We watched the very dark C’est arrivé près de ches vous (literally, ‘It happened in your neighbourhood’), marketed in English as Man Bites Dog, this evening. Strangely, we watched it with people in whose neighbourhood some of this 1992 film was shot. It pre-dated by two years Pulp Fiction and must surely, with its garrulous, philosophizing serial killer, Ben, have had some influence on Quentin Tarantino, if only indirectly. C’est arrivé was shot on a shoe string by four filmmaking students and benefits greatly from those twin liberties, as their black-and-white cinema verité ‘mockumentary’ sends up the media and its fascination/complicity with violence. There is another message, I think, though it is delivered via reductio ad absurdum. We are all capable of the sort of detachment which enables us to do to ‘others’ what we would never do to our own.