Natural Born Killers
with Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore
Written by Quentin Tarantino, David Veloz, Richard Rutowski
Directed by Oliver Stone
by Laura H. Kallio
Ollie Stone strikes again! With Natural Born Killers, his ninth film, his camera isn’t assaulting the Warren Commission or American policy during Viet Nam or even Jim Morrison. Stone has apparently caught up a little. He’s been made aware that the year is 1994, not ’64.
His latest target was chosen wisely, seeing as how the biggest star of the 1990’s isn’t the achievements of any single person or event but rather media-created phenoms like Tonya Harding, Anita Hill, O.J. Simpson, the brothers Menendez, and the Bobbits – famous and followed more closely than the war in Bosnia, and with an enthusiasm that borders on cult worship, not for who they are, but for what they’ve done.
With Natural Born Killers, Stone satirizes American media and therefore, in a sense, himself.
The film theorizes that, for the sake of higher ratings and in order to sell more pimple cream, the media, with pseudo news programming like Hard Copy and Inside Edition, has lost sight of its obligation to the public and stooped to a level wherein Jeffrey Dahmer interviews and stories about postal workers who go on killing sprees are all in a day’s work.
American media, the film suggests, is intentionally appealing to one of Western Civilization’s basest of interests – our fascination with man’s inhumanity to man, our insatiable appetite for cheap thrills. In doing so, however, the film forgets, or chooses to ignore, the fact that we buy it. We choose to tune in when PBS programming is just as easily accessible.
The film’s point is well taken – something definitely is rotten in Denmark, and the utter absurdity of America’s latest heroes, or anti-heroes, may well wind up serving as some kind of sign of our impending doom – but the blame for this mess may well lie more within us, the viewers, than it does with the media itself. Supply and demand and all that, don’t you know?
So why are we so obsessed? Has the escalation of violence in America become so terrifying that we’d rather be entertained by it than informed about it? Denial maybe? Unfortunately, Natural Born Killers neglects to deal with these issues.
So, have you figured out that this film is idea rather than plot driven yet?
This fact is evident immediately as the entire film, all two hours of it, plays out in a hypersensory, hallucinatory directorial style that runs like one long surrealistic music video. This sort of extended play, feature length, MTV-style film making is, in a way, innovative in and of itself. Its editing takes the form of a visual assault – quick, tight, and, complete with morphing, comic book style animation, and tons of black and white and blue screen imagery. It’s veritable feast for the eyes, a druggy, dark trip that winds up confounding as much as entertaining. Pure escapism.
And yet, despite the sort of surface, visual orientation of the film’s direction, there is room, albeit a pretty narrow one, for the viewer to enter.
Woody Harrelson, of Cheers fame of all things, and Juliette Lewis, play Mickey and Mallory Knox, a pair of sociopathic young lovers who kill anyone unlucky enough to piss them off. Lewis takes her role in Kalifornia and multiplies it by ten. The ferocity this young actress is capable of is frightening.
In keeping with the Bonnie and Clyde tradition, the pair teases the cops by leaving witnesses alive to tell the tales of their violent exploits.
We get glimpses of their horrifying childhoods which, of course, are to blame for all the mayhem they eventually cause. That is, their twisted inner children with a healthy dose of mutant genetic material thrown in – they are “natural born killers” after all.
A particularly effecting segment, which stars Rodney Dangerfield as Mallory’s sexually abusive father, runs like a Saturday Night Live skit, a sort of mock X-rated Leave It To Beaver sequence. The disturbance creeps up on you – after the laughter has died down.
A short while into the couple’s three week long killing spree, a sleazy, tabloid journalist modeled after Geraldo Rivera, and played aptly in an inexplicable Austrailian accent by Robert Downy Jr., grabs hold of the Romeo and Juliet from hell story and milks it for every penny and ratings point he can get. In the process, the killers become freak show fodder, victims of the predatory media, much as they are predators themselves.
Add to this mix of weirdos and maniacs Tommy Lee Jones as a prison warden who is as easily sucked in by the media merry-go-round as the Mickey and Mallory fans who gather together in hordes in support of the young lovers/homicidal sociopaths, and a dirty cop played by Tom Sizemore, who is a success at his job primarily because he’s as much a criminal as those he captures.
And, of course, as has become typical of Quentin Tarintino scripts, all of these loose ends eventually wind up thrown together to do battle against each other in a violent, at times comic, and, thanks to Stone, prolonged, film ending spectacle.
One difference Stone brings to this dark film is that while it’s certainly violent, at times sickeningly so, the violence isn’t there for the sake of itself as much as it has been in previous Tarantino affiliated efforts. It’s less graphic than the gore of Reservoir Dogs, for example.
Natural Born Killers isn’t a study in violence. With Stone in the driver’s seat, the violence serves as background scenery for a much grander social context, perhaps at the expense of the in depth characterizations that this film lacks. But this is what we’ve come to expect from Oliver Stone – sweepingly dramatic films that serve as his personal commentary on the not so well tended American landscape.
