Fear the reaper

If you've seen the movie version of Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (you should read the book) and if you pay attention to style, you'll be reminded of "Natural Born Killers." Unlike the film version of Fear and Loathing (an adaptation that provides a visual montage of some scenes from the book, but does not provide you with the cut and direction of the book), Natural Born Killers stays focussed on the message. The film is a cogent, frenetic, violent, and loving anti-fantasia of what America is, what it exports, and what it could become.

(To be clear, I had not, until yesterday night (this morning) seen this movie (originally out in 1994 - it's 16 years old!) and a Bill Murray interview I was reading mentioned his cameo in Zombieland and Woody Harrelson and Natural Born Killers and I thought, I guess I should watch that movie ... so yesterday I did.)

After killing her abusive father, and her trembling mother along with him, Mickey rescues Mallory from the stereotypically way over-the-top (Married with Children?) lower-middle class family nightmare. This release sets them off on their journey together. They are both father and mother-less, and without this anchor, they fall prey to despair and revenge. In short, Mickey and Mallory Knox rampage across the countryside killing. They are in love with each other. And they kill. They kill for a variety of reasons. Some people, they say really don't deserve to live. Some people are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes they kill with a shrug of self-preservation. For the most part they kill because they aren't convinced that living or length of life is all that consequential. That is, we all will die, so what's the point of worrying about when?

Eventually, as is the way in America, they get caught, incarcerated, interrogated, packaged, commodified, and celebritized. This is one of the central themes: America's main industry is to package things, anything, for sale. American is one giant retail chain. A commodity-seller with sights on getting rich on someone else's gullibility (or necessity, whatever suits). Into this morass Mickey and Mallory inject some moral clarity with the business end of a shotgun, or handgun, or rifle, and so on.

Visually and aurally this film is wonderfully difficult to take in. The camera fidgets and squirms. The backdrop is as often a montage of history panels and dream sequences as it is "reality". Which illustrates the point: we all live and act in the context of our families and our society. We cannot escape what they say about us, and what we say about them.

In The Sibling Society poet Robert Bly observes that Western society is a culture of adolescents. Parents are absent, either physically, or emotionally, from the lives of their children. Even when parents are physically present, they are as ill-disciplined pleasure seekers as their children. So we are a culture of siblings, with no adults around to run the show. This seems also to be the premise of Natural Born Killers. Combine a lack of loving supervision, with a heaping measure of a culture born of, and raised on, violence, and you just might get a disaffected, nearly incapacitated, person. If this doesn't result in Columbine, it might spawn Gordon Gecko (reincarnated as Lehman Brothers, et. al), or the guy asking for spare change in front of the MTS Centre. The ultimate result of this absence is the individual's alienation from community, and the loss of the fellowship that comes from good work (this point needs developing, a la Wendell Berry, but I've no time right now).

This film is unflinching in its observations. Brace yourselves if you haven't seen it.