CINEMA: Stanley Peskin
OLIVER STONE’S Natural Born Killers portrays a Darwinian vision of modern society as an inferno in which only the most brutal survive. America is perceived as a war zone, not unlike Vietnam territory, that encourages guerrilla warfare and mass slaughter. In a florid and tendentious treatment of the career of two serial killers (played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis), the film displays the greatest depths of depravity and greed, depicted in graphic acts of barbarism and sexualised violence.
The source material for the film was a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, which was substantially rewritten by Stone and David Veloz. Tarantino eventually accepted a screen credit for story. Other screenplays by Tarantino — Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction — however violent, possessed a critical self-awareness and a sadness, qualities absent from Stone’s film.
Natural Born Killers recalls Terence Malick’s Badlands, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, but it does not possess one iota of the passion and wit of these films.
In every image of Natural Born Killers there is something to decode. There is a host of predatory animals (wolves, rattlesnakes, rabbits), swelling cartoon figures, grimacing faces shot from above and below, men and women who howl and sob and groan, but ultimately the film has nothing to say about anything other than itself; it does not so much articulate the grim facts of human existence as it articulates its own self-indulgence and muck-raking tendencies.
In the most primitive way, the film exhibits Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of montage in the staccato intercutting of shots of predatory creatures and pop-art animated action with the human action sequences. Tilted framing and the mixing of colour and black and white photography are designed to unsettle. The colour is harsh and lurid, the soundtrack strident. The breakneck pace is interrupted for several spurious romantic episodes. In one, the killers, Mickey and Mallory, get married to the tune of La Vie en Rose.
The film exploits the dual machine of pop music and television. There is a battery of popular songs, notably two by Leonard Cohen with the portentous titles We are Waiting for the Miracle and The Future. Newspapers deal in death and ugly domestic quarrels take place with television sitcoms in the background. Television commentator Wayne Gail (Robert Downey Jr), whose name suggests that of capitalist and fascist movie star John Wayne, is concerned only with TV ratings.
The language of television is simultaneously cliched and rabble-rousing. The killers “tore up the countryside with a vengeance out of the bible” and their exploits are described as “murder and mayhem”. TV is described without a trace of self-irony by the killers themselves as “junk food for the brain”.
Everyone in the film is seen as a product of the media. The cross-country murder spree recorded on television is greeted with elation by the teenage community and the serial killers are perceived as folk heroes: “If I was a mass murderer, I’d be Mickey and Mallory.”
The killers themselves always leave a witness to record their bloodbaths for the media. The Tale of Mickey and Mallory (there may be an oblique reference here to Disney’s famous mice) suggests their desire to write their own chronicle and commemorate themselves in media legend.
Stone leaves no stone unturned. Criminals and lawmen are seen to come out of the same basket. Scagnetti, a lawman, who has vowed to track down and punish Mickey and Mallory, rapes and kills a young woman. References to the Sante Fe Trail and the unnecessary killing of Red Indians are crude reminders of America’s past history.
The film has a two-part structure. In the first section, Mickey and Mallory are seen on the rampage. In the second, they are imprisoned, interviewed by the media and eventually escape during a blood-filled prison riot (an extended sequence in which Tommy Lee Jones gives a pop-eyed and frenetic performance as a prison warder).
Guilty of terrible atrocities, Mickey and Mallory do not meet a horrible end. We last see them in a trailer, travelling through America with their two children, the very image of domestic bliss and the American Dream. The irony could not be more heavy-handed.
Throughout his film, Stone argues that the violence shown by all of the characters is inseparable from the violence of the television image and its corruption, but ultimately Natural Born Killers is itself no more than commercial manipulation. Stone himself seems too cynical or corrupt to care: his film repels and it never fascinates.
At the very moment it compels the audience into acknowledging its own collusive, voyeuristic role, it is as meretricious as the media which Stone so insistently claims despoil minds and hearts.