The Problematics: ‘Natural Born Killers’ at 30, An Acid-Soaked, All-American Hellscape Of Violence and Venality

Oliver Stone’s 2020 memoir Chasing the Light is a helluva read: frank, dishy, and, given Stone’s reputed volatile temperament, surprisingly reasonable and equanimous. But it also privileges Stone’s point of view — because of course it does — in surprising ways that even he might not be aware of. In the book he only mentions the 1994 rager Natural Born Killers twice.

Here’s the first mention, with some context. “[American] exceptionalism was stamped all over the arrogance of Patton, embodied by George C. Scott in the hit movie of 1970 . The horrible truth was that Americans loved this Patton, the movie and the man, a sick man who’d gone too far. We loved killers. Why was I raised seeing killers on almost every TV show? Isn’t that why I made Natural Born Killers later in life — to show that madness in our culture?” And here’s the second, when speaking of his script for De Palma’s Scarface (a movie that makes a cheeky cameo appearance in Killers ): “It would precede my work on Wall Street , and, later, Natural Born Killers , both of which depict misshapen offspring of capitalism run amok.”

Notice anything about how he frames the title in these sentences? Kind of makes you think that Natural Born Killers was, like many of the director’s classics — think Platoon , think Salvador — a creation solely concocted by Oliver Stone, which of course it was not. And because it was not is the reason it’s a Problematic — aesthetic mostly, but in other categories too! — in the first place. Because it is in fact the result of a misbegotten collision of two very different sensibilities: that of Stone, and of screenwriter Quentin Tarantino.

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It was because of Killers , as it’s sometimes reported, that Tarantino dug in his heels and determined to direct every other picture he scripted. He did not have quite that much clout in the early 1990s, but Pulp Fiction , which premiered at Cannes a few months before Killers hit U.S. theaters but didn’t rock the States until October, would get it for him. In the Reservoir Dogs wake, he was kind of a go-to script doctor whose own screenplays, with their sippy dialogue and amoral action, were coveted commodities. One of them, True Romance , was directed by Tony Scott, an anti-message director whose virtuoso- sensationalist approach made him all but perfect for the lurid material.

Stone picked up the Natural Born Killers script when it landed at Warner Brothers (the producer Jane Hamsher, who acquired the script from Tarantino for a mere $10,000, wrote an arguably scurrilous book about her experience, and vamoosed from the movie world to take up a career in politics by the turn of the century). He doesn’t say what he saw in the screenplay in his memoir, but the finished film demonstrates that for better or worse he attacked the material with a zestful, perhaps even righteous energy. (And Tarantino, who holds other Stone films in very high regard, famously loathed the results.)

Stone’s directorial mode here is a complete inversion of the brutal realism of his prior pictures. His American hellscape puts title killers Mickey and Mallory in a practically flying car speeding through rear-projected flames. When they go into a surreal all-night drugstore advertising itself in green neon, the movie’s entire color scheme goes green, and so on. The opening scene, in which Mickey and Mallory wipe out a diner, has a primo piece of identifiable Tarantino dialogue: examining his dessert options, Mickey drawls, “Let’s give that Key Lime Pie a day in court.”

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But then the movie goes Stone Crazy, as the director marches through multiple indictments of what he sees as the sickness of American culture. Mallory’s abusive childhood is framed as a John-Waters-esque sitcom, with legendary comedian Rodney Dangerfield as her creepy abusive dad. Dangerfield morphs his dyspeptic comedic delivery into genuine malevolence and perversion while Edie McClurg mutates her conventional matronly persona. It should work. But it doesn’t. When Harrelson brains Dangerfield, we hear tweeting birds as in a Looney Tunes short — easy to get the rights for that sound effect, as this is a Warner Brothers movie…

Under Stone’s direction, the movie, despite its meth momentum and lysergic sound and vision, huffs and puffs and beats its breast telling itself it’s got something meaningful to say. Several meaningful things to say, in fact. One of the movie’s most risible scenes has Mickey and Mallory visiting some indigenous people; actual activist Russell Means plays a tribal leader who sees the words “demon” and “too much tv” projected on Mickey and Mallory’s torsos. In this scene Stone manages to work in a reference to Vietnam, because of course he does — Means’ home has a framed letter from Lyndon Johnson informing him that one of his sons was killed in the war — and while you know, he’s arguably not wrong that this is a culture addicted to violence and to its depictions, Stone choosing a script that tended more to celebrating than condemning that condition seems a tactical error. (In my friend Matt Zoller Seitz’s excellent book The Oliver Stone Experience , the director’s defense of this movie and its central characters is avid and, well, eccentric.)

The performances are lively but not necessarily compelling. Some time into a recent viewing of the movie I thought, “I love Woody Harrelson, why do I hate him in this?” I think it might be because his character is a real jackass, and Harrelson plays him straight. Juliette Lewis bounces around like she’s on goofballs, and while Robert Downey, Jr. does a remarkable Down Under accent, his role doesn’t resonate as hard as it might have back in the day when U.S. tabloid television was avidly importing Australian anchors. The only actor who delivers the level of knowing ridicule the material might deserve is Tommy Lee Jones as a blustery prison warden. I shall not speak here of Tom Sizemore as Jack Scagnetti (a component of the Tarantino Universe, which isn’t as much of a thing in his current work as it once was, some speculations to the contrary ), who looks a little too comfortable in his New Wave underwear during what was once an obligatory genre movie scene — that is, a depiction of the dirty but determined police detective having an assignation with a hooker. (An actually good and funny performance, albeit a bit of a deep cut, is Ron Vawter channeling Hume Cronyn in Brute Force as a maniacal prison guard.)

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The relentless depiction of murder and corruption and venality is not so much objectionable as it is tedious. You eventually start waiting for the movie to get as bored with itself as you are with it. For me this was one hour and 23 minutes in. (A final insult to lovers of good movies comes via Tarantino — a quote from Howard Hawks’ classic, and classically humane, Western Rio Bravo , put into the mouth of Mickey before he and Mallory make their not-final stand.)

Which isn’t to say it’s not objectionable. When Mickey leads a prison riot and starts addressing his fellow inmates, the cross cutting to the Black prison inmates nodding to Mickey’s dumbass philosophizing is pretty offensive. And the final montage of the movie features TV clips of Tonya Harding, the Menendez Brothers, Rodney King and the firebombing of the Waco complex of David Koresh in case you missed the point.

One aspect of the movie I can heartily recommend is its soundtrack, a remarkable collage concocted by Stone and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, which mixes Reznor’s music with classical and electronic material and some grungy post-punk as well. (L7’s immortal “Shitlist” pops up more than once.) Near the end, things get seriously avant-garde; as Mickey and Mallory come down a prison stairwell to be confronted by Jones’ warden, the heavily percussive music is a section of electronic composer Sergio Cervetti’s The Hay Wain ,a visionary avant-garde work that was issued on CD and is now available online, via Periodic Music, a pioneering label founded by a longtime friend of mine.

Despite having concocted this self-important tripe (and the movie was a moderate hit), Oliver Stone remains a great and important filmmaker. As is the case with his onetime collaborator Brian De Palma (there is a moderately amusing nod to Scarface in Natural Born Killers ), it’s a crime that Hollywood no longer seems to have a place for him at its ever-shrinking table.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny . He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface , published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you .

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