NATURAL BORN KILLERS
A film review by Phineas Narco
Copyright 1994 Phineas Narco
SCTV, the TV spoof comedy show out of Canada that ran for several years in syndication, once tried to do a parody of Laverne & Shirley and found that they just couldn't do it. The show was already a parody of itself. This might be the case with Oliver Stone's new film NATURAL BORN KILLERS, a movie that's sure to be the most controversial, and one of the most lucrative, of the year. It is also the most visually inventive mainstream film to be released since Alan Parker's PINK FLOYD-THE WALL. Moreover, I think this movie will really polarize its audience into those who think it's brilliant and those who think it's garbage.
In case you've been under a rock for the past month, NBK has been hyped like crazy on television for over a month before its release. It concerns the adventures of Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis), two lovestruck free-spirited serial killers who go on a three week rampage across America killing over 50 people before they are brought to justice. As bad as that sounds, Mickey and Mallory are the only two likable characters in the picture! They are surrounded by scumbags ... Tom Sizemore as a sadistic cop hot on their tail, Robert Downey Jr., an Australian Geraldo Rivera who would sell his soul for ratings, Tommy Lee Jones as a sleazy prison warden, Rodney Dangerfield as Mallory's perverted foul-mouthed father, all foils for the pure love, and love of killing, that the death-dealing duo share.
The movie has moments of brilliance:
-LOVE THAT MALLORY: Done in the style of a tv sitcom, a picture of Mallory's horribly abusive home life complete with laughtrack and arbitrarily bleeped profanities. What's chilling about this is how much *like* a sitcom it is ... the laugh cues are right on and we react to them in the same way as we would a scene on CHEERS ... until we realize something truly vile and sick is going on underneath the laughs. This is arguably the most effective sequence in the picture.
-Perfectly timed "subliminals" ... someone says something to Mickey that we know pisses him off and there's a short "cut" of a few frames of a bleeding head screaming. A brief peek of the rage within.
-A cop murder captured live on television ... then a cut to the Coca-Cola commercial with the smiling computer animated polar bears. Talk about trivialization!
Lewis and Harrelson do fine jobs considering the amount of special effects they have to contend with. There might be some Oscar nominations in the offing here unless the Academy gets cold feet from this controversial picture.
One weak point of the film is that there really isn't any exposition about how the public comes to love these two ... perhaps they've been watching TV versions that give the killers the same preferential treatment as this movie?
Hmmmm.
Just about everyone they kill does something (at least in the mind of a killer, or a moviegoer) to deserve it. A cowboy dances vulgarly, unwelcome with Mallory, a redneck trucker ogles her and talks to Mickey vulgarly about what he'd like to do to her, a horny gas station attendant tries to rape her, a waitress snaps rudely at her ... they're all blown away ... and inside, more and more, we're cheering the killers on.
Hmmmm.
By the end of the movie, during the prison break, we're cheering for the prisoners and escapees as they smash and kill their captors ... rather like the gawkers on the overpass in LA cheering OJ Simpson 50 yard dash into the end zone.
Hmmmm.
Much has been made about the fact that throughout the movie Stone uses just about every special cinematic 'gimmick' in the book: 8mm, lens filters, grainy black and white, jump cuts and flashbacks galore, animation, morphing, pixelvision, front projection, rear projection, video, subliminals, laughtracks, reverse-reverb, slow motion, super slow-mo, claymation(?), time-lapse, double exposure ... to name only the ones I recognized! the film is a literal textbook of special film technique and certainly it is the most prominent, even overwhelming, aspect of the movie. The average length of a shot would be interesting to figure out. I suspect it's probably under a second, maybe two at the most. Perhaps when this comes out on video Criterion Collection will issue it on laserdisc in CAV format so that videophiles can check it out literally frame by frame. There is enough STUFF in this film for ten films and to be frank it is frequently distracting. While watching this movie I found that I was so captivated by the astonishing visuals I wasn't paying any attention to the characters, dialogue or the plot.
All this begs the question: Why did Oliver Stone make his film like this? I have always been impressed by at least the *visuals* of his movies even if I don't always agree with the ideas behind them. JFK for example was a factual mess but technically brilliant. But Stone's smart enough guy to know that this movie would affect its viewers in the way I described and I really believe that it's intentional, as I'm sure a lot of people have figured out. What he's doing is caricaturizing American media... offering forth the favorite subject of the tabloid news circuit (serial killers) in the same kind of quasi-real quick-cut flash and sparkle style of those same tabloid news shows. Stone seems to be saying "you want sensationalism? You want flashy visual gimmicks? You want the STORY and not the reality? Here! Here it is in spades times ten!!" The problem with this film's reception with people who criticize it, I think, is they don't GET that it's a spoof of media. And understandably so! Indeed, "news" nowadays has gotten all too much like the style of NATURAL BORN KILLERS. It's hard to tell the caricature from the original and at first glance it seems that Stone is just offering *more* of what he's purportedly criticizing and spoofing. The difference between what Stone offers and what television offers is that Stone has a bigger budget and more time to work on it. NATURAL BORN KILLERS is visually assaultive, confusing, violence-glorifying, over-the-top, pretentious, self-indulgent comic book fairy tale. But that's the point!
There really is a fine line between what Stone has put together here and what he's commenting on and spoofing. Since media is becoming more and more a parody of itself, parodying media is getting to be a tricky business calling for the kind of extremities Stone explores here.
*That* in itself really says something.
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