Natural Born KillersThe best satires have a healthy dose of social commentary, prescience and madness. Natural Born Killers is an ultra-violent movie about two thrill-killers: Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson) and his wife, Mallory Wilson Knox (Juliette Lewis), who cut a bloody swath through the Southwest United States on an extended honeymoon of murder and mayhem. Becoming a media sensation, courtesy of exploitative shock reporter, Wayne Gale (Robert Downey, Jr.), they are apprehended by a mutual psychopath, Detective Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore), and carted off to a deep, dark prison. But every cult of personality is just a stone's throw away from a comeback.
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Released in 1994, Natural Born Killers was quickly labeled as "controversial"; it was mandated by the MPAA to have about four minutes removed--deemed too violent or objectionable--so that it could obtain an R-rating. It's infamy was a result of the media--that noisome demon satirized in the film--claiming that it served as an inspiration for real-world acts of terror and murder, including the Columbine shootings. There is a circuitous irony here; the media chose to ramp up the infamy of Natural Born Killers in order to drive its own ratings--as is its wont--although the film openly criticizes the media (through the sleazy Wayne Gale) along with the schizophrenic and psychedelic direction by Oliver Stone. Re-released in a director's cut many years later, Natural Born Killers remains as strikingly relevant today as ever, in an era of scandal networks like CNN and propaganda forums like Gawker posturing as legitimate "news". (Along that train of thought, they operate with nigh-impunity, and there is the implication that they are funded by the power elite as part of a grand control apparatus to keep America sedate and numb, like sterile little rabbits in our pens.) Even now, Mickey and Mallory become the most unlikely of "heroes"--not moral heroes, but perhaps the most "American" archetypes of defiant independence in the face of a world that is ignorant of its own spiritual corruption and imprisonment. There is something primal about Natural Born Killers in the way that it can--beneath the blood-soaked scenes of carnage and sadism--remain more poignant in its message. The gospel of Mickey and Mallory is an observation about a society that is virtually comatose, enslaved by values imposed on us and then dangled in front of us like a carrot--a lure to keep us moving on the proverbial treadmill, powering the great machine. Oliver Stone drives this point home in Natural Born Killers at virtually every stretch of the manic, two hour film. Television advertisements for products like Coca-Cola are interjected into Natural Born Killers, and like a klaxon blaring, shock the audience to acknowledge the absurdity of consumerism by juxtaposing these "wholesome" ads with objectionable scenes. As mentioned, there is no moral virtue to Mickey and Mallory--except that they are both victims of abuse and love one another; they kill people for kicks. But what Natural Born Killers dares to do is to present them as sympathetic by contrasting them with unsavory people that come across as even worse...people so evil, they deserve to be killed. People like Mallory's incestuous and hateful father, Ed (Rodney Dangerfield), the oily and self-interested prison warden, Dwight McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones), as well as Gail and Scagnetti. These antagonists are especially loathsome because they represent the worst interpretations of American values. They are perverted and tainted demons, and yet are showered with praise in this mixed-up, brainwashed world of Natural Born Killers--a world so ripe with decay that man-eating flowers like Mickey and Mallory can thrive and become post-modern pop icons, rockstars with shotguns.
Natural Born Killers is presented in a maelstrom of style, so outlandish and over the top that it consistently feels like a hallucinogenic nightmare--a genuine bad trip. The film has a deliberately warped perspective from the start, through off-kilter camera angles, frequent transitions from color to black and white, and even through jarring transitions of film to digital video and changes in the resolution of the imagery. There are even animated portions of Natural Born Killers, and other scenes use stock footage from other movies and commercials. All of this makes the audience's experience a constant state of unease and insecurity, which no doubt contributes to subconscious feelings of anxiety and discomfort, compounded by the terrible violence and indictment of the media in modern America--snake venom injected right into your veins. Shots of terrible tragedies exploited by the media near the end of the film underscore the connection between Mickey and Mallory and opportunistic parasites like Wayne Gail. Mickey is compared to a demon or a serpent--both analogous with Satan in the Garden of Eden, representing the source of forbidden knowledge. Conversely, the media peddles tragedy as entertainment and molds modern perspective through its amoral lack of responsibility for the repercussions, concerned only with profit--the root of all evil. To wit, the media is the true purveyor of "forbidden knowledge" via exploitative journalism--literally setting the stage for chaos and priming the world for superstars like Mickey and Mallory, the inevitable product of their depravity. In many ways, Mickey and Mallory are caricatures--cautionary exemplars more than actual characters. They can be sympathized with for the hard state of affairs which have led them to such a life as this, but they are also pawns of paranoia and self-annihilation because of the failures of those who are supposed to be in charge. Virtually all of the antagonists in Natural Born Killers occupy a position of authority, from Mallory's father to Scagnetti and McClusky; even Gale exists as an "educator" of sorts, since his TV show is ostensibly designed to inform. Both Mickey and Mallory speak in a Southern drawl, yet their pleasant colloquialisms normally meant to diffuse tension ironically heightens the tension, hinting at terrible violence yet to come. The exaggerated look of the film, the cliche-by-design plot (which is fundamentally a riff on Bonnie and Clyde), and even the choices of music gives Natural Born Killers the feel of a Looney Tunes cartoon gone horribly wrong--the kind of shows with explosions and mallets these killers might have grown up watching on TV, reenacting them in a terribly perverse way. In all of Natural Born Killers, there is never any mention of God or actual religion--even on death row or when victims are staring down the barrel of Mickey's revolver, there is nothing. It could be said that the world of Natural Born Killers is a "godless" world; but more accurately, it has a "god": The Television. It is an omnipresent force which dictates not just the lives of the characters in the film, but also the audience. It is no benevolent shepherd but a self-serving Moloch that demands sacrifice, and it's dreadful testament is the undercurrent of Natural Born Killers.
Recommended for: Fans of a profoundly dark satire of media and violence, through an ultra-violent nightmare love story drenched in gore. The rapid speed of the story, the pulsing and constant barrage of music, and vivid visuals make the movie an explosion of blood and cynicism, and like being under the influence of perception-altering drugs or some kinds of ophidian toxin.
Natural Born Killers is presented in a maelstrom of style, so outlandish and over the top that it consistently feels like a hallucinogenic nightmare--a genuine bad trip. The film has a deliberately warped perspective from the start, through off-kilter camera angles, frequent transitions from color to black and white, and even through jarring transitions of film to digital video and changes in the resolution of the imagery. There are even animated portions of Natural Born Killers, and other scenes use stock footage from other movies and commercials. All of this makes the audience's experience a constant state of unease and insecurity, which no doubt contributes to subconscious feelings of anxiety and discomfort, compounded by the terrible violence and indictment of the media in modern America--snake venom injected right into your veins. Shots of terrible tragedies exploited by the media near the end of the film underscore the connection between Mickey and Mallory and opportunistic parasites like Wayne Gail. Mickey is compared to a demon or a serpent--both analogous with Satan in the Garden of Eden, representing the source of forbidden knowledge. Conversely, the media peddles tragedy as entertainment and molds modern perspective through its amoral lack of responsibility for the repercussions, concerned only with profit--the root of all evil. To wit, the media is the true purveyor of "forbidden knowledge" via exploitative journalism--literally setting the stage for chaos and priming the world for superstars like Mickey and Mallory, the inevitable product of their depravity. In many ways, Mickey and Mallory are caricatures--cautionary exemplars more than actual characters. They can be sympathized with for the hard state of affairs which have led them to such a life as this, but they are also pawns of paranoia and self-annihilation because of the failures of those who are supposed to be in charge. Virtually all of the antagonists in Natural Born Killers occupy a position of authority, from Mallory's father to Scagnetti and McClusky; even Gale exists as an "educator" of sorts, since his TV show is ostensibly designed to inform. Both Mickey and Mallory speak in a Southern drawl, yet their pleasant colloquialisms normally meant to diffuse tension ironically heightens the tension, hinting at terrible violence yet to come. The exaggerated look of the film, the cliche-by-design plot (which is fundamentally a riff on Bonnie and Clyde), and even the choices of music gives Natural Born Killers the feel of a Looney Tunes cartoon gone horribly wrong--the kind of shows with explosions and mallets these killers might have grown up watching on TV, reenacting them in a terribly perverse way. In all of Natural Born Killers, there is never any mention of God or actual religion--even on death row or when victims are staring down the barrel of Mickey's revolver, there is nothing. It could be said that the world of Natural Born Killers is a "godless" world; but more accurately, it has a "god": The Television. It is an omnipresent force which dictates not just the lives of the characters in the film, but also the audience. It is no benevolent shepherd but a self-serving Moloch that demands sacrifice, and it's dreadful testament is the undercurrent of Natural Born Killers.
Recommended for: Fans of a profoundly dark satire of media and violence, through an ultra-violent nightmare love story drenched in gore. The rapid speed of the story, the pulsing and constant barrage of music, and vivid visuals make the movie an explosion of blood and cynicism, and like being under the influence of perception-altering drugs or some kinds of ophidian toxin.