neither/nor 40


Te Mondo movie is often, and not without reason, accused of an overreliance on cheap irony, of the sort trafficked in by Brain Damage, Dr. Francis B. Gröss and, at his worst, Gualtiero Jacopetti. But in another sense the cross-cultural Mondo movie, like Mondo Cane or Des Morts, encourages the definition of “irony” as put forth by the American philosopher Richard Rorty in his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989): an awareness that one’s own cultural “vocabulary” is only one among many, and an understanding that one’s native vocabulary does not have a privileged relationship to final truth. While the Castiglioni Brothers beat the bush to discover whatever in Africa would seem most aberrant to their inscribed Euro-American audiences, a concurrent tradition of exoticizing the West sprung up in Mondo—particularly turning to the United States, that melting pot of savagery and civilization. Te precedent was set by Robert C. Cohen’s Mondo Hollywood, and Romano Vanderbes sold a tabloid view of the U.S. in two Tis Is America films (1977 and 1980). In Japan, where Faces of Death made such a hit, a particularly eager market for macabre Americana emerged, producing both Kentaro Uchida’s Te Shocks (1986), which begins with a crying Statue of Liberty, and Renan and Schrader’s Te Killing of America.


Te Killing of America was underwritten by producer


Mata Yamamoto for distribution in Japan, where it would be released under the title of Violence U.S.A. A great deal of the movie is comprised of found footage, including the siege of a Howard Johnson’s rooftop in New Orleans seized by anti-white spree-killer Robert Essex, or intimate footage of James R. Hoskins, a 41-year-old Cincinnati man who took the crew at local ABC affiliate WCPO-TV hostage at gunpoint to protest gun violence, before excusing himself with perfect Midwestern politesse to blow his own head off. (Reporter Elaine Green, who interviewed Hoskins on-


mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s


camera, received a Peabody Award for her poise.) Tese gems are interspersed with interview footage, original or otherwise, with personalities including the towering, terrifyingly articulate “Co-Ed Killer” Ed Kemper; Elmer Wayne Henley Jr., the teenaged accomplice (and murderer) of Dean Corll, a prolific serial killer working in the Houston area in the early ’70s; and Sirhan Sirhan, who expresses remorse, after a fashion, when recalling his presidential-aspirant victim: “In the morning, I get up and say ‘I wish that son of a gun were alive, so I wouldn’t have to be here now.” Renan, the author of an influential 1967 book called An Introduction to the American Underground Film, is credited as director, though he shared duties with writer Leonard Schrader, the brother and former collaborator of critic-turned- filmmaker Paul, who co-wrote the narration with his Japanese wife Chieko. (Te film additionally credits a platoon of cinematographers including Robert Charlton, Jon Else, Tom Hurwitz, Peter Smokler, and the ubiquitous Willy Kurant.)


Te Killing of America begins with a channel-surf


atrocity exhibition and a tour of Los Angeles by night that encompasses helicopter views and crime scenes. Voiceover stalwart Chuck Riley, reading the Schraders’ script in an impassive, clipped style, introduces the basic premise of the movie: “America is the only industrialized nation with the high murder rate of countries at civil war.” Te culprit? “Guns, and more guns.” From a slo- mo replay of the then still-recent non-fatal shooting of Ronald Reagan, we move along to another Kennedy, and a reproduction of the events leading up to perhaps the most-viewed home movie in history, the Zapruder film, and the back-and-to-the-left headbang. Tis, we’re informed, was “the day the American dream of freedom was wedded to the American nightmare of murder.” Aside from Riley’s deadpan voice-over, the movie


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