Twenty years ago today, Warner Brothers Studio unleashed Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers to the public, which is still among the ballsiest major releases in film history. The story follows the hallucinatory path of Mickey and Mallory Knox, two star-crossed lovers who take other people's lives with nihilistic abandon, and become iconic media sensations along the way. Roger Ebert opened his four-out-four star review writing, "Natural Born Killers might have played even more like a demented nightmare if it weren't for the O.J. Simpson case." This was the early 90's after all, where the likes of Joey Buttafuoco, Richard Ramirez, David Koresh, and the aforementioned O.J. became dubious household names due to violent scandals. The film itself went on to have its own scandalous history with copycat killings and a general outrage that accused the movie of glorifying its amoral protagonists. Does it? I can say, as someone who isn't usually keen on Oliver Stone's output, that Natural Born Killers remains vital precisely because of his satirical condemning on the subject of the media exploiting murderers, and how each became intertwined.
Stone has made a career out of kinetic, socially-charged provocations that stemmed from his soldier duties in Vietnam (he signed up influenced by his political father, but became anti-war) and rubbing shoulders with criminals (like the cocaine cartels he researched for his Scarface script). No one accused him of subtlety for works such as Salvador, Wall Street, The Doors, Platoon, or Born on the Fourth of July. Those latter two films listed each earned him Academy Awards for Best Director, which gave him the clout to fan his fire inside and make more Big Theme movies without much or any interference. His style became more frenetically-paced with rapid edits in each new movie he fired out (Stone shoots fast), with a chief example being the bug-eyed expose on The Government with 1991's JFK, where he weaved a tapestry of different film stocks, flashbacks, testimonies, and re-enactments to assemble the conspiracy behind Kennedy's 1963 assassination. He decided after tackling Big topics like Vietnam, the stock market, and political murder to do something "Arnold Schwarzenegger would be proud of." Hollywood's rising wunderkind Quentin Tarantino sold an option to his genre script Natural Born Killers to young producers Jane Hamsher & Don Murphy, who then brought it to Stone, who attached himself to the project. His mad aesthetic would be most appropriate with this subject, but had an important non-fan of his vision early on.
Quentin Tarantino's script differs so much from the what was produced that he end up with just a "story" credit, but his patented dialogue laced with pop references (for one, Mickey Knox is the first name in the closing credits for Once Upon a Time in the West) and the transplanting of the road movie/lovers-on-the-run sub-genre (like Godard's Pierrot le Fou, the game-changer Bonnie and Clyde, also from Warner Bros.) to still has his fingerprints. The two filmmakers met prior to filming, and an argument happened. Tarantino didn't like his story being used for social commentary, but Stone recognized the potential for a political discourse given the sub-genre's history (what lovers-on-the-run film doesn't damn society?). Ultimately, Stone shut down Tarantino's take on sensationalized violence as someone who's experienced it for real first hand versus Tarantino's thirst for b-movie spectacle. He even said that Tarantino makes movies and he creates films. They've since made-up (reportedly over alcohol), but the gift in the source material harkens to Stone's earliest sensibilities in genre filmmaking (his first two features were horror films) and is fused with his journalistic probing, only as an appropriately grotesque satire. Stone and re-writers David Veloz & Richard Rutowski riff off of Tarantino's script with a lurid poetic harmony. Tarantino went on to make successful (an influential) movies, and Stone embarked on his film, which from a production standpoint was almost as chaotic and surreal as the story.
"I was the sanest person during the whole shooting!" recalls Woody Harrelson, who stars as the good ole boy killer Mickey after his tenure with comedies like White Men Can't Jump and the TV sitcom Cheers. Stone correctly detected violence in his past (Harrelson's father was a hitman), and gave him the lead. As his young southern wife Mallory, the Gen-X firecracker Juliette Lewis was cast for her prettiness possessed by an anarchic brat. They have an odd, but insatiable chemistry. Other roles were filled by equally offbeat actors like Robert Downey Jr. as an Australian Geraldo-esque media-whore Wayne Gayle, Rodney Dangerfield as the incestuous rotten pig father of Mallory, Tom Sizemore as a celeb cop Jack Scagnetti, and Tommy Lee Jones as the hick prison warden Dwight McClusky who despises the killer couple more than anyone. The energy from this cast of weirdos only added buzz a set wrought with loud music, over-the-top set-design, a staged prison riot in a prison with inmates as extras, and surely a sizeable about of substances floating around for consumption. Principal photography lasted 56 days in 1992, and took more than a year to edit into its 118 minute theatrical version.
The result? Its first shot is a desert in black in white, which anoints the movie with a classic outlaw spirit. Black and white ends up expressing the non-literal, "vertical narrative" in the story that zaps us into people's true emotions through dialogue. It's one of many bold stylistic devices including (probably not limited to) animation, psychedelic rear-projections, around 18 different motion picture formats, documentary footage, faux-documentary footage, a savvy collection of music from various time periods and genres (from the divine Leonard Cohen to L7, Nine Inch Nails to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) to and commercials edited in a quick-cut MTV pace to give a subjective and psychotic rush of the madness in its white trash Latchkey children from ruined childhoods that grew into killers. The experience is a thunderous strobe of images (boasting around 3,000 cuts, most movies have around 700) that orient a viewer into a crazed psychological landscape that's severe enough to create an essay-form distance. Former Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman said that Stone weaves in and out of the minds of his subjects as he sees them and as they see themselves. He'd later proclaim it as the #1 of the 1990's and "The spectacle of our time" at the millennium's end.
Critics other than Ebert and Gleiberman weren't so kind. Most of the negative reactions (like from Leonard Maltin or Kenneth Turan) came from interpreting its overall perspective and nihilistic ending as an immoral victory for its ugly characters. It didn't land as a satire. It's a fair criticism that I disagree with, mainly due to its conviction to immerse in the trends at its time to reflect its own slanted ethics. A shot of a scorpion being run over or a line like "Kill the fucking Indian!" add meaningful nuance and foreshadow as a written piece, underlining again and again the cyclical powers of media and violence that perpetuate evil. The media angle is pertinent in making that evil a spectacle, as it did with Geraldo's interview with Charles Manson or The Night Stalker earning a heartthrob status among single women. Natural Born Killers is ugly in its context, but achieves a beauty in its bedrock content. Mickey and Mallory are the only characters in the story who believe in the power of love, which in turn teaches them the errors of meaningless murder.
A tragic encounter with an elderly Native American played by Russell Means allows them to see the error in their ways, and is an insightful moment (almost a microcosm of American's history) for the film to show the consequences of violence. This section, which features the allegory of the snake being led out of the cold, is the dead center piece to the sea change in Mickey and Mallory's polluted consciences. It leads to the moral and narrative comeuppance toward the main characters. The movie still doesn't ignore Mickey and Mallory's awful moral values that linger, but the optimism lies in that even the most immoral people can grow into better beings, in spite of the overpowering bad influences from a lifetime of hell. Mickey mentions at one point that "only love can kill a demon", and that Mallory was his salvation because she was teaching him how to love. It gives him the peace he didn't find from killing.
In the years since its release, some people didn't recognize the brutal love story at its center. It was cited as an influence for the murder of William Savage and Patsy Byers, the 1997 Heath High School shooting, the 1999 Columbine massacre, the Richardson family murders, and the Dawson College shooting just to name a few. John Grisham (a friend of Savage) even prompted a lawsuit against the filmmakers and Warner Bros. for inciting violence. These were tragic cases of people misinterpreting the essential center to a piece of art that discusses the relationship between a corrupted mind and the media that influences them. In the decade of irony, none perhaps were as great or unfortunate as the obvious message of Natural Born Killers being lost on the public (the media). Criticisms against Stone's bad acid-trip approach are reasonable, but how anyone can see the film as only glorified sensationalism and not being (and by the end condemning) that same sensationalism might have missed the message by the almost subliminal life-force of its fury. The signs of Mickey and Mallory's enlightenment can be seen in recognizing the evil in the exploiters like the media (Wayne Gayle), the corrupt lawmen that exploit it (Scagnetti and McClusky). Mickey gives a candid interview that highlights the primal truth that murder is natural, but exploitation of it is more wretched. The killers aren't saints, but the movie makes a good case that most evil demons are those around them.
My first experience was from the more extreme 122 minute director's cut (a staple in Stone's filmography) just before my teens, and the unique, perpetually-dutched angle movie impacted me. The moments of cruelty were laced with pure sociological poetry and refracted real issues in junk food American values with a populist hook. It was as if a Roger Corman movie had dropped strong acid and orated a deep conversation on a legitimate problem with the world. I've seen it countless times over the years due to its singular strengths in merging its style with the substance. They are one in the same, like linked snakes.
Today, the film is a portrait of a specific, morally-bankrupt era that has only corroded more with the advent of social networking. It still plays as a satire given its almost cartoon surfaces, but the message of the dangerous repercussions of the a superficial, sensationalized media woven into the minds of scandalous figures will stay kindled in any culture which thrives on instant news, buzz words, and water-cooler circus curiosity. Natural Born Killers is like an imperfect peyote trip that starts as a nightmare, and ends in a relaxed, near meditative examination of America's ugliest pass time that has supplanted a spiritual center. Mallory at one point sings "Guess I was born, naturally born, born bad" in an attempt to understand her own corruption. The brilliance in Natural Born Killers, two decades later, is showing how the media's dark presence contributes to a problem, and how even the most diseased minds can be healed by the glowing power of love. To quote the Leonard Cohen song used in the film for a moment of liberation, "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
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