Natural Born Killers (1994) Review
6/10
Two people with catastrophic childhoods kill roughly fifty strangers across the southwest, become television celebrities, and are eventually broken out of prison during a live interview by a journalist who has decided he is one of them.
The 6 is an argument I have with myself. The technique here is genuinely extraordinary, the performances are committed, and Robert Richardson’s photography is unlike anything else of the period. The argument the film is making does not survive the way it is made.
A film condemning the media’s appetite for stylized violence cannot make its case by supplying two hours of the most stylized violence available, because the audience arrives for the supply and not the condemnation.
The Technique Is Unlike Anything Else
Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan cut this out of eighteen or so formats. Thirty-five millimeter, sixteen millimeter, Super 8, video, black and white, color, animation, rear projection, and a sitcom sequence with a laugh track.
None of that is decoration and it does have a logic. The register changes with whose reality is dominating the frame. Mallory’s childhood arrives as a sitcom because that is the only vocabulary available for describing a family, complete with studio audience laughing at her father’s abuse.
That sitcom sequence is the best thing in the film and the clearest statement of its thesis. Rodney Dangerfield plays the father, the laugh track responds to every line, and the horror of it is that the format is doing exactly what formats do, which is make anything watchable.
Richardson shot it and won nothing for it, which is hard to explain given the range. He would go on to three Academy Awards, and this is the most technically adventurous work of his career.
The rear projection is the device that has aged best. Behind Mickey and Mallory in the car, the sky runs backward, changes color, fills with demons and headlines and old footage, and none of it is explained. Their interior weather is simply outside the windows, which is a solution no dialogue could match.
Changing form mid-work is legitimate when the form encodes a point of view. The sitcom is not a gag about television, it is the only frame Mallory has for narrating her own family.
The rule that keeps it disciplined: each shift must belong to somebody. A change of register that expresses only the author’s restlessness reads as showing off, and the audience disengages.
In prose the equivalent is switching between modes, from close narration to transcript to list to letter. Each mode should carry information the previous one could not, and the reader should be able to feel whose account they are inside.
The Satire Eats Itself
Stone’s stated position was that the film criticizes sensationalized violence. I believe he meant it and I do not think the film accomplishes it.
The mechanism fails for a specific reason. Satire requires distance, and this film’s method is total immersion. The killings are shot as exhilaration, scored like music videos, edited for rhythm. The audience is placed inside the pleasure and then told at the end that the pleasure was the subject.
Wayne Gale is the escape hatch and he does not carry the weight. Robert Downey Jr. is excellent, playing a tabloid host with an Australian accent and no interior life, and he functions as the film’s designated hypocrite. Putting the critique inside one obviously repellent character lets everything around him off.
The comparison that clarifies it is Network, which is about the same subject and keeps its distance completely. Nothing in Network is exciting. It is all people in rooms making decisions, and the argument lands because the film never asks you to enjoy the thing it is condemning.
Tommy Lee Jones and Tom Sizemore show what the film could have been. Both play authority figures who are worse than the killers, a warden and a detective operating on appetite and vanity, and both are pitched at cartoon volume. Played straight, either could have carried the critique the film keeps handing to Wayne Gale.
Tarantino Wanted His Name Off It
Tarantino wrote the original screenplay and hoped to direct it himself for a small sum. He could not raise the money, sold it, and it eventually reached Stone.
Stone rewrote it substantially with David Veloz and Richard Rutowski. Tarantino was reduced to a story credit, asked to have his name removed entirely, and said publicly and repeatedly that he hated the result.
His concern by his own account was attribution. He did not want to be credited with something he had no hand in making, and he was eventually permitted to publish his original script as a book, which he has said helped considerably.
His original is a different film. The media satire is present and much smaller, the structure is closer to a crime story, and Wayne Gale is a supporting figure. Stone took the media element and made it the whole picture, which is a defensible choice and not the one the writer signed up for.
A story credit and a screenplay credit are different objects, and the distinction protects a writer whose material has been transformed. Tarantino’s insistence on it was about accuracy and not vanity.
The transferable point is about adaptation of your own work by other people. If you sell it, it becomes theirs, and the only thing you retain is the right to be described correctly.
There is also a lesson in what got amplified. Stone found one element in the script and expanded it into the entire architecture. That is what adaptation does, and it is why an author reading a screenplay of his novel is usually looking at somebody else’s argument.
The Copycat Cases and the Lawsuit
In March 1995 two eighteen-year-olds, Sarah Edmondson and Benjamin Darras, watched the film, took acid, and drove out and shot two people. William Savage was killed. Patsy Byers was left paralyzed.
Byers sued Stone and Warner Bros., with the support of John Grisham, who had known Savage personally. The claim was that the film incited the violence. It was dismissed on First Amendment grounds, reinstated on appeal in 1998, and the industry waited several years before the appeals court dismissed it again.
That outcome matters well beyond this film. It established that a work of fiction is not liable for crimes committed by people who watched it, and every studio in Hollywood had a stake in the answer.
The film’s own history is inseparable from all of this. It was banned outright in Ireland including in film clubs, delayed in Britain while the BBFC investigated the copycat reports, and its planned UK video release was canceled after Dunblane. Stone cut about four minutes to obtain an R rating in the first place.
What It Looks Like Thirty Years On
Thirty-four million dollars, a hundred and ten million back, the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, and Ebert giving it four stars and placing it eighth on his list for the year.
The reception was violently split and both sides had a case. It is the eighth most controversial film in history by one Entertainment Weekly count, which is the sort of ranking that tells you more about the moment than the picture.
What has happened since is that the target moved. The film is attacking network television and tabloid news, institutions that have since been replaced by something the film could not imagine and that operates on exactly the mechanism it identified. In that sense it was right.
But the style has aged in a way the argument has not. The relentless montage that read as assault in 1994 now reads as a very long music video, and a viewer who grew up online is not going to find the editing overwhelming. The film’s shock was its delivery, and the delivery is now ordinary.
Juliette Lewis is the element that has gained. She was twenty-one and gives a performance with no vanity in it at all, playing a woman whose damage is legible in every gesture, and it is the one piece of the film that works entirely without the editing to support it.
A work built on formal shock has a shelf life, because shock is relative to what the audience has already absorbed. The argument underneath may survive long after the surface stops working.
That is the case for making the argument legible independently of the technique. If the reader has to be overwhelmed to get the point, they will stop getting it as soon as they stop being overwhelmed.
Test it by describing your work plainly to somebody. If the plain description carries the point, the technique is amplifying something real. If it does not, the technique is the whole product.
Should you watch Natural Born Killers?
Watch it once for the technique and for the sitcom sequence, which is one of the sharpest things anybody made in the nineties. Do not expect the satire to convince you, and be clear that the film’s own history is a larger and more interesting subject than the film.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 4 of my film lists