Natural Born Killers

Easily one of the most controversial films ever, "Natural Born Killers" isn't an easy film to classify. Is it a good movie? In the sense that I kind of enjoyed watching it, yeah, I guess it's good; I enjoy films with the kind of overt stylization you see here. But I can't say it's a really successful film.

The plot, which I think everybody can start to guess at from the title, involves two serial killers named Mickey and Mallory Knox. After abusive childhoods for both of them that end with their parents' deaths, the two of them go on a killing spree across Route 666. Meanwhile, the news media seemingly condemns them, but that doesn't seem to get into most people's heads: Everybody seems to love the Knoxes, from three boys who declare them the best thing to happen to mass murder since Manson to kids in Japan, London and France who just love them. Tabloid TV host Wayne Gale, meanwhile... well, he's mainly important for later in the film, when he's interviewing Mickey (but not Mallory, for some reason) on live TV after the Super Bowl.

As you may have guessed, it's a satire. Unlike most "satires" nowadays, which seem to consist of trying to shock an audience without really saying anything about the subject matter, "Natural Born Killers" at least seems to have a point: We do tend to pay enough attention to murder and death in the media that we're only a few steps away from idolizing the killers. The thing is, that point is made early on in the film--maybe thirty minutes in. So what's left?

Strangely enough, we get to spend quite a bit of time with Mickey and Mallory. This is odd on several levels--not only because this is supposedly a satire of the media, but because for a movie that condemns the media for idolizing killers, it seems to be doing something close to that. Maybe it's not outright idolizing them--anybody who isn't already crazy enough to start killing is likely to see Mickey and Mallory as evil. But the movie doesn't seem to condemn them for what they've done--even after they supposedly swear off killing anybody who doesn't deserve it, they don't seem to have much of a problem killing anyone who gets in their way.

That's just the two of them. The other main characters in the film also seem to be crazy, and they're the ones who are cast in a negative light. McCluskey (the prison warden who has them locked up in the second half of the film), Wayne Gale (the reporter for "American Maniacs"), Jack Scagnetti (the policeman who catches Mickey and Mallory)--they all seem to be reprehensible maniacs who are just as bad, if not worse, than Mickey and Mallory. Is that another point of the film--that the ones who "protect" us from the maniacs are just as bad as them? I'm not sure. The way I interpreted it was that everybody in the movie who got more than ten minutes of screentime was a psychopath. Maybe that's the point of the film--we're all psychopaths. To hell with it--you could play this game all day. The movie is, as a forum acquaintance of mine once put it, a cinematic Rorschach test--no matter what you see, the filmmakers see their points in it.

Now let's move on to how the film is shot and edited. As I mentioned earlier, it's super-stylized: Many scenes are in both black-and-white and color, with continually changing film stock. Some scenes are shot on videotape (Mallory's life at home is shot as a sitcom, with Rodney Dangerfield getting laughs from a laugh track at his abusive speech). There are various points in the film where we get cutaways to things that barely seem to be connected to the scene in question--in a scene where Mickey and Mallory are stuck in the desert, we get cuts to jumpy time-lapse photography of clouds and dead animals. (We even see Mickey's face distort like he's had a picture taken of him after he watched the videotape from "The Ring.") A lot of the movie seems to be shot at a Dutch angle--the camera is tilted 45 degrees, much like "Battlefield Earth." (Well, at least it kind of makes sense here.) There are quickly-cut bits of "demons" (which, when you pause and look at them, look less like demons and more like people making silly faces at the camera). There are pieces of other movies thrown in, from "Frankenstein" to "Night of the Lepus." I could go on and on about this.

The overt stylization is fun to watch, but what exactly does it mean? It makes sense in very few movies. In "Requiem for a Dream," for example, it resembled the state of mind of the addicts. In "Run Lola Run," it didn't make sense at first (though I still loved the film), but now that I think about it, it also resembles the state of mind of the characters who have to think fast about their situation. Here, I guess it's supposed to resemble the state of mind of an insane person. Yet it's not just applied to scenes with Mickey and Mallory; it's applied to scenes where other characters are shown, and even applied to scenes on TV. I guess it's another instance of the Cinematic Rorschach Test--the idea that everybody is a psychopath. (Well, really, I think it's not so much that as it is that Oliver Stone was high most of the time when he made this film. But never mind that.)

In the end, I guess the movie's a mixed success. If you're looking for a well-thought out idea, it's not successful. But if you want to sit back and have the movie flow into you, it works.