The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015. Remaining movies: 89 Days to go: 59
Movie #351: Natural Born Killers
Sex, violence, fame and exploitation are all jumbled together in Natural Born Killers. Does the media depiction of violence cause it to escalate in real life or do they merely glorify something that already exists? In this film, the message is that it’s a symbiotic system, cyclically feeding, growing and regenerating, over and over. One bleeds into another, and like two serpents intertwined, there doesn’t seem to be a beginning or an end.
The film is intentionally frenetic, employing a multitude of different film styles to imitate the seeming reckless abandon Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) have toward sex and life and murder. Director Oliver Stone uses animation, black and white photography, and psychedelic, seemingly random, unconnected images to drive home the feeling of unease and instability. To further blur the line between Mickey and Mallory’s real lives and their portrayal in the media, they are often shown on television shows (interspersed with commercials, of course) or on news coverage or even in TV parodies. There’s even the character of Wayne Gale (played by Robert Downey Jr. doing an awful — and possibly cocaine-fueled — British accent), an exploitative TV “journalist” more concerned with sensationalism and ratings than objective coverage of a story. Generally I don’t much care for this level of stylized nonsense in a film, but here it’s pretty effective in making the statement Stone wants to make about the culture of fame and infamy. Even Gale, when given a taste for violence, falls as easily into line with it as he was to having a hot TV show.
In this movie, everyone is corrupt. Everyone is a fame whore. Everyone wants a piece of the action. Whether it’s Detective Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore), strangling prostitutes and writing overblown bestsellers on himself, or Warden Dwight McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones) more worried about the press coverage of his prison than the safety and security of his guards and prisoners, no one is, as Mickey explains, innocent. In fact, Mickey and Mallory are veritable heroes of the tale, killing the wicked (like her awful parents or Scagnetti or Gale or whatever pervert sexually assaults her in a diner while she’s trying to dance). That angle is played up so much, in fact, (as opposed to the indiscriminate killing they do to just about anyone else) and they’re given such a triumphant ending, that the movie itself becomes another form of glorification, and that can get problematic.
Harrelson and Lewis are spectacular in their roles — hypnotic, compelling and convincing in their insanity as much as their frenzied lust for one another — and seem to take on the personas of their characters in every different iteration the movie places them in, be it a hammy sitcom or a drug-induced fever dream or an overblown, cinematic murder spree. And Lewis, especially, shows a lot of range, not just with her riotous anger but with her cloying insecurity about whether or not Mickey finds her sexy anymore when he wants to kidnap other women — and she can switch from one extreme to another at the drop of a hat. (Shout out to good ol’ Balthazar Getty as the gas station attendant who paid the ultimate price for his too eager, harried cunnilingus skills.)
Natural Born Killers is not a film I care for too much, but it does have its place in the landscape of the discussion about the culture of the media and the effect and role of sex and violence and sensationalism within it. That being said, though, I wish the film had wound up with Mickey and Mallory enjoying the fate that really awaits them in this murderous scenario of theirs: dead. That’s a happier ending, to me, than the one Oliver Stone thinks he left us with.
Viable Option 