Natural Born Killers

Every so often, a movie appears that becomes the focal point from which a decade is viewed. Right or wrong, for better or worse, these films become the quick and easy reference for pop historians seeking an instant fix on the zeitgeist. Such pictures aren't necessarily the greatest cinematic acheivement of a given period, but they invariably represent the key moment when the otherwise ill-defined angers and murky passions of an age explode to the surface with volcanic force.

Natural Born Killers is such a film. An ultra-violent, blood-spattered epic, it's an instant shoe-in as grist for the op-ed mill. It has the gall to romanticize mass murder. Its body count smashes through the three-digit level. It presents established forms of authority as being based upon rape, murder and coercion. But despite its anti-authority pose, Natural Bom Killers also has enough politically incorrect material to send the P.C. crowd into heart failure. Even worse, it's a film by Oliver Stone — and old Ollie, once again, is attacking the bloated carcass of mainstream American society.
 
In other words, it's the underground blasting to the surface in the guise of a multi-million-dollar movie that emotionally slaughters its audience with the same giddy abandon that its heroes murder their hostages.

Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) are the sort of kill-crazy-lovers-on-the-run who've been the obsessive subject of such classic movies as You Only Live Once (1937), Gun Crazy (1949) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967). But unlike their celluloid ancestors, Mickey and Mallory aren't accidental killers — they enjoy it. As P.C.ers would say, killing gives them a sense of empowerment. More importantly, it allows them to repeatedly murder their fathers, and in Natural Bom Killers, patricide is viewed as a major step toward liberation.

The American cinema of the 1980s was fixated on the return of the father. From Star Wars to E. T. and beyond, daddy was the center of attention. It was the age of Reagan and Darth Vader, and no matter what horrors were perpetrated by fathers, the old boys' status was always redeemed by either the final reel or the next photo op.

But this archetypal theme of the '80s comes to an abrupt end when Mallory's incestuous daddy/monster (Rodney Dangerfield) is beaten to death in a slapstick rite of homicide. The message is loud and clear — the easy days of patriarchy are taking a fatal nose dive into a fish tank.

Technically, Natural Born Killers is an experimental collage of over-lapping images, freewheeling jump cuts, jerky camera movements, mixed film stocks, video inserts and enough inside references to other movies to compel half the country to enroll in film school. Philosophically, it's a neo-punk joyride through the postmodernist highways of cyberspace. It's the end of the world as we know it, as well as a bullet-riddled eulogy to media-drenched fantasies.

Love it or hate it, Natural Bom Killers is the beginning of'90s cinema.