources of aggressive learning that need to be controlled--the family, peer groups, and the media. D-Fens would have learned his aggressive behavior as a child. His mother is seen in the film. His father is dead. The violence his childhood might have had is not indicated. It is the violence of the society in which he lives today that is highlighted, and this could come under the heading of peer groups. The film does not delve deeply enough into D-Fens' life to demonstrate clearly h
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2654
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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