NATURAL BORN KILLERS. Stone’s Controversial Opus Explained

Natural Born Killers: A Misunderstood Film

Natural Born Killers tells the story of a pair of lovers, Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) Knox, who kill the girl’s parents (the father sexually abused her and the mother allowed it), then go on a murderous spree across the desert regions of America, killing people they encounter along the way, always leaving someone alive to spread the word about the dangerous couple. They are pursued by Detective Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore), who is infatuated with Mallory, and reporter Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), a cynical careerist hosting the TV show American Maniacs dedicated to profiles of famous serial killers. When the police finally capture the killers and they are imprisoned under the sadistic warden Dwight McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones), Gale proposes a live interview with Mickey, who eagerly agrees. Mickey’s views on life and death expressed during the interview incite a riot among the prisoners watching the program. Taking advantage of the chaos they caused, the lovers kill Scagnetti, who is present in the prison, and escape, leaving Warden McClusky at the mercy of his enraged “wards.”

The film’s final scene shows Gale’s murder, his death being the condition for the couple’s liberation from the media world and the beginning of a new chapter in their lives. The end credits show Mickey and Mallory as parents, carefree and traveling in an RV with their children.

Considering only the events presented in Stone’s film, one might indeed get the impression that the movie contains no serious message and at best can be seen as a reprehensible glorification of power and cruelty. The criticism of the media making celebrities out of serial killers, embedded in its most literal layer, is lost amidst the incredibly captivating scenes of the lovers and their bloody exploits. Mickey and Mallory are portrayed as physically attractive characters with strong, nonconformist personalities living according to their unique life philosophy. They allow no one into their world—isolated by their love, they are like stars unattainable for their adoring fans. The pair of killers is thus idolized in the film, not only in Gale’s show segments but also in all other sequences. The viewer identifies with the main characters as readily as their on-screen fans do.

However, the interpretation of Natural Born Killers will undergo a complete transformation when not just the film’s plot but also its visual aspect, usually ignored and treated as a series of music-video-like, meaningless images, becomes the subject of analysis.

It turns out that the film’s true message is embedded in its form, which I will endeavor to prove in the following part of this article.

The positive portrayal of Mickey and Mallory in the film is perhaps best evidenced by the fact that they have a guardian angel named Owen (Arliss Howard), who helps them escape from prison during the riot. Owen appears three more times in the film: in the first scene, sitting at a bar table reading a newspaper (when Mallory passes by, he glances at her briefly and then disappears), in a short shot between the sitcom I Love Mallory and a Coca-Cola commercial (his face covered in blood), and in the scene where Wayne Gale, walking through the prison corridors with Warden McClusky, envisions the fame the warden will enjoy after the live interview with Mickey (Owen is mopping the floor). Interestingly, in the alternate ending of the film, included in the DVD release, Owen kills the lovers when Mallory mocks his sexual proposal. Oliver Stone explained that the reason for shooting this scene was his assumption that viewers would want to see Mickey and Mallory punished for all the murders they committed. However, he felt the punishment should be meted out not by the law or society but by another killer similar to them.

Expressive Form of Natural Born Killers

Natural Born Killers is a film made using an enormous variety of techniques and expressive means that together create a unique, formal fireworks display.

We have here extraordinary camera angles, color images alongside black-and-white ones, shots recorded on 16mm film appearing in the middle of a scene shot on 35mm film, shots of varying graininess, animations appearing out of nowhere, TV commercials, archival footage, the sitcom convention, and many, many other kinds of audiovisual expression…

What was all this meant to serve? Was it really just about attractively presenting the murderous rampages of the titular protagonists? Or perhaps, worse, the elaborate form was meant to cover up the banality of a typical action plot? In reality, the visuality of Stone’s work fulfills a far more significant function, namely it constitutes what Umberto Eco described as an expressive form or a significant structure.

Analyzing the aesthetics of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Eco concluded that the form of this novel is its main and most explicit among all communications. It is a form of the chapter or the word itself, which expresses its subject. In other words, the content of the book does not contain any evaluations or comments regarding the characters, their actions, and the world presented in general, and the only commentary is the form, which being inseparably merged with the phenomenon it presents at any given moment, completely conveys its essence. An example is Joyce’s use of the stream of consciousness technique, giving the reader direct access to the characters’ inner thoughts, allowing them to perceive the novel’s world exactly as the characters do—the noises around Bloom heard as Bloom would hear them, Molly’s passions defined as Molly feeling them would.

Eco also sees expressive form in cinema, citing examples such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. In Potemkin, Eisenstein did not ‘evaluate’ the crew-machine relationship, but handed over the role of commentator to the convulsive montage of shots of the machine and the machinists tied to it, almost identifying with its rhythm of work. In his debut, Godard tells the story of a ‘burnt-out’ and alienated hoodlum, editing the film, thus the way of seeing things, as if seen by the character, ignoring time and real relationships, applying improbable pauses in camera movement and unusual camera angles: the director’s montage is the character’s way of thinking.

Externalizing the Internal

An identical technique is employed in Natural Born Killers. Here, too, the style of the image in a given scene depends on which character is the focal point. Oliver Stone himself explains:

At the beginning of the film, we’re inside the heads of the two killers, who are driving – they are completely insane, maniacs. The style reflects their perception – we don’t know what’s going to happen in thirty minutes, just as they don’t. When Robert [Robert Downey Jr.] appears, we switch to a slick TV style, and when Tommy Lee Jones enters the scene as the crazy warden, we adopt his point of view – the camera becomes as mad as he is. The warden’s prison is shown through “nervous, paranoid rhythms, black-and-white footage, irritating silences, brutal treatment of prisoners […]. We hear strange animal noises coming from behind the walls. It’s a descent into hell.

In some moments of Natural Born Killers, a particular type of internal monologue appears. However, it is not a verbalized monologue, as seen in Joyce’s novels or in films where a character’s voiceover conveys their thoughts. Here, the characters’ individual reflections and feelings are depicted through short, fleeting images that intercut the scene’s segments. Exemplary instances of this technique can be found in the film’s opening scene set in a roadside diner. When the waitress Mabel (O-Lan Jones) takes Mickey’s order, two realities are shown simultaneously: the reality of the diner (depicted in color) and the reality of what’s happening in Mabel’s mind (in black and white). In the exterior shot, the waitress appears tired and bored, but in the next shot, we see her mischievously smiling, suggesting she secretly wants to flirt with her customer. The image then returns to the starting point, with the waitress looking tired again. Another example can be seen shortly afterward: the cowboy (James Gammon) sitting next to Mickey at the bar calls the dancing Mallory a “pussy.” In one (black-and-white) shot, Mickey calmly raises his glass to his mouth, but this motion is interrupted by a (color) flash showing his face covered in blood—a visual representation of the fury caused by the cowboy’s vulgar comment, which is not visible on the murderer’s calm face.

The peculiar form of Natural Born Killers aims to express the characters’ personalities as fully as possible, both by stylizing the depiction of the film’s reality to match how the characters perceive it and by showing their thoughts and feelings through short, fleeting shots.