April 2, 2025

This week the From Below is excited to bring you a double feature freakout from the bizarro mind of Jon Moritsugu on Wednesday, April 2nd, at 8 PM. NOTE THE LATER TIME FOR A LATER SUNSET!

Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will open at 7:50 and we’re starting the movie(s) at 8:10!

We’ll be screening two of Moritsugu’s short features: 1989’s My Degeneration and 1993’s Terminal USA, both running about an hour apiece. Continuing the DIY ethos and rebellious, satirical spirit of last week’s screening of Perfumed Nightmare, Jon Moritsugu’s work is joyously, abrasively perverse, confrontational, poppy, and profane. We can situate his work in a nexus between the Cinema of Transgression

oozing from the ruin underbelly of NYC, the network firmament of academic film studies (Moritsugu, like some thrawn mirror version of Peter Wollen, semiotician-director of Friendship’s Death screened a few weeks ago, studied in the Semiotics department at Brown—highly recommend checking out his student film Mommy Mommy Where’s My Brain? As a slimy soupçon before the screening), and the burgeoning New Queer Cinema movement—Gregg Araki is a common comparison point to Moritsugu, most obviously for their identity, and interrogation thereof, as Japanese-Americans, but they also share a off-kilter pop sensibility that make them two of the best torchbearers of John Waters-style subversion in the 1990s.

We’ll start things off with My Degeneration, a riot grrrl disembowelment of the rock-n-roll myth of making the big time. Ever the Gen Xer, Jon Mortisugu’s cautionary tale of selling out sees Bunny Love, winner of a local Battle of the Bands, catch the attention of the industry—the beef industry, that is, which sees the trio as the perfect vehicle for their message of making meat cool again. They’ll just have to tweak their name and lyrics a bit first. Featuring music by Vomit Launch, Government Issue (GI), Poison 13, Bongwater, Fizzbombs, Halo of Flies, My Degeneration is a hazy, shoegazy ode to the potent powers of music and meat.

Following that, we’ll peep Moritsugu’s masterpiece, Terminal USA, a fucked up soap opera of such profane proportions that you’ll be wondering how it ever made it to air. That’s right, Terminal USA was made for public television, through an initiative by the Independent Television Service for the program “American TV Families.” (The $365,000 budget from ITVS was about $355,000 more than any other budget he had worked with before, allowing Moritsugu to quit his day job as a minimum wage record store clerk.) Moritsugu’s script was somehow, someway, selected for this, and he subsequently delivered a dayglo nightmare of the American Dream, as his Japanese-American family deals with drug abuse, incest, patricide, and good ol’ fashioned homosexuality. The ITVS was reportedly horrified, but it still made it to air on some stations, even if many more rejected it from the broadcast schedule. Following this, Moritsugu faced criticism from Asian American community groups, which he responded to by saying, in a fashion similar to the tone of his films, “you don’t see Asian-Americans on TV. I see this as a first, a very Americanized Asian-American family… you never see that on TV which is really disconcerting… As usual, it freaked out the squares, but I did get a lot of support from cool Asians.“

We can’t wait to share these beautiful, garish, noisy slabs of mythos-skewering pop destruction, this Wednesday at 8!