The first thing we’re met with are title cards informing us: “All of the film you are about to see is real. Nothing has been staged.”
This is immediately followed by shaky handheld footage of armed police officers surrounding a stoic black man decked out in a sharp brown suit and deep black shades, leaning casually against a storefront wall on a public street in broad daylight and brandishing a pistol. They order him to drop the gun. He doesn’t. They unload their weapons. He drops with the gun.
Thus begins the feature-length tone poem of murder, mayhem and madness that is The Killing of America, a documentary produced in Japan in 1981, directed by American screenwriter Leonard Schrader and film archivist/author Sheldon Renan. A headlong descent into a red, white and blue inferno, this is probably the last film most viewers feel like watching right now, although surely there is something to be said for cinematic immersion therapy. If nothing else, those despairing over the apocalyptic tenor of our current moment might take some measure of solace from the realization that the apocalypse has been going strong for four generations now.
True to its word, The Killing of America is composed entirely of archival material: new broadcasts, courtroom footage, jailhouse interviews, candid recordings of carnage both quotidian (a fatal liquor store robbery) and historic (the Zapruder film). The film is bookended by the murders of the two greatest avatars of 1960s idealism: Johns F Kennedy and Lennon, respectively. Despite the fact that Kennedy was the fourth American president to be felled by an assassin’s bullet, the film marks his murder as the moment the country’s psychic dam broke, ushering in a tide of blood from which have yet to extricate ourselves.
Unafraid to stretch credulity or play fast and loose with some facts (Kennedy’s murder is unabashedly presented as a conspiracy), the film-makers draw a direct line between the political violence of the civil rights era to the spate of mass murders committed by religious cults, lone gunmen and serial sex killers. Along the way we meet a rogue’s gallery comprising the most notorious names in American tabloid history: James Earl Ray, Charles Whitman, Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Jim Jones, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Edmund Kemper, to name just a few.
To anyone with even a cursory interest in true crime – which nowadays is seemingly everyone – these are well-worn subjects, although there’s something to be said for the sheer amount of ground the film manages to cover during its 90-minute runtime. The Killing of America is at its most enthralling during its middle section, when it focuses on a handful of lesser-known and forgotten cases, including publicly staged hostage crises initiated by the likes of James Hoskins and Tony Kiritsis.
Kiritsis’s story is especially intriguing, and it’s a wonder that it hasn’t been the subject of a major feature film or series. Kiritsis was a dumpy, diminutive and foul-mouthed bartender who, in 1977, took mortgage broker Richard Hall hostage. Running a wire so that it ran between his and Hall’s necks, as well as his sawn-off shotgun so as to keep the police from shooting him (less they trigger the weapon), Kiritsis paraded Hall through downtown Minneapolis and before reporters for three whole days. Thankfully, the situation was resolved without any fatalities, although it is in Kiritsis and Hall’s ordeal that the film lights upon most its potent metaphor: “For three days, they seemed to embody the plight of their country: the man of progress with the fool of violence on his back.”
That metaphor could be applied to the new wave of violent urban dramas and thrillers made in the decade preceding The Killing of America – Taxi Driver, Death Wish, Dirty Harry – as well as any number in the years following (including this past year’s Joker). While the documentary never bothers to address violence in media, it nonetheless feels as though it’s in conversation with those other films. This sense is bolstered by the fact that the late Leonard Schrader was the older brother (and frequent collaborator) of Paul Schrader, the man responsible for some of the most defining films on the subject of urban violence and individual alienation. Clearly, this must have been a favorite subject during family get-togethers.
While The Killing of America was popular in Japan and attracted a cult following in the UK and Australia, it was rarely seen in America, having only been widely available since 2016. It’s hard to watch the footage of police attending to calls of domestic violence in minority and lower-income neighborhoods and not think of Cops and its subsequent bastard children of the reality TV age, just as it’s impossible to take in the moving carousel of graphic carnage without being reminded of early shock websites like Rotten.com, which have now splintered into incalculable threads within the forums of Reddit, 4Chan and the like.
Even though it presents itself as full-fledged, Old Testament-style prophecy, it wouldn’t be right to call the film prophetic. The section dedicated to the figure of the lone shooter certainly plays as all too sadly familiar and relevant to today, as does its running excoriation of America’s addiction to firearms. But when it comes to diagnosing the deeper sickness at the heart of its subject, the film offers little in the way of insight or revelation. Despite its air of gravitas – most of which comes by way of voiceover legend Chuck Riley’s somber narration – The Killing of America exists firmly within the reactionary and highly problematic tradition of the mondo movie: documentaries (or, more often than not, pseudo-documentaries) which depict taboo subject matters in an intentionally sensationalized and exploitative manner.
This all may sound as though I’m dragging the film, but I’m not: as with all exploitation films, the problematic nature of The Killing of America is its selling point. Unlike most pieces of true crime entertainment – which may be exploitative but lack the visceral and transgressive power of true exploitation cinema – the film will scare off the majority of viewers. But for those with a strong stomach or a taste for the grindhouse, it is essential viewing.
Plus, if nothing else, its depiction of the outside world as a nightmarish hellscape from which there is no escape should make you feel at least slightly better about being stuck indoors.
