I Just Barely Missed Natural Born Killers' 30th Anniversary So Here's My Piece on That Flaming Pile of Garbage
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With Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone audaciously hurled a script by Quentin Tarantino, at the time the hottest writer in film history, with the exception, of course, of Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz into the garbage so that he could re-create it in his own obnoxious, overbearing, odious image.
Stone decided that Natural Born Killers needed to be plugged into the warped cultural zeitgeist, that it should comment on the Rodney King beating and riots, our culture-wide obsession with crime and our mania for turning criminals into celebrities.
Being Oliver Stone, Natural Born Killers comments on the madness of its time in the glibbest, most obvious and insufferable manner possible.
Natural Born Killers follows the courtship and crimes of Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) Knox. When they meet ugly, Mallory is enduring a hellish existence as the sexually, emotionally, and verbally abused daughter of degenerate slob Ed Wilson.
Wilson is a bug-eyed monster of darkness and depravity played by stunt cast Rodney Dangerfield in sequences shot and acted like a crude sitcom, complete with canned laughter. It’s Married Children from hell. Working once again with cinematographer Robert Richardson, who would go on to become Tarantino’s cinematographer of choice, Stone relentlessly foregrounds the relentlessly artificial nature of everything onscreen.
Stone doesn’t let us forget for a second that we’re watching a vulgar, sensationalistic B-movie with pretensions to art and social commentary rather than anything that could be mistaken for real life.
To that end, the film shifts compulsively from black and white to oversaturated color to edgy animation in the style of what MTV was up to at the time. Stone favors bleary close-ups, crazy angles, wall-to-wall stock footage, and rear projection.
Stone and his edgy collaborators are out to out-MTV MTV but mostly just induce a 119-minute-long migraine. Stone doesn’t believe in anyone or anything beyond, of course, the super-human saintliness of Native Americans.
Stone continues his long-time project of othering Indigenous people here, treating them as something simultaneously better than and distinct from the rest of humanity. Even Mickey and Mallory, sociopathic monsters who seem to derive sensual pleasure from indiscriminately murdering people, realize that they have sealed their doom by murdering a Navajo shaman with a direct line to the spirit world.
Before he is arrested, Mickey is beaten by police officers in a glib recreation of the Rodney King beating. Of course, the reason Rodney King became famous was because he was treated differently and much worse because he was a black man.
There is consequently no satire or commentary in this aggressively pointless sequence, only the cheap buzz of recognition that comes with referencing something that everybody knows about.
Mickey continues his evolution into a very poor man’s Charles Manson after getting locked up alongside his homicidal soulmate. Harrelson can be an enormously appealing and likable performer but he delivers a performance utterly devoid of charm.
Granted, Mickey isn’t supposed to be a lovable chap by any stretch of the imagination, but he's supposed to have at least some of Manson’s wild-man charisma and magnetism.
The only actor who emerges from this nightmare unscathed is Robert Downey Jr. as scuzzy tabloid opportunist Wayne Gayle, who scores a blockbuster interview with the now world-famous Mickey, only to get caught up in a prison riot that allows the film’s anti-heroes an opportunity to escape.
As is often the case with the future star of The Avengers, he seems to be in an entirely different movie than everyone else, a film with a point of view and a satirical edge. He alone seems to grasp the tone the film should have but does not. For all of its empty transgression, Natural Born Killers only comes alive when Downey Jr. is onscreen.
Within the context of Stone’s persona and filmography, Heaven and Earth felt like an apology for the sexist, racist, needlessly provocative nature of its creator's previous films.
Natural Born Killers, meanwhile, feels like Stone apologizing to his fanboys for making a movie that wasn’t sexist, racist, and needlessly provocative.
Stone set out to satirize our culture’s fixation with violence as entertainment with the subtlety and understatement of the chainsaw scene in his screenplay for Scarface. Instead, he ended up descending into bleary, incoherent self-parody.
The only aspect of Natural Born Killers that holds up are Leonard Cohen’s songs. So listen to “Waiting for the Miracle” and “The Future” and forget the rest of this puerile nonsense.
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