...people really need to take another look at "Natural Born Killers."
The plot: Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis in roles that are a little too convincing) are a husband/wife pair of serial killers whose vicious crime spree across the country has made them into media superstars.
This movie is a barrage of frightening and surreal images, and is damn near hypnotic to watch.
I can see where the controversy surrounding this film comes from but what I don't understand is where the hate is coming from.
1994's "Natural Born Killers" has to be one of the best movies of the 90s - its sole purpose on this planet is to showcase America's fascination with violence.
But lets try to understand the hate. This movie is here for one reason and I think that we can all agree on that reason. Oliver Stone is a competent and accomplished filmmaker and most of the hate seems to be directed towards him. Stone, who is working from a script that has since been virtually disowned by Quentin Tarantino, pretty much took over and shaped the screenplay to his own vision.
I can understand why fans of Tarantino have a right to be p*ssed off, but I find it extremely difficult to believe that they truly hate the finished product, and the same goes for Tarantino. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Tarantino fan myself, and I'm sure he didn't appreciate Stone re-writing his script, but he should be proud of what was done with it.
The message, if you can call it that, is that we are obsessed with violence, and Stone exposes our love for it and spits it back in our faces. To quote Marlon Brando - "The horror, the horror." I say to hell with the hypocritical people who find this movie offensive for they are the ones that this movie is truly aimed towards.
Yes, horrific images are displayed in this movie and terrible things happen to people all throughout, but it's giving us we want, and we hate it. The hate surrounding this film is extremely misguided. My high school paper recently did an article about sex and violence on television and one of the supposed outlets of that violence would be our fascination with the war in Iraq and the Jessica Lynch story.
It said that we are much, much more concerned with the sex (I personally don't think today's teenage girls are THAT impressionable, but who knows?), rather than the violence (which apparently seems to be causing a misguided sh!tstorm of controversy, too, and like the sex, I don't think that people are that impressionable), namely the kind that is seen in music videos and such. Though the article refused to go into specifics (but we know who the people being discussed are and I'm sure they do, too), it brings me back to "Natural Born Killers," which I think people need to take another look at.
In this day and age, violence on television is becoming more and more commonplace, and this movie's relevance seems to make its viewing that much more important. Before we go and continue to bash the hell out of it again, people need to come back and take a look around themselves and watch "Natural Born Killers."
