The Killing of America - Democratic Underground

NorthernSpy

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Fri Mar-12-04 07:55 AM
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The Killing of America

Twenty years ago, Paul Schrader's older brother, Leonard, made a film about violence in America that Americans never got to see. Even his backers thought it was too gruesome. He still stands by the project. As he tells Geoffrey Macnab, it could save lives.

-- from "Life and death in the United States of Anger"
The Independent - London, UK, The Friday Review
Friday June 30, 2000

Question: Has anyone here seen this film? I haven't, but I think I would like to if I can find it.

The article suggests that Schrader sees the wide availability of guns as a key part of the problem, but he seems not to take into account the areas of the United States that have very widespread gun ownership, but whose social pattern of violence seems closer to the Japanese model: low rates of out-directed violence (murder), and high rates of inward-directed violence (suicide).

Also, I'm troubled by this:

Between 1900 and 1963, the murder rate in America had hardly changed at all. "In terms of the population growth, it may even have gone down, but the rate just rockets after the assassination of President Kennedy," he suggests. He can't pinpoint exactly why.

Er... didn't American murder rates rise enormously with the advent of Prohibition, and reach what may have been an all-time high in the 1930s?

Mary

A few more excerpts included below, but I really recommend going to http://www.leonardschrader.com/interviews/independant.shtm , and reading the entire article.
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Leonard Schrader grew up around guns. His family may have been strict Calvinists, but that didn't put them off hunting. Rifles were almost part of the furniture in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he was born in 1944. "My uncles all had hunting guns and hunting dogs," he remembers. "They went bird hunting, deer hunting." The guns made him nervous, though. "I was always afraid of them, maybe because they made the possibility of suicide too easy when I was young." It's a fear which afflicted his little brother, Paul, too. In the films they went on to write and direct, that fear is often painfully evident.

(...)

Last week, The Killing of America, a documentary that Leonard Schrader made in 1981, was released for the first time in the UK (the DVD becomes available next month). It's one of those films that just disappeared off the radar. Made with Japanese money, it was shelved by its US distributors. "Let's just say two very powerful people in showbusiness were partners in a company. One loved the film, and paid a lot of money for the American rights. His partner saw it six weeks later, blew up and said, 'this is exploitation, a terrible film - we'll just eat the loss and make sure that it never shows in the US'."

(...)

Apart from anything else, the murderers are getting even younger. In the documentary, he shows footage of Brenda Spencer, the teenager who fired at passing school children with the rifle given to her for her 16th birthday because "Mondays are so boring". But now, he points out, seven-year-old children are shooting one another. He is baffled by Congress's continuing failure to ban handguns ("you couldn't walk into a 7:11 with a rifle very easily - people would see you coming"), but doesn't think America is ready to give up its love affair with weapons. "If you compare America to Canada, Americans, many of them, just don't want life to be that boring," he says by way of explanation.