Originally made for PBS and aired in their seven-part series “TV Families”, Terminal USA was immediately met with controversy. Writer/director/punk rock provacateur Jon Moritsugu deliberately made the film as transgressive as possible in order to shock and “get crazy shit on TV.”  He succeeded as 60 PBS affiliates refused to air it and then it was used as an example as to why the National Endowment of the Arts shouldn’t be using taxpayer money.

The film is an assassination of the American “model minority” stereotype for Asian Americans. Terminal USA is centered around a Japanese-American family with no last name. The mother is stealing the dying grandfather’s morphine and only keeping him alive to get the insurance pay out, the teenaged daughter is having sex with the family’s lawyer, there are twin sons – one who is a junkie and the other is in the closet and has a fetish for hyper-violent skinheads.

Terminal USA may be a film that is trying as hard as it can to offend, but not without a mission. Writer/director Moritsugu doesn’t just have a background in the world of underground punk rock, he also has a pedigree of semiotics and critical theory studies at an Ivy League university. This is the type of film John Waters would have made if he was influenced by punk not as opposed to being an influence on it. It plays with the tropes of the endless sea of American family sitcoms and the “golden age” of ‘50s/’60s Hollywood melodramas – all refracted through the lens of bands with names like Crime and Void.

This is a notoriously difficult and offensive film with a strong point of view that in today’s contextless age of Instant Information/Opinion could be easily dismissed as un-PC/anti-woke edgelord fare, which makes it an absolutely crucial piece of art for our current society. 

This film will be introduced by Dr. Kirin Wachter-Grene, Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She will be leading a post-screening open discussion on the film as well.