Natural Born Killers began innocently enough as a script by Quentin Tarantino. Like its sister script, True Romance, which Tarantino also sold to Warner Brothers to fund Pulp Fiction, Killers is a testament to everlasting love in the midst of violence. While Tarantino wrote Killers as more of a classical throwback to road on the run romances like Badlands, once Oliver Stone came aboard it turned into a completely different animal. The script quickly evolved into a shouting, exaggerated satire of violence and its symbiotic relationship with American media. Building on the quick cut, multi-format menagerie of JFK and utilizing Trent Reznor and a Bible’s worth of stock sound effects and music cues from all sources, Stone took the script even further by to make it full-fledged assault on the senses. It’s long been a subject of contestation, on the one hand praised as an audacious indictment of television, and on the other an irresponsible glorification of violence.
Whatever the opinion, it still remains relevant, and has had more home video releases over the years than almost any other film from the nineties. Warner recently released a nice book style Blu-ray of the theatrical cut, but if you wanted the uncut director’s cut, you had to go to Lionsgate because of Warner’s strict policy against non-rated material. I don’t really know what that policy is, since they have and do release unrated material, like Rest Stop or Beerfest, but at one point they must not have, hence leasing the sought after director’s cut of Killers to Lionsgate. Whatever the case, it’s back at Warner now, and they’re now debuting the cut on Blu-ray and DVD simultaneously, now with a new featurette and introduction. Fans have been waiting for the miracle a long time, and it appears to have finally struck. Let’s take a look at Stone’s stoned out film.
Oliver Stone treats the material like television right from the start. Not television in the derogatory sense of lesser production value or second-rate story, but television as a medium rather than a genre. We start into the film chronologically out of order, as if we just channel surfed to a show midway through. Mallory (Juliette Lewis, Cape Fear, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape) is dancing away to some jukebox hits, while Mickey (Woody Harrelson, Cool Blue…okay and The People vs. Larry Flint and White Men Can’t Jump) is sitting at the diner counter eating some key lime pie. A couple hicks flirt with Mallory, Mickey finishes his bright green sliver of desert, and the two congregate to shoot the shit out of everyone in the diner. They are a couple of serial killers who kill for the thrill and the media is always there one step behind them.
What drove them to such absolutes? Before we blame it on the media, we get a wonderful scene, perhaps the standout in the movie, that parodies the fifties era sitcom, titled “I Love Mallory”. Rodney Dangerfield plays type and against all at once as her perverted, incestuous father barking vile threats and vulgar catcalls to Mallory while a studio audience laughs on. Mickey walks in and the audience cheers, and Harrelson even gives a humble smirk and a beat to the camera to really sell the shallow vapidity of such sitcom constructions of everyday life. Mickey and Mallory meet, drown the father and burn the mother, and then head off on their cross country trek for drugs, fame and maybe even a little meaning.
On their trip they get married, run into a Native American, whose detachment from media hegemony makes him the martyr of the film, sensationalist crime journalist Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr., Less Than Zero, Chaplin), who will do anything to interview the lovers to boost his own fame, corrupt FBI agent Detective Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore, Saving Private Ryan and that sex tape he was in a few years ago) and tart, mustachioed prison warden Dwight McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones, Under Siege, Black Moon Rising), among many others. They get bit by a snake, search for drugs, get arrested, break out of prison, rape a hostage and finally get a one on one with Wayne Gale. Only after the Gale interview only one is left standing. It ain’t Wayne.
If Marshall McLuhan, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Sam Peckinpah (take that, scorpion!) made a movie together, it would probably be something like Natural Born Killers. It’s one of those grand, multi-leveled films where the visuals alone can speak to a disconcerting audience, the violence can speak to another, and then the complex semiology of visual and audible symbols another still. It takes jabs at the American zeitgeist via its mosaic of visual pastiches, whether it’s those old Hollywood driving scenes set to disconnected backdrops (like those sequences at the start of The Naked Gun movies), rabid rabbits right out of Night of the Lepus or laugh tracks from old sitcoms. When it’s not taking up the full screen, these visual signifiers to our media culture are playing behind windows, in the sky or on the television – regardless of whether Mickey and Mallory are paying attention, they’re being inundated with consumption culture.
Stone gives consumption a color, too, via the green that makes itself prominent on a few select objects and scenes in the movie. Mickey’s vibrant key lime pie, junk food in a junk culture, the jukebox that Mallory plays her canned pop hits to help goad her sexuality (it's green when she's eaten out on her car, too), and the drug store (“DRUG ZONE” as it is not-so-subtly blown up as), where the two seek out treatment for their condition. Green appears once more during a tinted scene in the prison riot, suggesting, finally, that violence is America’s last major form of consumption. So whether he’s using old media, different film stocks, contrapuntal sound cues or even single colors, Stone is constantly layering his film with levels of metaphor, context and understanding.
The film has the pacing and the structure of a couch potato with his finger on the dial, surfing back and forth between film stocks and even story points. All the subliminal editing with demons, fire and negative image animals all culminate to the grand, indicting finale. After Mickey and Mallory have their grand face off with media and television literally with Wayne Gale, the channel then changes, and we are given a channel surf summary on the sensationalism of American media, with shots of the Menendez, Simpson and Bobbit trials, as well as a Tonya Harding skate. That end film montage does the opposite of what detractors of the film say about Natural Born Killers – rather than turn the two into heroes it instead makes them a flash in the pan. Film naturally glorifies or inflates its subject, but after two hours the “heroes” become nothing more than a channel worth changing. We never find out what happens to them, not because it matters, but because our A.D.D. information generation couldn’t be bothered for the follow up. There’s other stuff on TV.
presentation...
Considering the film is shot on 17 different exhibition formats, from 8mm to 35mm, black and white to video, it’s pretty tough to guage image quality. The cinematography is so stylized and over-processed that it’s never fully clear, but even in the flurry, the reality of the transfer is that it is soft. Even the 35mm color footage lacks edge sharpness and detail. There are never any scenes that provide the window effect of looking at reality, but perhaps that’s just as well considering it’s a film about the obtrusive hegemony of television. The one thing that this new Blu-ray really does offer over past DVDs is the boost in color. Robert Richardson’s cinematography is unkempt with a flurry of vibrant primary colors, with each color rich with many intertwined metaphors. Colors are so important in Natural Born Killers, and here they’ve never been more expressive. This 1.78:1 anamorphic 1080p VC1 encoded transfer may not be top quality, but the cinematography still is and it’s preserved well enough here.
Natural Born Killers is presented in Dolby TrueHD 5.1, and the mix is a forceful one. Gunshots, rioting yells and some heinous laughing all really shoot out with force, and the LFE always gets a workout because of it. There’s an amazing selection of music here, from light fifties pop to Leonard Cohen’s perfectly nihilistic anchoring. Cohen supplies three songs for the film, all during the key moments (start, end and the riot climax) and if anything I’ll remember the sound for that rather than any sort of envelopment. There is some nice effects work moved to the rear speakers, although dialogue stays stuck in the center speaker. It’s a wild, abrasive film, and it has a soundtrack to match.
extras...
All the extras from the theatrical cut Blu-ray have been brought over for this new Blu-ray, including the 44-page booklet that was built into the packaging previously. Now it’s a booklet inside a regular Blu-ray case, along with a new 2009 introduction, but the content is otherwise the same. Extras from the previous release include the standard definition, interlaced:
• Theatrical trailer
• Twelve minute Charlie Rose interview with Stone
• Audio commentary with Oliver Stone
• Around 27-minutes of deleted scenes, including a memorable comedic rant on Mickey and Mallory by Denis Leary and other performances by Rachel Ticotin, the Barbarian Brothers and Ashley Judd. All scenes have optional introductions on their exclusion by Oliver Stone
• Alternate ending with optional Stone introduction
• It never made the previous Blu-ray, but the documentary from the original DVD, “Chaos Rising: The Storm Around Natural Born Killers”, is also included here in its 26-minute entirety.
On those extras: The deleted scenes are interesting, especially the Leary rant. Shame that couldn’t have made it into the final cut. The deleted scenes are otherwise of little consequence. The alternate ending is pretty contrived, and offers too much structured closure on a film that prides itself on its anarchy. All deleted scenes are presented full screen. The commentary is a lull, and really, it points to the idea that Stone is vastly overrated as a creative mind. The images and ideas he put on screen are certainly wonderful provocations, but when he’s forced to explain, as he tries to do here, he comes off as almost oblivious to the messages he seems to be getting at. Rather than dissect the meaning behind the many symbols in the film, he’ll instead say something like “I liked that shot” or something of that vapidity. The commentary was a big letdown, and the Charlie Rose interview is more an ego rest stop to push controversy rather than cut to the core of the man or the film. “Chaos Rising” offers a lengthy look at the making of the film, with most of the principal cast and crew weighing in on both the making-of and the controversy surrounding the film. It’s quite well made.
What’s new? Well, we get a short video introduction from Stone that is presented in HD. Through the nature of editing, this 4-minute introduction ends up coming off a lot more articulate than Stone does in any of the other pieces. There is also a new documentary, also in HD, called “NBK Evolution: How Would it All Go Down Now?” Running a TV-friendly 22-minutes, this is a fascinating documentary that manages to shed light on both the film and the media culture Stone was satirizing. It has several interviews both from the inside and outside, talking to filmmakers like Stone, Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as well as those in the media, from Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter representatives to Tila Tequila and Joey Buttafuoco of all people. The editing is very good and complements the film quite nicely. The first half offers a nice look at the scandal of Natural Born Killers from today’s perspective, and the second half, on what it would be like today is interesting, if a little silly.
wrapping it up...
Natural Born Killers is a roughly sewn patchwork of violence, pastiche and television, yet as realized by Stone’s highly symbolic vision, Robert Richardson’s lucid cinematography and Leonard Cohen’s nihilistic prose, it ends up forming some beautiful fire blanket of American values. Winona, this is how you build an American quilt! The director’s cut is presented in full and with a bevy of extras new and old, some extras are better than others, but the set provides a good mélange of material. Killers is a film so packed with information that it can speak for itself more than anyone explaining it ever could. Hearing Stone shallowly deconstruct his fierce work only further signals that the less said about this nineties masterpiece the better. The image quality on the Blu-ray is acceptable, but soft, but the audio is at least an audible assault.
 | overall... Film: A Video: B- Audio: B+ Extras: B Final Grade: B |
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