Natural Born Killers
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Natural Born Killers is a 1994 motion picture directed by Oliver Stone and starring Juliette Lewis and Woody Harrelson. Rodney Dangerfield, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Sizemore and Tommy Lee Jones are also featured.
Quentin Tarantino wrote the screenplay, which Stone, Richard Rutowski, and David Veloz extensively edited. Tarantino, unhappy with the rewritten version, publicly disowned the script and asked that his name be removed from the screenwriting credits. Despite Tarantino's objections, his name still appeared in the credits.
The movie intended to highlight the sensationalised way crimes are depicted in the media and the way killers are virtually regarded as cultural heroes. But it was criticized by the press for its excessively graphic and violent content, and because of this many people (including many of the film's biggest fans) often seemed to miss the real point of the film: it is a highly stylized critique of violence glamorized by the media.
Plot summary
The film opens with Mickey Knox (Harrelson) and his girlfriend Mallory (Lewis) in a roadside cafe. Mallory is offended when a strange man tries to hit on her. Mallory then punches him in the face and kicks him several times, embarassing him. He tries to fight back, but gets his butt kicked. She finally starts jumping on him and stomps on his face to kill him, shocking and humiliating the man with her agile fighting ability. Mickey, meanwhile, stabs two other customers and shoots the chef and the waitress (with a bullettime slowmotion shot five years before The Matrix). They leave one witness alive, as is their custom, to tell the tale.After the titles, there is a flashback sequence to how the murderous pair met up. Mickey was a delivery man who turned up at the house where Mallory lived with her abusive father (Rodney Dangerfield), her mother, and Kevin, who lives the role of her younger brother, but is actually her child with her father. The scene is portrayed as a sitcom with a canned laughter track, the "audience" laughing hardest when Mallory is subjected to lewd comments and molestation by her repulsive father. When Mickey arrived with a delivery of beef, he fell in love with Mallory and whisked her away on a date, stealing her father's car in the process. Mickey was arrested and imprisoned for car-theft, but he escaped and returned to Mallory's house. He kills her father by drowning him in the fishtank (while he is simultaneously hit in the head with a tire iron), and burns her mother alive in her bed. They spare her ten-year-old son (who was played by Oliver Stone's son, Sean). Mickey then takes Mallory away with him.
Back in the present the pair continue their crime-spree (which bears several parallels to Bonnie and Clyde), slaughtering their way across the southwest United States and claiming fifty-two victims. Following them are two characters who have an obsessive interest in Mickey and Mallory for the purposes of acquiring fame and glory, as well as furthering their own careers. The first is a policeman, Detective Jack Scagnetti (Sizemore), who is seemingly in love with Mallory. He wants to be the hero by capturing the pair and saving the country, though it is plainly revealed that Scagnetti has a lifelong obsession with serial killers after having his mother killed by one when he was five. Journalist Wayne Gale (Downey) hosts a show called 'American Maniacs', profiling serial killers in a blatantly sensationalist way. Various clips of his program on Mickey and Mallory are shown, with Gale sounding outraged as he details the pair's crimes, although off-air he clearly regards their crimes as a fantastic way of boosting his show's ratings. It is Gale who is mostly responsible for elevating Mickey and Mallory into heroes, with his show featuring interviews with people expressing their admiration for the mass-killers as if they were pop stars.
While lost in the desert, Mickey and Mallory are taken in by a Najavo man (known as "Old Indian") and his grandson. After the duo fall asleep, the Old Indian begins chanting besides the fire, invoking nightmares from Mickey about his abusive father and mother. Mickey wakes up in a rage and shoots Old Indian before he realises what he is doing. Mallory and Mickey are both traumatised, marking the first time the couple feel guilty for a murder. Mallory exclaims, "You killed life!," implying Old Indian was more worthy of living than their previous victims. While running from the scene through the desert, the two are bitten repeatedly by rattlesnakes.
They go to a drugstore to find snakebite antidote, but the police interfere and they have a shootout, which ends when Scagnetti captures them at gunpoint. The movie then jumps ahead one year. After a surreal trial that is shown in a flashback in clips from 'American Maniacs', complete with fans outside the courthouse with banners saying "Murder ME Mickey!!", the homicidal couple have been imprisoned but are shortly due to be shipped to a mental asylum after being declared insane.
Scagnetti arrives at the prison and meets up with Warden McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones) and the pair devise a plan to get rid of Mickey and Mallory; Scagnetti will shoot the pair when they are being transported to the asylum and McClusky will arrange it to look like they were trying to escape.
Gale is also at the prison and manages to get Mickey to agree to a live interview immediately following the Superbowl. At the time, Mallory is held in solitary elsewhere in the prison, ready to be shipped out with Mickey.
As planned, Mickey is interviewed by Gale. He gives a speech about how crime is a normal part of humanity, describes enlightenment through murder and declares himself a natural born killer. His words are prophetic to the other inmates (who are watching the interview on TV in the recreation room), which incites a riot. Chaos overthrows the prision, which is over 200% capacity, and the prisoners torture and murder nearly all of the guards.
Warden McClusky heads down to the control room, leaving Mickey alone with Gale, the film crew and several guards. After elbow-smashing a guard in the face and stealing his shotgun, Mickey blasts to death most of the guards and takes the survivors and film crew hostage. He leads them through the prison riot to find Mallory. Gale follows, giving a live television interview as people are murdered all around him. Meanwhile, Mallory is being savagely beaten in her cell by Scagnetti for refusing to submit to his attempts at seduction (for which she attacked him). With Gale and his crew filming everything, Mickey rescues Mallory, Scagnetti being brutally killed after losing a Mexican standoff with Mickey.
After being rescued by a mysterious prisoner named Owen (Arliss Howard), Mickey and Mallory take cover in a blood-splattered shower-room. By this time Gale has snapped and has shot a number of prison guards, getting a big thrill out of it in the process. Warden McClusky is outside the shower room with dozens of guards. Utterly obsessed with getting Mickey and Mallory, McClusky threatens to storm the place, despite the protests of his guards who insist that there are more pressing problems, namely the hundreds of other rioting inmates heading their way.
Mickey and Mallory, together with their saviour, Owen, eventually manage to escape, holding guns to the heads of Wayne Gale and a prison-guard hostage, Gale's camera capturing everything. McClusky is unable to order his guards to shoot because Gale and the captured guard would be killed. After Mickey and Mallory flee, McClusky and his guards are massacred by hordes of inmates who eventually burst through into the area. in the director's cut of the film, there is a shot of McClusky's head on a pole.
In a rural location Mickey and Mallory give a final interview to Wayne Gale before - much to his surprise and horror - they execute him, capturing it on the camera that is still transmitting live images of the event all across the country (their one survivor).
Figures and Tropes
- TV: Televisions dominate this film, both with real television sets and with television images playing on the sky, windows, or the sides of passing buildings. The film is shot in an unprecendented variety of styles, with a number of different types of film, all intercut and overlayed. The entire narrative is structured as a television story, both in the way we watch it and in the way the character's think about their own stories. Some of the more obvious examples of the character's TV-filtered narratives are the flashback sequence where Mickey met Mallory, called I Love Mallory, where the reality of Mallory's unloving and abusive home is set against the canned laughter and "aw shucks" attitude of 1950s sitcoms, and where Mickey breaks out of the work camp the scene shifts to a Western, which inspires him to steal a horse and ride out against the coming tornado. Much of the pair's violence is only shown as replayed or recreated on television. During the prison interview, Mickey's head is shown talking on a little television in an idealized 1950s Leave it to Beaver livingroom and on the prison television. The last scene of the film flicks away from Mickey and Mallory as if the viewer has begun to flip channels. It flicks through a variety of images including recurring images interspersed through the film, the O.J. Simpson trial, and the burning Branch Davidian compound. This effectively places the viewer at the center of the film's moral quandary, asking what the viewer is responsible for creating and what demons are lurking in the viewer's own media consumption.
- Snakes: One of the first images in the film is of a rattlesnake. The couple exchange wedding rings of intertwined snakes, and Mickey has a tattoo of two snakes forming a heart on his chest. There are recurring shots of a seven headed dragon, like the one depicted in the Book of Revelation. Mickey and Mallory first meet a real snake at the Navajo's. The rattlesnake is coiled in the corner, a scene which Mickey recalls with fondness and admiration in his prison interview. The Navajo tells a story in his native Navajo about a women offended at a snake that bit her, to which the snake replies "Look bitch, you knew I was a snake." The pair are bitten by a seeming field of rattlesnakes, which leads them to the drug store (a neon sign of Caduceus of Mercury) where they are captured.
- Nature: Mickey uses nature and evolution to justify his killings, saying that "A deer don't know why he's a deer and a wolf don't know why he's a wolf. God just made 'em that way." He explains that he is the next step in evolution, and that he's a "natural born killer." Shots of nature open the film and occur throughout the film, set both on a television and in nature, with a violent or disturbing undertone.
- Frankenstein: Explaining why he's going to shoot Wayne Gale, Mickey says "Frankenstein had to kill Dr. Frankenstein."
- Yin and Yang: Mickey and Mallory have Yin and Yang tattoos on opposite arms. Mickey's tattoo is opposite and below another tattoo of the face of Christ. Mallory's tattoo is opposite and above a tattoo of a scorpion. Mickey's left earring is a Yin Yang.
- Green: A glowing lime green light is used throughout the film to denote sickness, either in the mind or body. It first appears in the film's opening sequence, as lights in the diner jukebox. Green is also present in the key lime pie Mickey orders. It appears again predominantly when Mallory kills a gas station attendant, and absorbs almost the entire screen during the drug store sequence. Lime green lights later make a less pronounced appearance during the riot sequence.
Trivia
- Denis Leary and Ashley Judd both made cameo appearances in the movie, although both were edited out of the theatrical release.
- Several murderers are alleged to have been inspired by the movie Natural Born Killers. For example, 18-year-olds Sarah Edmondson and her boyfriend Benjamin Darras supposedly watched the movie before carrying out a robbery that resulted in murder. Relatives of one victim filed a lawsuit against Stone. (see External Links for article relating to these incidents.)
- Additionally, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of the Columbine High School Massacre were fans of the movie. They used the acronym "NBK" as a code for their mission: "God I can’t wait till they die. I can taste the blood now - NBK” and "“the holy April morning of NBK" are just a few examples. Also, in an undated journal entry, he wrote with quiet despair about his options. "I'm stuck in humanity. Maybe going 'NBK' w. eric is the way to break free," he wrote, referring to the scheduled rampage.
- The prison riot was filmed at an operating prison. Many of the inmates in the prison scenes were real prisoners, including several convicted murderers.
- Downey admitted that his use of an Australian accent was a technique he adopted to accentuate his character's apparent dignity.
- The fate of the inmate known only as Owen was not explained in the original theatrical release; it is implied he is some sort of guardian angel. In the first scene in the movie, Owen briefly appears sitting at a table in the cafe, but his image fades out and vanishes. In the special edition DVD, an alternative ending was shown, where Mickey and Mallory are both executed by Owen.
- The shoot time for the entire film was 56 days. The editing process took nearly a year.
- The film contains as many as 3,000 edits. Most feature films only contain about 700.
- The character of Mickey was inspired by real-life spree killer Charles Starkweather.
- The wedding scenes were filmed on the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge outside Taos, New Mexico.
- Tori Amos refused to allow the film to feature her song "Me and a Gun," which is an intimate account of a rape she experienced at age 21. She later commented on Oliver Stone's insensitivity in her song "A Sorta Fairytale."
- In the scene were Mallory breaks Scagnetti's nose, Juliette Lewis acually broke Tom Sizemore's nose.
Alternate Versions and Deleted Scenes
When the film was submitted to the ratings board it was initially given an "NC-17" rating. Stone then re-edited the film several times to reduce the rating to an "R". Among the scenes excised were:
- Mickey raping a female hostage in the hotel room after Mallory storms out.
- A shot through the bullet hole in Wayne Gale's hand after Mallory shoots him.
- A quick shot of Warden McClusky's head on a pike after he's overrun during the prison riot.
- A guard being thrown into an oven of the prison's kitchen during the riot.
- A deranged inmate (Denis Leary) delivers a rapid-fire monologue about how the Pittsburgh Pirates are responsible for Mickey and Mallory's killing spree.
- A courtroom scene showing Mickey questioning one of the survivors of his and Mallory's rampage, Grace Mulberry (Ashley Judd). She recounts the night that Mickey killed all of her girlfriends and her brother. After Mickey is done questioning her, he attacks her with a pencil and stabs her to death with it.
- The Hun Brothers (played by the Barbarian Brothers), professional body builders and still-living victims of the Knox's killing spree, talk about their admiration of their attackers. The Knox's had used chainsaws to cut off the Brothers's legs. (Ironically, the Knox's admiration for the Huns is what kept them from killing the twins.)
- After Mickey and Mallory escape and kill Wayne, they are seen riding down the road in a van with Owen, who asks to accompany them. When Mickey informs him that they will be dropping him off, Owen begins making sexual overtones towards Mallory. He then produces a gun and Mickey and Mallory realize that he is their "demon" incarnate. Owen fatally shoots Mickey, then turns the gun on Mallory; the screen cuts to black, accompanied by Mallory screaming, before cutting to a shot of the van driving away into the desert. In an introductory sequence, Oliver Stone says that he wanted Mickey and Mallory to get their comeuppance, but that it couldn't come from society or the law; rather, it had to come from "one of their own" (ie, another psychopath).
Quotes
- Mickey: But I came to the direction I need a gun. So, the next day I started off early for work, and I'm gonna stop by a gun shop and pick up a little home protection. I walked into the placeand had never seen so many guns in all my life. So, I'm lookin' around, the this really nice sales guy comes up to me. His name was Warren. I'll never forget his name. He was really nice.Anyway, Warren showed me all these different models of guns. Magnums, automatics, pistols, Walters. And I ask to see a shotgun. He brings me a Mossberg pump action shotgun. As soon as I held that baby in my hands, I knew what I was gonna do. It felt so good. It felt like it was a part of me. They had a mirror in the store. I looked at myself holding it, and looked so fuckin' good, I immediately bought it. Bought a bunch of boxes of ammo. Turned my car around, drove to Mallory's house, we took care of Mallory's parents, packed up the car, and we were off. Everybody thought I'd gone crazy. The cops, my mom, everybody. But you see,they all missed the point of the story. I wasn't crazy. But when I was holding the shotgun, it all became clear. I realized for the first time my one true calling in life.
- Wayne Gale: What's that?
- Mickey: I'm a natural born killer.
- Mickey: I am the most dangerous man in the world.
- Wayne: So tell me. How can you look at an ordinary person, an innocent guy with kids, and then shoot him to death. I mean, how can you bring yourself to do that?
- Mickey: Innocent? Who-who's innocent, Wayne? Are you innocent?
- Wayne: I'm innocent? Yes I am. Of murder? Definitely.
- Mickey: It's just murder. All God's creatures do it. You look in the forests and you see species killing other species, our species killing all species including the forests, and we just call it industry, not murder. But I know a lot of people who deserve to die.
- Wayne: Why do they deserve to die?
- Mickey: I believe they got something in their past, some sin, some awful secret thing. A lot of people walking around out there already dead. They just need to be put out of their misery. That's where I come in. Fate's messenger.
- Mickey: At birth, I was cast into a flaming pit of scum forgotten by God.
- Dwight McClusky: Mickey & Mallory Knox are without a doubt the most twisted depraved pair of shitfucks it has ever been my displeasure to lay my god damn eyes on. I tell you these two motherfuckers are a walking reminder of just how fucked up this system really is.
- Mickey: Hey, Jack! Mickey's back!
- Mickey: You can't hide from your shadow.
- Wayne: You just said an instant of purity was preferrable to a lifetime lie. I don't understand. What's so pure about forty-eight dead bodies?
- Mickey: You'll never understand. Me and you, Wayne, we're not even the same species. I used to be you...then I evolved. From where you're standing, you're a man. From where I'm standing, you're a ape. I'm here...I'm right here... and you...you're somewhere else, man. You say why? I say why not?
- Mickey: MICKEY: We'll be living in all the oceans now.
See also
- Bonnie and Clyde (and the film)
- Natural Born Killers soundtrack
External links
- (A Mexican film borrowing the Spanish translation of the title.)
- [Natural born copycats], a 2002 article from The Guardian on Stone's response to claims that the movie inspired several murders
- [NBK - Beyond Good And Evil] A Nietzschean point of view
- [Trivia for NBK]
- [Script of the movie]
| Films by Oliver Stone |
|
Feature Films Seizure | The Hand | Salvador | Platoon | Wall Street | Talk Radio | Born on the Fourth of July | The Doors | JFK | Heaven & Earth | Natural Born Killers | Nixon | U-Turn | Any Given Sunday | Alexander | World Trade Center | Son of the Morning Star Documentaries Comandante | Looking For Fidel |
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