A few weeks ago I watched Oliver Stone's controversial (would classic be an adequate adjective here, too?) film, Natural Born Killers, and it has taken a while to think of how I'd approach the film, but even today it's hard to write about the film and its lingering effect. So much has already been written regarding the level of violence in the film, so it would be desirable to avoid yet another essay on the violence of the film; however, that would be quite impossible considering that Stone's subject is violence--well, violence in association with media and the public's insatiable need for entertainment. Instead, what I could write about is the powerful effect the film, and others like it, can have on us.
The moving picture, whether small or big, is an intriguing medium because no other art-form so closely mimics our visual perception. No other art-form simulates reality so well. However, Natural Born Killers is far from any reality I know. It plays with conventional representations of family in television sitcoms, hints at the sometimes sinister nature of "getting the story," and the inherent power in representational media. Natural Born Killers poses interesting questions: Are the main characters' murders truly the most reprehensible actions that occur in the film, or is the public's endless desire for entertainment, in whatever form it takes, the true villain of the film? What about the desire for fame and celebrity and the lengths in which we'll go to obtain both?
Stone poses these questions by integrating images and scenarios that refer back to television and film. Take for instance the quite disturbing scene when Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) first meet at Mallory's childhood home. The scene plays out as a contrived sitcom piece (complete with laugh-track), but Stone takes the usually saccharine plots of a sitcom and fills it with a lecherous, incestuous, and violent father-figure, far removed from the world of Beaver and the Brady's. This particular scene is a play on how sitcoms represent the ideal familial unit, an ideal that is impossible to live up to, an ideal that adds pressure on families to maintain an unrealistic image. Stone is also hinting at the idea that psychosis and violence often begins at home, the one place, at least according the artistic representations, where we are supposed to be safe and happy.
Unfortunately, the psychosis and violence that begins in the home is hardly going to be contained there, which is where the dangerous power of film and television comes into play. According to Stone's film, film and television act as a magnifying glass for psychosis and violence, but the image within that magnification extends beyond, out into the realm of reality. With it's rapid succession of cuts, edits, and Stone's insistence on not having a single straight shot (the camera is always tilted), Natural Born Killers made me uncomfortable, restless, and tense; there was only one moment in the film when Stone allowed for a moment of calm, almost: the scene when Mickey and Mallory exchange vows and blood. Watching the film, I imagine, feels like looking into the mind of a narcissistic psychotic, where the entire world is both against and paying attention to you, where reality is shattered by a hyperreality, a reality so magnified and distorted that it is virtually unrecognizable.
The problem with Natural Born Killers is that it does not present an alternative to all the craziness, which is Stone's intention, of course. It's an enigmatic film that attempts to bring up more questions than it answers. It makes us all accomplices in the violence that occurs on screen; after all, would Mickey and Mallory have been as violent, or successful, without having an audience? Robert Downey Jr.'s character, Wayne Gale (a television investigator and personality), is the symbol for just such a connection between viewer and murderer. When his interview goes wrong, Gale accompanies (not willingly at first, of course) Mickey and Mallory as they escape from prison; however, he helps them in their escape, killing others as ruthlessly as they do. His motivation is twofold: Gale is willing to do anything for a great interview, more celebrity; and he is also motivated by his unfulfilling life, a suppressed rage that has had no other outlet. Mickey and Mallory are the expressions of the rage that can form in all of us and from the safety of our living rooms we can vicariously experience that rage through their exploits. The problem, of course, is that others are suffering at the hands of their rage, for our own entertainment.
Natural Born Killers has no catharsis, no psychological release of anger and rage, because it is an expression of an unsolved, and possibly unsolvable, problem in our very nature: entertainment at the expense of others. Of course, art at its best can profoundly affect all of us, change us for the better, but the other side is that it can also profoundly affect us in a negative sense. Stone focuses here on the more negative aspects of art's power, and he leaves us to make our own decisions regarding how to react to such a powerful presentation. Just like most of us control our more violent impulses, Stone is perhaps suggesting that such control needs to be exerted over our impulse for entertainment at all cost.
I'm not yet sure if I consider Natural Born Killers as a classic film, but it is definitely a powerful film... a film I don't think I'd like to experience again.
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