Oliver Stone | 1hr 59min
It is clear from the grotesque reconstruction of Mallory Knox’s childhood that this future murderer’s proclivity for violence was at least partially learned. Though it is crudely refracted through the artificial sheen of a sitcom, no amount of canned laughter can smooth over her father’s verbal, physical, and sexual abuse, nor her mother’s negligence. Perhaps this was the superficial life that Mallory once idealised on television, but its garish cheer only serves to underscore the incest and trauma which moulded her into a vicious predator.
Meanwhile, her mercurial, sadistic lover, Mickey Knox is far harder to pin down. We know that he too is scarred by a toxic relationship with a father figure who committed suicide before his eyes, yet according to this nihilist’s worldview, evil is simply in his blood. “I’m a natural born killer,” he proclaims to the television cameras as they feast on his depravity, broadcasting his message to the masses.
“All of God’s creatures do it.”
Mickey’s Darwinian logic may indeed be rooted in nature, Olive Stone concedes, though this doesn’t absolve the multitude of corrosive influences that helped forge two of America’s most infamous murderers. The mass media is not quite the passive witness that it pretends to be in Natural Born Killers, but rather actively engineers a self-perpetuating loop, feeding audiences whose voracious appetite for cheap spectacle grows the more it is sold to them. Perhaps it didn’t directly create Mickey and Mallory, but it is certainly a willing enabler of their worst impulses, giving them a stage upon which they may commit and inspire further atrocities.
Stone does not observe this phenomenon with distant, moralising judgement though. Natural Born Killers itself is consumed by manic excess, seeking to comprehend its cultural delirium from within an anarchic collage of news programs, commercials, music videos, documentaries, and virtually every other form of pop-cultural detritus one might have found channel-surfing in the MTV era. Through Stone’s rapid-fire montages, we can barely grasp a stable perspective, though that is not important in his feverish experiment. It’s the overwhelming experience of raw, sensory overload which functions as the true thesis of Natural Born Killers, psychologically assaulting any intellectual attempt to isolate the evil thrumming beneath its kaleidoscopic surface.
Beyond the mixed-media pastiche that shapes this amoral landscape, Stone continues to fragment visual continuity through his own hallucinatory aesthetic, switching between a range of film stocks, toggling colour and black-and-white, and splicing animation into live-action footage. This radical formal design is announced right from the opening diner scene, where wide-angle lenses and jump cuts during Mickey’s flirtatious conversation with a waitress presage the frenzy to come. The camera twists in low, canted angles as Mallory sensually dances to a medley of jukebox songs, and once the carnage begins, it tracks the trajectory of knives and pistols as they zero in on their targets. Not even the soundtrack is willing to settle on a consistent genre, wildly swinging from the dulcet tones of Leonard Cohen to rock ‘n’ roll, punk, and eventually even opera, undercutting the brutality with a perverse symphony of absurd irony.
This stylistic chaos is not evidence of failure on Stone’s part to maintain formal control. Such fractured madness is the organising principle of Natural Born Killers, drowning out moral substance with cultural noise that transforms these tabloid antiheroes into a Bonnie and Clyde for postmodern America. As far as Mickey and Mallory are concerned, their lives might as well be a pop culture fever dream, filtered through the fabricated facade of cheap entertainment.
Stone audaciously revels in this artifice too, lifting them beyond the limits of naturalism through psychedelic acid trips, rear-projected backdrops, and neon-green washes that flood sets with harsh, sickly lighting. When Mallory finds herself distracted by violent movies on television during foreplay, he doesn’t absolve himself of complicity either, directing Mickey’s scorn toward Midnight Express and Scarface – two films Stone himself had written. Meanwhile in the window of their motel room, historic newsreels and nature documentaries replace the real world outside, transforming the glass pane into yet another glowing screen.
So obsessed are Mickey and Mallory with embedding their legend into America’s televisual bloodstream that they leave a witness at every crime scene to tell their story, thus securing their transformation into cultural commodities. Indeed, these lovers consider themselves main characters in their own show – and when they become the focus of true-crime docuseries American Maniacs, their self-mythologising fantasy collides with reality.
With their faces beamed onto every screen in the country, it is only inevitable that Mickey and Mallory should be arrested, and of course sleazy producer Wayne Gale is there with his crew to capture every second. Robert Downey Jr.’s broad Australian accent and cartoonish flamboyance may be overdone, yet for this opportunistic, larger-than-life character, the theatrical exaggeration amplifies the satire. He is not content to let this story end with their imprisonment either, visiting an incarcerated Mickey one year later for a sit-down interview before he is carted off to a psychiatric hospital. Wayne may not be a mass murderer, but even before he gives up the journalistic pretence, one thing is painfully clear – his bloodlust is as insatiable as his subject’s.
Maintaining a jittery, frenetic pace, Stone gleefully weaponises media marketing tricks in his depiction of Wayne, subliminally splicing in blood-soaked, Satanic flashes of the producer that only briefly register in our consciousness. He and Mickey may be birds of a feather, yet unlike the serial killer, he hides his appetite for carnage behind ratings charts and profit margins. By selling murder as cheap, prime-time drama, Wayne has made it impure, Mickey claims in the interview – though it only takes a small whiff of violence for this parasitic showman to submit to its raw, feral pleasure.
“I’m alive for the first fucking time in my life,” Wayne screams down the phone to his wife, simultaneously serving as his subjects’ accomplice and documentarian as they make their prison break. Any question as to his professional objectivity vanishes the moment he starts shooting at guards, drunk on the ecstasy of violence. Still, it’s not as if we harbour great compassion for these victims – given the systemic corruption we have witnessed, it is evident that both institutions and outlaws are twin engines of moral decay.
Perhaps violence is inherent in human nature after all, we ponder as Mickey’s words ignite a prison riot. The orchestral thunder of ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ underscores their daring escape before once again giving way to Leonard Cohen, his soothing voice drowning out the warden’s screams as he is pulled into a ferocious crowd of clawing hands. It is a triumph of cinematic bravura for Stone, as deeply nihilistic as it is mesmerising, yet even after this apocalyptic climax Natural Born Killers has not yet completed its blistering manifesto.
“Let me just swing the camera round and do my little wrap up,” Wayne insists after reaching safety with the escaped lovers, passing the rig to Mickey – though this wrap up is not Wayne’s to make. His murder will make a far more impactful conclusion to this saga than any self-congratulatory monologue, Mickey decides, seeing his fame-hungry narcissism for what it is. “Don’t Mickey and Mallory always leave somebody alive to tell the tale?” the producer pleads, making one last appeal for mercy, before horrifically realising with their response that he has written his own death.
“We are. Your camera.”
What need is there for a lone witness when a single lens can make the whole world watch? What use is testimony when millions can watch blood drip in high definition? As philosopher Marshall McLuhan once proclaimed, the medium is the message, and Stone’s hyper-kinetic satire takes that prescient axiom to its operatic extreme. Within every American household, immortality is mechanically manufactured frame-by-frame, and Natural Born Killers screams its brazen, self-flagellating indictment of pop-cultural cannibalism in blinding neon and blood.
Natural Born Killers is currently streaming on Disney Plus and Stan.