Natural Born Killers
First screened in August 1994 / Most recently screened in August 2024
Director: Oliver Stone. Cast: Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Sizemore, Tommy Lee Jones, Rodney Dangerfield, Edie McClurg, Russell Means, Arliss Howard, Everett Quinton, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Steven Wright, O-Lan Jones, James Gammon, Richard Lineback, Dale Dye, Terrylene, Phil Neilson, Sally Jackson, Brian Barker, Balthazar Getty, Red West, Jeremiah Bitsui, Lorraine Farris, Joe Grifasi, Jared Harris. Screenplay: Oliver Stone, Richard Rutowski, and David Veloz (based on an original screen story by Quentin Tarantino). VOR:⑤
Hard to say how influential it's been: techniques often mimicked, but low profile in current discourse. Risk and originality, though? Loaded.
I rarely saw movies on opening weekend while I was in high school, but wild horses could not have kept me away from Juliette Lewis in a leading role. I've written before about how Lewis's work in Cape Fear was the epiphany that produced a lifetime of adulating screen actors, and especially actresses. I've also written about how JFK and Nixon were watersheds in my early filmgoing, and though the latter post-dates Natural Born Killers, Stone exerted quite a claim on me at the time. And I've also side-noted recently that Woody Harrelson was not exactly a deterrent in my late-adolescent movie choices. I even saw The Cowboy Way, y'all, so there was simply no possibility I was missing Natural Born Killers the second it premiered, which was 30 years ago this weekend. I raved about it with the four high-school friends I saw it with. I talked it up afterward to my skeptical parents, and months later they allowed me to order it on pay-per-view, back when you had to call the cable company from your landline to get clearance at a specific window of its all-day, paywalled loop. Mom, Dad, and I watched it together on that occasion, and I'm pretty sure it was the only time they worried that my budding cinephilia was exposing me to things they really, really wished I hadn't seen.
Natural Born Killers is hard to write about, for a range of reasons: because the gangrenous visual phantasmagoria defies verbal translation, because its most potent elements are shotgun-wedded to its most puerile and graceless, and because I think it requires defensive movie lovers to reconsider whether we truly believe that the outlandish depravity of so much U.S. screen media (but some media in particular) really is blameless for the ballistic bloodlust that only seems to escalate with every new year of American life, even having started at an already-genocidal pitch. Do I think Marilyn Manson and Natural Born Killers caused the Columbine massacre? No. Do I think it's immaterial and not even worth contemplating that NBK was the Columbine killers' favorite movie and indeed the code word they used for discussing and then executing their plan? No, I don't think that's immaterial at all. Do I think a movie that had such a powerful and utterly non-violent effect on me, that pushed film form, that challenged actors, that fomented an interesting if often bad-faith cultural conversation is necessarily worth the price of the actual mayhem it directly or tangentially and not so surprisingly inspired? I do not think there is an obvious answer to that question, but it's a weird one to dismiss entirely out of court.
I've advocated repeatedly that we should be more comfortable owning that a movie we like or even love is not automatically a "good" movie. We might need to be equally comfortable debating whether a movie we do like or love has automatically earned its right to play with fire in this most public medium, so inextricably linked to our conscious and unconscious, individual and collective dreams. I get the argument against Natural Born Killers existing. I also get the strong arguments for it, and why artists would want to make it, and I see it as a work of utterly serious intent, even when it's farcical (the sitcom, the Tommy Lee Jones character) or laughable (the Russell Means sequence) or almost unconscionably hideous (the multiple rapes and probable murders of multiple women in multiple hotel rooms by more than two major characters).
If I say everything I'm tempted to, I'll be on Letterboxd more than I'm allowing myself on a day allotted to other writing. But I'll just say that I truly wasn't positive my early admiration would hold up more than 20 years after my most recent viewing, and at a time when so many of the cultural pathologies that Natural Born Killers describes and from which it won't even pretend to exonerate itself have reached even lewder proportions.
But I still do admire it, and more than that I still can't totally figure out how they made it (much less with big studio money and ill-considered product-placement cash!), and I still can't think of many movies as extravagant in form and color and risk-taking, as openly diabolical in spirit, as committed to their bit. Robert Richardson's cinematography, distributed across 18 different film stocks and unabetted by almost any digital trickery, is mind-bendingly virtuoso, even if you're not eager to co-sign some of the images or effects he's been tasked to achieve. Same is true of the film editing by Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan and at least a dozen other people. If I'd worked that job, I assume I would still be sleeping off the recovery. But as with the lensing, this isn't just about scale of assignment or degree of difficulty: Natural Born Killers has a better claim than most popular movies at conjuring a new language or at least a new dialect of cinema, directly apropos of the script's themes but also an unforgettable exhibition of couture techniques in a ready-to-wear mall-movie release.
Harrelson and Lewis are both dynamite, even if Stone has done the actors no favors by using so much footage that is instantly recognizable as garish, cameras-rolling improv. They go far toward presenting a Mickey and a Mallory you kind of believe as individuals and as archetypes while at all times subsuming themselves within a director's grandiloquent vision. In Harrelson's case, given his family biography and his own politics, this exploration must have exacted some heavy personal cost. In Lewis's, her titanium fearlessness even in this early stage of her career is an enduring wonder, but it quickly entailed its own high price, as the industry and its audiences just pulled back in fear. In the principal supporting cast, Tom Sizemore is a little too believable in straightforward odiousness and Tommy Lee Jones a little (or way) too much with his commedia dell'arte buffoonery, but Robert Downey Jr. finds a way to embed the best of both their approaches with a kind of lunatic but often straight-faced comic brio that is asking you not to laugh at it but to worry about it (or, okay, maybe both). So many Wayne Gales were already festering on American TV by 1994. To paraphrase a key line in the movie, it's not that we didn't know the difference between right and wrong definitions of "news" or approriations of television, or where this would all inevitably head, we just simply, as a society, didn't care. We plainly still don't.
Downey and Stone aren't going for subtlety, at all, at all, AT ALL, and neither are Sizemore or Jones. So it's impressive that the mile-wide critiques expressed by and through these men in NBK's second hour achieve the impact they do, declining a familiar and imprecise jab at "the media" and laboring to arraign the specific, overlapping calumnies of tabloid "reportage," the true-crime industrial complex, the utterly non-rehabilitative prison system, the boob tube, and the vicious individuals who sadly can't shunt all responsibility for their outrages onto The System or the tragic domesticities that produced them. I'm not implying any of this is new, but it's all mounted with such disarming ferocity and stylistic innovation that there's simply no holding away. All synesthesia, no anesthesia. You never stop forgetting you're watching a movie-movie, an unholy fusion of Kenneth Anger and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer configured as a road film, with a bottomless arsenal and a creepy laugh track. But you also feel, even in 2024, like you've been Longlegs'd, compelled by a cultural object you've invited into your own home, your own psychic space, into razoring open your own gut and rummaging around through all the toxins and filth you've consumed, even if you tell yourself you haven't. Grade:A–
