Movies That Settle - Natural Born Killers

Once one of my favorite movies. Now?

It’s been a couple months, but I figured I would post something and give everyone a thrill. Just kidding. You don’t care, right?

Anyway, I experimented a little with an audio recording of this post. It’s a new thing on Substack, so I thought I’d try it out. If you don’t feel like reading, here’s me reading it to you. Pretend I’m tucking you in, if you want. If you like to read, just scroll down a little.

Anyway, the 90’s amiright?

Recently, the 90’s have been making a comeback. Streamers love their nostalgia, and 20-somethings today are reliving their youth by watching sitcoms and movies from their hey-day, similar to what I was doing twenty years ago when Nick-at-Night started playing Family Ties and Facts of Life late on Friday nights and radio stations started having Back to the 80’s Nights. It was a great time, to be honest, before 9-11 and right before George W. Bush was elected twice. It’s probably similar to the 60’s before JFK was assassinated, but I’m not that old so I don’t know if that’s really what it was like. The point is, it was a fun time, for me, anyway.

I feel like the reason people wanted to enjoy a little nostalgia in the late 90’s-early 00’s was because the early-mid 90’s was incredibly maudlin. I’m not a psychologist, so I have no idea why, but a lot of people were into Nirvana and grunge and just generally happy being sad. I myself was not a huge fan of Nirvana, but I certainly was what I would call an angry young man, with no real reason for being so. I had great parents who didn’t deny me anything and a lot of good friends and lived in a perfectly normal middle class town. For some reason, though, I was pretty grumpy.

Even so, by the summer of 1994, I had graduated from high school, was ready to enter the Film program at Emerson College, and working in a movie theater for $4.25 an hour and five free passes a month (the real reason to work there), and life was pretty grand. Then a movie came along that broke my eye open a little: Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. If you have never seen it, I’m not even sure I would recommend it now, unless you happen to have just graduated from high school and are preparing to get a film degree, but there was a time when this was my favorite movie. It was just a perfect storm of world events, the period of my life and a very crazy, influential movie that really struck a chord with young Matt Dursin.

The backstory is almost as interesting as the movie itself. Basically, a young Quentin Tarantino was gaining prominence at the time, and had essentially sold two movies and used the money and recognition to make Reservoir Dogs, and was about to get his big break with the release of his magnum opus, Pulp Fiction. The two scripts he sold were True Romance, which ended up being directed by Tony Scott, and Tarantino liked, and NBK, which was bought by Jane Hamsher and directed by Oliver Stone, and Tarantino has apparently never watched all the way through. He retains a “Story by” credit, but apparently it was re-written so much that Quentin just couldn’t abide. 

A little side note here; I’m a huge Tarantino fan, but I feel this is just sour grapes. When you are a nobody in Hollywood and you sell your script, whoever buys it is usually allowed to do whatever they want with it. I have read Tarantino's original script, which he was allowed to publish in book form, and apparently alleviated his hatred for the movie. It’s fine, but a completely different movie, and probably wouldn’t have made much of an impact. In fact, if he had ended up directing it, Tarantino actually had planned to cast himself as Wayne Gale, the tabloid journalist who ended up being played by Robert Downey, Jr., and Gale had a much bigger part, and I will say that, even though I love Tarantino’s movies, he’s not the best actor in the world, and the movie as he had envisioned it may have sucked for that reason alone.

Nobody beats RDJ

Anywho, the script ended up in the hands of Oliver Stone, who helped with the rewrites and changed it from your basic serial killer road movie into a scathing commentary on society’s obsession with murderers and psychos, and thus, the media’s compulsion to turn them into celebrities. These two dynamics make for a very interesting “chicken and egg” scenario, as it is constantly debated whether Mickey and Mallory Knox, the serial killer lovers/superstars played brilliantly by Woody Harrellson and Juliette Lewis, were born evil or were pushed into it by lousy parents and a society that never allowed them to get their piece of the pie. It’s also a touching love story, if you want to look at it that way.

The plot is pretty basic, really. Just a lovely “Boy Meets Girl, Boy and Girl Murder 52 People and Go To Prison, Start a Riot in Said Prison and Escape” story. The kicker is that the riot isn’t any old prison riot. It’s actually started because Wayne Gale, a tabloid journalist who would probably work for TMZ if the movie was made today, or maybe be an Andy Cohen-style host of several reality TV shows, insists on interviewing Mickey Knox one day before he is shipped off to a home for the criminally insane, and somehow gets the go-ahead to broadcast it live. Mickey is so compelling that the prisoners who are watching the interview end up erupting into anarchy, giving Mickey the opening he needs to overcome the guards, reunite with his lady love Mallory and together they, and Wayne, make their escape, with Wayne’s celebrity status making him the perfect hostage. They then shoot Wayne to death on camera, in a symbolic gesture that Mickey himself says he doesn’t fully understand, but hey, “Frankenstein killed Dr. Frankenstein.” 

Mickey and Mallory then ride off into the sunset and presumably live happily ever after. There’s a credits scene played over Leonard Cohen’s “The Future” of the Knoxes in a camper with kids running all over the place, and Mallory looks pregnant, so that’s the one I’m going with. The Director’s Cut showed an alternate ending where a fellow prisoner shot them, but Stone said in an interview that he changed the ending because he felt, in this world, “they get away with it.” I am forced to agree.

Speaking of Oliver Stone, the real reason anyone would talk about this movie almost 30 years later is the direction. I have never taken acid, but I can only imagine that watching this movie is what it would be like. It was shot on film, in color and black and white, digital, old camcorders, video, there's even some animation thrown in. In all, eighteen different film formats were used in the creation of this movie, and it took eleven months to edit and featured almost 3,000 cuts, while the average movie has 600-700. There’s really nothing like it. Stone himself said that it is a satire and not meant to be taken literally at all. For example, after Mickey and Mallory are bitten by a venomous snake, they go to a drug store to find some anti-venom, when in reality, they would probably die in minutes and most certainly be paralyzed, but who cares? It’s just a movie. Stone has also maintained that people (*cough* John Grisham*cough*) who think that the violence depicted in the movie was the cause of violence in the real world missed the point. I suppose he has to say that, but it’s his movie so who are we to interpret it for him? If he ever read this post, he would probably think I missed the point, too.

And perhaps he would be correct. Like I said, when I saw Natural Born Killers, mere days before entering film school, it had maximum impact on me, and I never killed anybody, but my first screenplay was about whether violence in movies causes people to commit violent acts in real life, and boy, did I rip it off. My co-workers in the theater were all excited to see it so we could talk about it with each other (unfortunately, it never came to our little movie house.) We all had a touch of film nerd in us, and it spoke to us, and not in a “Violence is cool,” way. Let’s face it, if a movie inspires you in that way, then you have some issues already. It is impossible to say, of course, but I feel like if I saw this for the first time today, I would probably be impressed by the style but I might think it was a little preachy in its message. I would definitely still think Robert Downey Jr is hilarious, though.

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to check out some other posts and all the fun stuff on my linktree.  Trust me. it’s fun.

*Look at that. I still have a working linktree.