Natural Born Killers

Gangster films like Bonnie and Clyde and Mean Streets, detective films like The Long Goodbye and The Conversation, musicals like New York, New York and All That Jazz, Western's like Ulzana's Raid and McCabe and Mrs Miller, war films like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, romantic comedies like Annie Hall and Smile - these and other films were designed for widespread distribution and are genre films, but they finally do more to challenge and reflect upon their generic heritage than to mindlessly sustain it (Shatz in Cook and Bernink 1999: 144).

The work depends on a set of external relationships, its position within a grid of other cultural texts: its inter-textuality. Realism, Barthes argues, 'consists not in copying the real, but in copying a depicted copy of the real…the text convinces by being in harmony with, drawing on the credit of, other texts. This definition of realism in terms of a work's formal operations rather than its subject matter leads Barthes into a distinction between the realist and the modernist text (Cook and Bernink 1999: 331).

Genre theory allows us to locate a film within recognised structures of meaning. This may be subliminal and unconscious - the movie fan who enjoys cinema but does not study it - or analytic and considered. Either way, the concept of genre is inherent in film culture. Similarly, narrative is a psychological, sociological and filmic fact: we organise information according to established structural principles. Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994) both fits and defies these expectations, representing post-modern, mediated consciousness. Ultimately, it is a genre film (action/crime/romance) which is "about how images and the history they try to create can be read in multiple ways" (Kolker 2002: 5). It is quintessentially ironic, and this subversive fact gives it a more elusive, trans-generic identity: that of the shock movie, and how this is part of modern, collective consciousness.

Genre, Phillips notes, "can be critical and questioning, not just descriptive" (Nelmes 1996: 162) Cultural production builds on previous work, and thus becomes increasingly sophisticated, because inter-textual possibilities are extensive. NBK begins like a road movie, with black and white desert scenery (suggesting earlier cinematography), an isolated road, a wolf or wild dog, and a close up of a snake. These are archetypal natural born killers: nature is inherently predatory, kill or be killed. Anti-hero Mickey (Woody Harrelson) later proclaims this affinity as the reason for his actions. "It's just murder", he says, and explains that animals "do it all the time". These thematic establishing shots are followed by the scene in the diner, where Mickey and Mallory are eating and dancing respectively. This juxtaposition creates the narrative, structural opposition for the entire film¹. Phillips (Nelmes 1996: 170) applies the following template to the western; it is equally descriptive of NBK:

NBK juxtaposes nature against society, and considers the role of the media in influencing consciousness. Like the media it depicts (Mickey reads a newspaper in the diner featuring his own exploits), NBK presents us with a narrative of ambivalent status: in what sense is it real? Those who protested against NBK, concerned about copy-cat violence, could be said to have "believed what they saw" (Kolker 2002: 5).

NBK operates within narrative and genre conventions, but the realism this creates simultaneously questions their 'truth value'. Later in the film, Stone effectively re-creates the video footage of the Rodney King beatings in Los Angeles (1991), when the homicidal Mickey is in front of a drug store. Like the jury who watched the infamous footage, in watching NBK we become visual analysts.

As a 'realistic' genre movie, NBK is offensive and disturbing. As satire, it is a more intelligent and subversive text. The camera, like the media, is able to lie so convincingly it becomes a hallucinatory force which - if we believe Jean Baudrillard - substitutes for reality. Simulation, like the sitcom and cartoon sequences in NBK, is a seamless component of daily experience: We are presented with the story through a multiplicity of devices or forms: cartoon, situation comedy (including canned laughter), dance, and sequences constructed in a documentary format. The culmination of this is a film in which the veracity of anything we see is challenged (Rowe in Nelmes 1996: 121).

Genre classification encompasses more than its obvious components. Hayward (1996) notes "genre does not refer just to film type but to spectator expectation and hypothesis" (160). She believes there are "four essential component parts to genre: technology, narrative, iconography, and stars" (165). Influential directors create films that arguably fall into their own genre - the culmination of auteur theory. NBK was originally a Tarantino film - the latter wrote it, and handed it to Stone for completion. It is perhaps more characteristic of Tarantino than Stone, embodying many of the former's preoccupations. Beyond its generic parameters, NBK parodies the nature of mass media itself, which includes film. It ostensibly fits an action/crime/romance hybrid, but in a self-conscious manner because of its (at times) semi-documentary presentation. Thus in the second half of the film, the two anti-heroes are filmed and interviewed when they break out of prison. We are meant to share their disdain for the reporter, more than our objection to their psychopathic behaviour.

We read movies with reference to prior experience of film, and our historical perspective on narrative and genre traditions. Mickey and Mallory are two 'natural' killers, which locates the film in the action/crime/romance genre, like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1970), Wild At Heart (1990) and Thelma and Louise (1991). The anti-hero couple are iconic wandering outlaws, eventually trapped. We know the action/crime/romance movie is an artificial construction; NBK references the convention with irony rather than certainty. Its significance lies less in the subject matter than the "formal operations" (see Cook and Bernink at the beginning) on which it is based. Tarantino/Stone thus update the genre according to a post-modern consciousness which de-constructs narrative and generic formulations. Rather than a "film text…closed off from wider contexts of audience and culture…(it involves) "a knowledge and a set of associations held by the spectator, not to enhance the fiction but to intensify a sense of the spectator and director creating meaning together" Phillips in Nelmes 1996: 156).

The anti-heroes fit a news-generated narrative i.e. criminals with abused childhoods, and while NBK has a temporal narrative sequence, it is subverted with psychological flashbacks presented in frightening cinematic equivalence. As Kolker notes, Stone interrupts temporal expectations: He will repeat a motion or a character's comment. Like Eisenstein, he turns time into an emotional and political force, a way to express an idea rather than a simple trajectory for the story to follow (Kolker 2002: 52). Mickey and Mallory are media stars like any other because they are in the media. The media is, as Mickey says to a TV reporter, "like the weather, except it's man-made". It influences social and day-to-day consciousness, because it is both ubiquitous and subtle.

Film directors usually insist that the theory of copy-cat violence is unfounded; the rationale for NBK lies in the self-conscious irony where you're not supposed to take it seriously (locate it as a conventional genre/narrative film). Thus, the narrative is blended with a fictional sit-com sequence. The couple's romance begins as a 'white trash', television storyline where Mickey is the romantic hero who rescues the imperilled female.

At one level, NBK fits generic classification; at anther level it is trans-generic. Did Tarantino/Stone want an action/crime/romance movie, or something else? Clearly, NBK is 'something else'. The violence for example is both stylised (the slow-motion knife-throwing and the horror-movie flashbacks), and a portrayal of the way media mediates. NBK parodies cinematic creation, as with the ironic use of composite back projection. Like road movie heroes, the couple drive away from the first scene of violence with a make-believe scenery unfolding behind them. There is a similar spectacle also in the very early stages of A Clockwork Orange: the white-clothed thugs drive through the night, standing up in the car. And when Mickey throws the knife from the diner there's a classical music sound track, reminiscent of Alex's love of Beethoven.

Tarantino is recognised as a director fond of inter-textual references; some of his widely appreciated sense of 'cool' derives from a subtle and ironic re-working of cinematic grammar. This post-modern characteristic of NBK is, I suggest, derived more from the writer than the director. NBK is most ironic where it fits the romance genre. Throughout, the film depicts the love relationship between Mickey and Mallory, beginning when they declare their love for each other in the initial diner scene, followed by flashbacks to their original (sit-com) meeting, when Mickey rescues Mallory from her abusive domestic circumstances (killing her parents). Like Bonnie and Clyde, Mickey and Mallory are 'an item'. Even their names suggest this, chosen for alliterative flow thus association. What does love have to do with violence and murder? How can the romance genre be reconciled to or linked with the action/crime drama? Sadly, puzzlingly, and disturbingly, this is psychologically accurate. Recent media headlines confirm this in the stories of Fred and Rosemary West, and the case concerning Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

While NBK does fit the patterns of genre theory, at another level it subverts them through the use of irony and parody. The real concern that copy-cat violence is a fact is, in the case of NBK, ameliorated only with this more penetrating analysis. It is at the more simple level, as an example of an action/crime/romance movie, that it is dangerous. The irony is obvious - two romantic lovers shooting, burning and slashing people - but perhaps this only reinforces the concern, because the violence thus bypasses normal objections. In the final analysis then, NBK may belong to a less recognised shock movie genre, together with A Clockwork Orange, Passolini's Salo, Baise-Moi and others.

The memory I retain of NBK is not that of a conventional action/crime movie, certainly not a romantic one, and I suspect this coincides with the intentions of Tarantino/Stone.

Appendix ¹

This fits the theories of Levi-Strauss. Based on cultural anthropology, he suggested that narrative is a means of resolving fundamental binary contradictions within society. NBK fits this analysis in two ways: the nature-society dichotomy, and the ambivalent reality-representation issue, which subverts conventional narrative and genre theory.

References

Cook and Bernink The Cinema Book 1999; BFI Publishing

Hayward, Susan 1996 Key Concepts in Cinema Studies; London: Routledge

Kolker, Robert 2002 Film, Form and Culture ; McGraw Hill

Nelmes, Jill ed. 1999 An Introduction to Film Studies; Routledge .