Natural Born Killers
Released just long enough ago to be forgotten by today's standard of speed amnesia, this film by Oliver Stone is worth seeing again. The violence in it was sickening just a few years ago, but such things have quickly gotten normalized in our culture's ongoing desensitization. Ironically, this very process of media desensitization is precisely the topic of this film's satire. NBK has since even been the subject of copycat crime sprees, or so the culprits claimed. This is troubling, because while the film works hard to analyze the dubious process by which violent killers are turned into romantic heroes in the mass media, NBK seems unable to escape from the same orbit, ending with the killers as living happily ever after, justified by the brutality of their backgrounds, and morally superior to the prison officials and popular journalists who pursue them. But as a postmodernist satire of media saturation-violence, from wrestling to sit-coms to real crime dramatizations to obsessive live news interviews, Stone's film is a thought provoking exercise that is stylistically mesmerizing.
As a postscript, several people accused Stone of inciting copycat crimes and called for him to be sued for damages-- which happened. The lawsuit was dismissed. At the least he was negligent, they argued. Interesting to me that the glorification of violence found everywhere in the thriller genre is taken to be safely neutral, while a powerful satire of glorification is condemned as, well, too violent. The last time I checked, this was always defined as "hypocrisy". The major contradiction in media culture now is that on the one hand, Natural Born Killers is reviled for inciting violence, while on the other hand, it is reviled for being _too obviously_ critical of media violence in a simplistic and unsubtle manner. But can we have it both ways? No.
A 2nd postscript on another form of hypocrisy: Quentin Tarantino, the reigning postmodernist "King of Cool" who plays with pastiche of pop culture genres, wrote the script for Stone's Natural Born Killers, but then criticized the way the film was directed. Ironically, Tarantino then copied several formal film techniques and innovations straight out of NBK for his later "Kill Bill" films. -- with the key exception that Tarantino continues the tradition of glamorizing violence. The Tarantino crowd sees itself as properly aesthetic and cool, far above the ham-fisted Stone! Creepy isn't it?
Released just long enough ago to be forgotten by today's standard of speed amnesia, this film by Oliver Stone is worth seeing again. The violence in it was sickening just a few years ago, but such things have quickly gotten normalized in our culture's ongoing desensitization. Ironically, this very process of media desensitization is precisely the topic of this film's satire. NBK has since even been the subject of copycat crime sprees, or so the culprits claimed. This is troubling, because while the film works hard to analyze the dubious process by which violent killers are turned into romantic heroes in the mass media, NBK seems unable to escape from the same orbit, ending with the killers as living happily ever after, justified by the brutality of their backgrounds, and morally superior to the prison officials and popular journalists who pursue them. But as a postmodernist satire of media saturation-violence, from wrestling to sit-coms to real crime dramatizations to obsessive live news interviews, Stone's film is a thought provoking exercise that is stylistically mesmerizing.
As a postscript, several people accused Stone of inciting copycat crimes and called for him to be sued for damages-- which happened. The lawsuit was dismissed. At the least he was negligent, they argued. Interesting to me that the glorification of violence found everywhere in the thriller genre is taken to be safely neutral, while a powerful satire of glorification is condemned as, well, too violent. The last time I checked, this was always defined as "hypocrisy". The major contradiction in media culture now is that on the one hand, Natural Born Killers is reviled for inciting violence, while on the other hand, it is reviled for being _too obviously_ critical of media violence in a simplistic and unsubtle manner. But can we have it both ways? No.
A 2nd postscript on another form of hypocrisy: Quentin Tarantino, the reigning postmodernist "King of Cool" who plays with pastiche of pop culture genres, wrote the script for Stone's Natural Born Killers, but then criticized the way the film was directed. Ironically, Tarantino then copied several formal film techniques and innovations straight out of NBK for his later "Kill Bill" films. -- with the key exception that Tarantino continues the tradition of glamorizing violence. The Tarantino crowd sees itself as properly aesthetic and cool, far above the ham-fisted Stone! Creepy isn't it?