Special “Going Postal” Movie Screening In London!

eXiled Alert! / What You Should Hate / October 9, 2009

By Mark Ames

If you’re one of the millions of eXiled Online readers living in the Greater London area, then Christmas is coming early for you. Next Friday, October 16, there will be a special screening of the brutal BBC-produced documentary, Going Postal, based on my book of the same name. The mad and mega-talented director, Paul Tickell, will be on-hand for a Q&A after the showing–I highly recommend taking advantage of that opportunity. The screening will be held at the Frontline Club, “in the heart of London”–for details click here. [Update: you can book through the Frontline website, though there may still be tickets on the night of the showing. It’s at 13 Norfolk Place, W2. Close to Paddington Station.]

Tickell is a rare talent nothing at all like the hammy blowhard middlebrows who have polluted the documentary genre over the past decade. For example, check out if you can Tickell’s documentary “Punk and the Pistols” for the BBC which he made last decade–it’s by far the best film on early British punk, and the interviews with Malcolm MacLaren are priceless.

Tickell has also made directed feature films, including the indie black comedy Christy Malry’s Own Double-Entry, a kind of proto-Going Postal movie about dying in the Office World, based on the 1973 novel by B.S. Johnson. If you haven’t seen that film yet, then you should–and you can. On Monday, October 12, there’ll be a special screening at the British Library–details here.

So, now that I’ve given our UK-based readers two reasons to live another week, be prepared because Tickell’s movies will give you plenty of reasons to end it all by next weekend.

Update: Here’s some more info on Fridays’ showing of Going Postal, from the promo description:

With extraordinary access to those involved, including one teenage murderer himself, GOING POSTAL tells the story of the school and workplace shootings which have cast a shadow over American society since the 1980s. This April saw the 10th anniversary of Columbine, but the phenomenon is twice as old. Hundreds have been killed. The film, directed by the award-winning Paul Tickell, seeks to build up a picture of how and why this violence occurs.
The documentary speaks to survivors, families of those who died as well as friends and families of the murderers themselves. Interviewed also is Michael Carneal, serving a life-sentence for a notorious school shooting in Kentucky when he was just 14. His raw and troubling story and those of other shootings are placed in context by interviews with those who have researched this subject in depth – from the first cluster of shootings in the 1980s in the US postal service (hence the phrase Œgoing postal¹) to more recent occurrences.
Some experts argue that although mental instability plays a role, rampage shooters are rarely insane and impossible to profile.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. You can reach him at ames@exiledonline.com.

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17 Comments

Add your own

1. Irritated | October 9th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Still waiting to see this in the US. Seriously.
2. Scott | October 9th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Still no word on a US release.
3. Jack Reynolds | October 9th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Check it out – Mark Ames is bringing foreign dollars into the American economy.
4. matt | October 9th, 2009 at 8:50 pm
WHY CAN’T I FIND THIS IN THE STATES
5. Tam | October 10th, 2009 at 3:10 am
You’d probably have a lot more readers over here if you did the occasional article about Britain. I’ve never met anyone over here who’s ever heard of the site until I mention it, even among my friends who are into satire and politics and love stuff like Chris Morris and Iamando Ianucci.
Besides which, it’s a country that has stuff going on that would be of interest to readers, such as the current attempt by old Etonians to takeover the country and Britain’s important contribution to the current economic fuckups.
The Exile still has a lot of good stuff on it but it’s become far more US centric and a bit too obsessed with what some fuckwad or other has written in today’s New York Times recently. Judging by the comments you have a lot of readers outside the US so a bit more pandering to us would be appreciated.
6. Ex-pat | October 10th, 2009 at 11:05 am
You seem curious on what Ames’ has to say about Britain, Tam. Let me help you out there. The editorial line, as long as I can remember, has been that modern Britain’s a lickspittle toadie both odious and irrelevant, Brits are freakish wooden-teethed perverts, and British women are in need of a burqa, stat.
Another point – Ames is an old-school journalist. He writes what he knows. To get to know Britain he’d have to live somewhere like Sutton Coldfield. Put Ames in Sutton Coldfield for a year, and… well, I’m still kinda upset we lost HS Thompson prematurely.
7. Tam | October 11th, 2009 at 2:15 am
Ex-pat
I’ll agree with you on the lickspittle toady thing, but you’re (sort of) wrong about the women among other stuff. For one thing, bigger cities like London have been a magnet to millions of immigrants for a good few years and particularly the Eastern European women Exiled readers are so fond of. As a result, if you walk about in central London these days you’ll see at least as many very pretty girls around here as you will anywhere else in the world.
8. Minoch33 | October 11th, 2009 at 4:28 am
Sutton Coldfield?? LOL ..full of Etonians that never made it to Eton 😉
9. geo8rge | October 11th, 2009 at 7:43 am
Any chance of a Sims expansion pack?
10. Salvor Hardin | October 12th, 2009 at 7:43 am
wheres a torrent when u need one, almost downloaded some crappy E! doco with the same name
11. Connors | October 12th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Congrats to Ames. Best book of the decade. Shouldn’t they be flying you to London for the screening?
12. T. Hallman | October 13th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Damned shame this place doesn’t have a discussion forum. The Going Postal champion of World History Joey “My syphilis is way worse than Lenin’s” Stalin’s grandson just lost a libel case wherein he was claiming at Vladimir “Fuck you if you don’t like and fuck you if you do” Putin’s behest that Stalin didn’t really go postal. Not even Russian courts would go along with that.
13. Robert D | October 14th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Tam, the old Exile website has an amusing article on Britain’s “chav” culture here:
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=8736&IBLOCK_ID=35
It would be pretty funny if the Exile did a savage, demolition style job on the BNP, but then, that’s kind of like bag snatching from old ladies. It’s just too easy.
14. hui | October 15th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Salvor Hardin,
there’s a vhsrip on thebox.bz
15. Chester | October 29th, 2009 at 4:31 am
To this discussion of the Exile’s take on the UK, I’d like to point out that there is a strong Anti-UK sentiment based on Irish heritage in the case of Dolan, and I seems to recall picking up on echos of that from other writers here too. Maybe if they Northern Ireland situation deteriorates into violence, we could end up reading more about the UK.
16. JM | November 9th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Might be a bit more difficult to do in the US. I think there’s more interest in the insanity behind US spree killings outside the country than there are in it, unfortunately. It’s become a bit too commonplace here whereas in Europe, despite similar things happening in Germany and Finland, it is still seen as a peculiar and disturbing American phenomenon.
As to distribution in the US, I could only see a limited one that would work – maybe NYC, DC, LA despite it probably being necessary in the less-populated parts of the US that are the settings of a lot of these incidences. A distribution deal through Netflix or Hulu could also help as well as a proper site to advertise it.
17. Eric Harris | September 16th, 2010 at 9:46 pm
Jesus motherf**king christ. Where is the torrent? I’m good at finding torrents for anything ever made. I have never been able to find a torrent for this. “Going Postal” simply does not exist. This documentary is some kind of hoax.