Natural Born Killers

Not to be confused with Natural Born Killaz.

Natural Born Killers
File:Natural Born Killers (1994).jpg Theatrical release poster.
Directed by	Oliver Stone
Written by	Oliver Stone Dave Veloz Richard Rutowski Story: Quentin Tarantino
Produced by	Jane Hamsher Don Murphy Clayton Townsend
Starring	Woody Harrelson Juliette Lewis Robert Downey Jr. Tommy Lee Jones Tom Sizemore
Cinematography	Robert Richardson
Edited by	Hank Corwin Brian Berdan
Music by	Brent Lewis Trent Reznor Leonard Cohen
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release dates	26 August, 1994 (USA)
Running time	118 min. (Theatrical Release) 121 min. (Director's Cut)
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$34,000,000

Natural Born Killers is a 1994 satirical film about serial killers and the media directed by Oliver Stone. It stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, and features appearances by Rodney Dangerfield, Robert Downey, Jr., Tom Sizemore, and Tommy Lee Jones. It is based on a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino that was heavily revised by Stone with Dave Veloz and Richard Rutowski.

Synopsis

The film opens with Mickey Knox (Harrelson) and his wife Mallory (Lewis) in a roadside cafe. Mallory is offended when a nasty hick tries to hit on her. He asks her to dance, she dances for a short while. Mallory then punches him in the face and kicks him several times, embarrassing him. He tries to fight back, but is easily put down by Mallory. She jumps on him and snaps his neck to kill him. Mickey, meanwhile, stabs two other customers and shoots the chef and the waitress (with a drawn-out bullettime sequence). 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 physically and sexually abusive father (Rodney Dangerfield), her mother, and Kevin, her younger brother. 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 arrives with a delivery of beef, he falls in love with Mallory and whisks her away on a date, stealing her father's car in the process. Mickey is arrested and imprisoned for car theft, but escapes and returns to Mallory's house. The two kill her father by drowning him in the fishtank, and burn her mother alive in her bed. They spare her ten-year-old brother. 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 and the Starkweather-Fugate case), slaughtering their way across the southwest United States and ultimately 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. Scagnetti wants to achieve hero status by capturing the pair, though it is plainly revealed that Scagnetti has a lifelong obsession with serial killers after seeing his mother shot and killed by Charles Whitman when he was five. The second is journalist Wayne Gale (Downey), who 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 film stars.

While lost in the desert, Mickey and Mallory are taken in by a Navajo man (known as "Old Indian") Russell Means and his grandson. After the duo fall asleep, the Old Indian begins chanting beside the fire, invoking nightmares in Mickey about his abusive father and mother. Mickey wakes up in a rage and shoots Old Indian before he realizes what he is doing. Mallory and Mickey are both traumatized, 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 a gunfight ensues, ending when Scagnetti captures them at gunpoint. The film then jumps ahead one year. After a surreal trial that is shown in a flashback in clips from 'American Maniacs', the homicidal couple have been imprisoned but are shortly due to be shipped to a mental hospital after being declared insane.

Scagnetti arrives at the prison and meets up with Warden Dwight McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones) and the two devise a plan to get rid of Mickey and Mallory: McClusky will arrange for Scagnetti to transport the Knoxes to the mental hospital. Alone with the pair during transport, Scagnetti will shoot and kill them claiming that they were trying to escape. Gale is also at the prison and persuades Mickey to agree to a live interview to air immediately after the Super Bowl. At the time, Mallory is held in solitary confinement elsewhere in the prison, awaiting her transport to the mental hospital.

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 inspire the other inmates (who are watching the interview on TV in the recreation room) and incite them to riot. During the riot, the inmates subdue, torture, and murder nearly all of the prison guards and their inmate informants.

Warden McClusky heads down to the control room, leaving Mickey alone with Gale, the film crew and several guards. Using a lengthy joke complete with hand gestures as a diversion, Mickey elbow-smashes a guard in the face and steals his shotgun. Mickey kills 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 report as people are slaughtered 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). Still live on national television, Mickey engages in a short Mexican Standoff with Scagnetti, eventually feigning concession to lower Scagnetti's guard. Scagnetti is then brutally killed by Mallory. Gale's TV crew are killed by corrupt prison guards. One of the two prison-guard hostages is shot and later bleeds to death.

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 prison guard himself, finding the killing a thrill. Warden McClusky is outside the shower room with dozens of guards. Obsessed with killing Mickey and Mallory, McClusky threatens to storm the shower room, 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 savior, Owen, eventually manage to escape, holding guns to the heads of Wayne Gale and a prison-guard hostage, Gale's camera still capturing everything. 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 pike.

Owen is never seen or mentioned again after the escape. Mickey and Mallory kill the prison guard hostage and dump his body out of the van while being chased by police officers. 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 (their one survivor).

The couple are then shown in an RV together years after their escape, with Mickey driving and Mallory (who is pregnant) watching their two children play.

Cast and characters

• Main article: List of characters in Natural Born Killers

Style

Natural Born Killers employs a wide range of camera angles, filters, lenses and special effects. Much of the movie is told via parodies of television shows of the time, including a scene presented in the style of a sitcom about a dysfunctional family. Commercials which were commonly on the air at the time of the film's release make brief, intermittent appearances.

Recurring images

Television frequently appears in the film, including real television sets and television images that play on the sky, windows, or the sides of passing buildings. Furthermore, the story is often told via TV programmes, and the characters think about their own stories through the filter of TV. One example is Mickey's flashback to his first meeting with Mallory, which is presented as an episode of a sitcom called I Love Mallory, in which Mallory's abusive home life is set played out to the canned laughter and "aw shucks" attitude of 1950s sitcoms. When Mickey breaks out of the work camp, the scene is shot as a Western, as Mickey steals a horse and rides out against a 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 living room 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. Intermittent breaks from the film show popular commercials from the 1990s making a direct relation between the diegetic audience and the cinematic audience. By challenging the mass media throughout the entirety of the film, Mickey and Mallory represent the idolized products of the society of the spectacle; by including glimpses of true life angry and violent celebrities, Stone concludes the film as a modern satire on the mass media's exloitation of violence.

The story of Frankenstein is mentioned twice: explaining why he's going to shoot Wayne Gale, Mickey says "Frankenstein had to kill Dr. Frankenstein", implying that his actions were created by the media, and when Warden McClusky is explaining to Jack Scagnetti that they plan to have Mickey and Mallory undergo electroshock therapy, footage of Frankenstein is shown.

Snakes reappear throughout the film. One of the first images in the film is of a rattlesnake. The couple later 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. In the couple's car, there is a toy snake. Mickey and Mallory first meet a real snake at the Navajo's: a 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 woman who was shocked that the very snake she'd rescued had bitten 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. Also when Mallory and Mickey cut themselves on the bridge to show their love to each other, their blood becomes animated and changes into a red and green snake, entwined and hissing at each other.

Mickey repeatedly uses nature and evolution to justify his killings, saying that "The wolf don't know why he's a wolf, the deer don't know why he's a deer. 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. As Mickey and Mallory literally walk out of the media's frame at the end of the film, it suggests that only a teleological advanced being can transcend the created establishments that influence common Americans.

Yin and Yang, an ancient symbol of moral equivalence appear more than once. 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. During Mickey's television interview he suggests that he and Mallory are "dark and light", compatible with one another they function as a single force intended to destroy the "demons" of mass media, corrupt law enforcement and the commonalty's obsession with violence.

A glowing lime green light is used throughout the film. 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.

The number 666 pops up in certain areas throughout the film - for example Route 666 and a brief glimpse of a newspaper a patron, who will later appear in the prison riot scene as Owen (Arliss Howard), is holding in the first scene.

Alternate versions

The original theatrical release was edited in order to receive an R-rated certificate in the USA. The film was subsequently released on video in the director's preferred version, which is approximately 4 minutes longer and contains more violent imagery. In the Director´s Cut three of the deleted sequences shows a guard getting stuffed into a washing machine, a guard get´s his head burnt against a cookplate and another guard gets stuffed into an oven.

Deleted scenes

• 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 Knoxes' killing spree, talk about their admiration of their attackers. The Knoxes had used chainsaws to cut off the Brothers's legs. (Ironically, the Knoxes' 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" (i.e., another serial killer).

Production

The original screenplay was written by Quentin Tarantino. It was revised by Stone, Richard Rutowski, and David Veloz, who kept much of the dialogue word for word, but changed the focus of the film from journalist Wayne Gale (Robert Downey, Jr.) to Mickey and Mallory. In Tarantino's screenplay, Mickey and Mallory are a normal married couple who suddenly decide to go on a killing spree; the revisions turned them into unwed social outcasts who were molested and beaten by their parents. Tarantino was unhappy with the rewritten version, and publicly disowned the script, asking for his name to be removed from the screenwriting credits. Ultimately, he received a "story by" credit.

The prison riot was filmed during four weeks at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois. In the first two of four weeks on location at the prison, the extras were actual inmates with rubber weapons. The other two weeks over 200 extras were needed to be brought in from 'the outside' because the Stateville inmates were on lockdown.The wedding scene was filmed on the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge just west of Taos, New Mexico.

Box office and critical response

In its opening weekend, the film grossed a total of $11,166,687 in 1,510 theaters. As of January 12 2007, the film has grossed a total of $50,282,766 domestically, compared to its $34 million budget. [1]

Natural Born Killers had a mixed critical response. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes records an average response of 48%, based on 27 reviews. However, Metacritic records a 74% positive response based on 20 reviews.

Roger Ebert, a film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the movie four stars out of four and wrote, "Seeing this movie once is not enough. The first time is for the visceral experience, the second time is for the meaning."

However, other critics found the film unsuccessful in its aims. Hal Hinson of The Washington Post claimed that "Stone's sensibility is white-hot and personal. As much as he'd like us to believe that his camera is turned outward on the culture, it's vividly clear that he can't resist turning it inward on himself. This wouldn't be so troublesome if Stone didn't confuse the public and the private." Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "for all its surface passions, Natural Born Killers never digs deep enough to touch the madness of such events, or even to send them up in any surprising way. Mr. Stone's vision is impassioned, alarming, visually inventive, characteristically overpowering. But it's no match for the awful truth."

Controversies

Violence and censorship

The film was controversial due to the graphic violence and has been compared to Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. The film initially had an NC-17 rating but Stone toned down the violence by making a huge number of cuts, and the MPAA re-rated the film an R. The director's cut edition contains the NC-17 rated version along with other deleted scenes.Stone has continually maintained that the film is a satire on how serial killers are adored by the media for their horrific actions and that those who claim that the violence in the movie itself is a cause of societal violence miss the point of the movie.

The UK video release was also delayed due to a shooting at a school in Dunblane, Scotland. It was passed '18' uncut for video release on 26 February 1996, but a few weeks later the shooting took place and the release was delayed until 2001, with the producers citing pressure from groups as a reason to not release it. Strangely, it was actually shown on Channel 5 while the video was still unreleased. In 2002 the full 'Director's Cut' version of the film, restoring the 3 minutes of cuts required in the US in 1994, was submitted to the BBFC and classified '18' uncut.

Copycat crimes

(The following Information is largely based on hearsay and comes from speculative sources. As with all cases of great emotional tragedy, people tend to link, point and blame when things become out of their control)

The film was accused of encouraging or even inspiring several murderers.

Seventeen-year old Nathan K. Martinez shot and killed his stepmother and half-sister while they slept at their home in Bluffdale, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City in October, 1994. He was apprehended several days later while sleeping in a motel in O'Neill, Nebraska, following a nationwide manhunt. He was obsessed with the film and had seen it many times. He had shaved his head and wore the same style of round sunglasses that the "Mickey" character did in the film. His father and older brother had left early that morning for a hunting trip.

In February of 1995, Charles Daniel Tuttle, 35 years old, murdered Cathy Harris 42, with whom he was living, with a claw hammer in her home, robbing it afterwards. Tuttle was found guilty and didn’t argue the charges. He was executed by a lethal injection in Texas in 1999. Harris' nephew told police that early on the day of the murder, Tuttle had told him that he watched the movie Natural Born Killers three times the day before.

18-year-olds Sarah Edmondson and her boyfriend Benjamin Darras supposedly watched the film before carrying out a robbery in 1995 that resulted in murder. Relatives of one victim filed a lawsuit against Stone.[2]

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, perpetrators of the Columbine High School Massacre were fans of the film. They used the initials of the movie's title, "NBK," as a code for their mission, writing "God I can’t wait till they die. I can taste the blood now – NBK" and "the holy April morning of NBK". Also, in an undated journal entry, Klebold wrote about his options. "I'm stuck in humanity. Maybe going 'NBK' w. eric is the way to break free".

Kimveer Gill, the killer who perpetrated the Dawson College Shooting, was also a fan of the film.

In 2004, Angus Wallen and Kara Winn, both 27, watched Natural Born Killers the night before murdering 22-year-old Brandon Murphy. They shot him, robbed him, and then set his body and apartment on fire in Jacksonville, Florida. The crime resembles one part in the movie in which Mickey, after killing Mallory's father with a tire iron, kills her mother by tying her to her bed and setting her on fire.

On April 23, 2006 Jeremy Allan Steinke, 23 years old, and his then 12-year-old girlfriend, murdered her parents, Marc and Debra Richardson, as well as her 8-year-old brother, Jacob in Medicine Hat, Alberta. Witnesses testified that Jeremy had watched Natural Born Killers several times previous to the murders. On July 9, 2007, Jasmine Richardson was found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder in the killings. On November 8, 2007, she was sentenced to the maximum allowable sentence of ten years, which is the maximum penalty for a person under 14 years of age. This will include four years in a psychiatric institution and four and a half years under conditional supervision in the community. She is currently the youngest person in Canadian history to be convicted of a multiple murder. Steinke is still awaiting trial.

After the murderer of one of novelist John Grisham's friends cited Natural Born Killers as an inspiration, Grisham spoke out against Oliver Stone and the film itself. When Warner Bros. was looking for a lead for the film adaptation of Grisham's A Time To Kill and suggested Woody Harrelson, Grisham, who had director and cast approval, said Harrelson would never be in a film he had anything to do with. Grisham has cited other reasons for not wanting Harrelson to play the role that Matthew McConaughey ended up playing, most notably that Harrelson "looked kind of dumbbell-ish". Oliver Stone responded by asking if Grisham would like to be held responsible for anyone murdered in a revenge killing or crime of passion, as depicted in A Time To Kill.

Style

There was also some controversy about the camera techniques. The film is filmed in a frenzied and psychedelic style consisting of black and white, animation, and other strange color schemes. The techniques were allegedly inspired by Stone's drug use during the making of the film, particularly psilocybin mushrooms, as revealed on the behind the scenes documentary shown on the DVD versions.

Stone considered Natural Born Killers his road film specifically naming Bonnie and Clyde (film) as a source of inspiration. Both these films fall under the road story genre through their constant challenges of their diegetic society. While Bonnie and Clyde attempt to disintegrate the weakened economic and social landscape of the 1930s, Mickey and Mallory try to free America from the overarching conventions which influence the common masses. While the flights of both couples successfully challenge their respective societies, both films conclude with pessimistic outlooks regarding individual freedom within the American sphere of influence. The police's ambush of Bonnie and Clyde exhibits the empirical control of law enforcement over the individual. Natural Born Killers ends as it begins, suggesting the uninhibited influence of the mass media among common Americans; this is seen within the film as the diegetic audience and media turn Mickey and Mallory into international superstars.

The famous death scene in Bonnie and Clyde (film) used brilliant editing techniques provided by multiple cameras shot from different angles at different speeds; this sporadic interchange between fast-paced and slow-motion editing that concludes Arthur Penn's film is used throughout the entirety of Natural Born Killers.

Soundtrack

• Main article: Natural Born Killers (soundtrack)

References in film or other media

• The English language adaptation of the Battle Royale manga by TokyoPop extensively references Natural Born Killers in issue 13; chapter 97 is actually named Natural Born Killers.
• Ben Elton's Popcorn includes the opening shot and discussion of the opening scene, and is otherwise largely derivative of the film.
• The Simpsons episode Natural Born Kissers is a reference to this movie.
• In The Simpsons episode Million Dollar Abie Chief Wiggum tells a doctor that is trying to kill Abe Simpson that he is a "natural born killer"
• Jay-Z makes a reference to Mickey and Mallory in the "All I Need" from the Blueprint album
• My Chemical Romance's song "Demolition Lovers" was inspired by the film.
• In Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 2 Bill tells Beatrix that he thinks she is a "Natural Born Killer."
• In the song "Nothing's What It Seems" by Project Wyze, they make reference to the movie with the line "I'm a Natural Born Killer without Mickey and Mallory."
• The book on Mallory's bed is the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.
• On the track "Respiration" by the Hip-Hop duo Blackstar, Talib Kweli says the line "killas born naturally like Mickey & Mallory."
• In the film Bride of Chucky, two characters in a relationship are thought to be murderers on the run, with their friend telling them over the phone "The cops are all over this, they're thinking like Bonnie and Clyde, Mickey and Mallory, multiple murderers"
• The Greg the Bunny episode Naturally Sewn Killers spoofs the whole film.
• A scene of the film is parodied in the film Little Nicky.
• The X-Files episode Lazarus references this movie several times.
• On hip-hop group, Swollen Members' album, Bad Dreams (album), the intro track features an audio clip from the scene in which Mickey claims he is a "Natural Born Killer."
• The music video for Young Buck's Shorty Wanna Ride is inspired by the film.

See also

• Bonnie and Clyde (and the film)
• Badlands, a film by Terrence Malick

External links

• Natural Born Killers at IMDb
• Natural born copycats, a 2002 article from The Guardian on Stone's response to claims that the film inspired several murders
• Natural Born Killers: A Postmodern Analysis of Violence and Television
• Natural Born Killers at Rotten Tomatoes
• Natural Born Killers at Box Office Mojo
• Movie stills