Falling Down and Menace II Society: Urban Mobility & the Relationship Between Race and Class

The cinematic trope of mobility, traditionally an important component of certain film genres like Westerns and gangster films, has long been a cause for anxiety within the history of visual representations of the city of Los Angeles. As Jude Davies writes:

Los Angeles has been made into a series of "locations" in a process whereby historical and spatial specificity are dissolved by being... abstracted to provide generalizations about the human condition, and increasingly from the 1970s on, the state of the nation, or "the future." (Davies 217)

The result for Los Angeles, a city obsessed literally since its "Boosterist" conception with self-determination through visual representation, is "a symbolic over-determination" that has created what could be considered a genre in itself, a temporally diverse collection of films that address some aspect or another of Los Angeles, generally with regard to the physical urban space of the city (217). Director Joel Schumacher's Falling Down (1993), "The adventures of an ordinary man at war with the everyday world," and the Hughes Brothers' Menace II Society (1993), "This is the truth. This is what's real," are two of these films. The trope of mobility as it is used in Falling Down and in Menace II Society provides us with a method by which to examine the complex relationships that existed in 1990s Los Angeles between race and class.