My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 21): Couples Gone Wild

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Directed by Arthur Penn
Starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty

Natural Born Killers (1994)
Directed by Oliver Stone
Starring Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis

Portraying sociopaths on film is an interesting business. It is hard for us to truly come to terms with a person absolutely lacking in empathy or morality or “superego”, the people who fill our prisons. Seeing them up close (e.g. Charles Manson, Adolf Eichman, O.J. Simpson on trial) makes you see how they can fit into society, partly because we choose not to believe that such people exist. Movies have no such compunctions, and some of the great films like Taxi Driver (1978) take us inside their world, if we can stand it.

The two films under consideration today are hardly Taxi Driver, which treats its sociopath very seriously, even sympathetically. These two films instead range from flippant to comical to surreal, essentially putting even up more of a barrier to our “understanding” the sociopath, which of course is not possible anyway. So perhaps comedy is the best approach, even as these sociopaths murder lots of people. That was the formula of Quentin Tarentino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), not one of my favorites since the comedy was smug, and the whole movie felt like I was on the outside of a hip joke.

But another wild sociopath movie came out in 1994, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, and somehow I managed not to see it until recently. Wow. The screenplay interestingly started with Quentin Tarantino, and there are connections to Pulp Fiction to be sure. But the style is quite different, more crazy and hallucinogenic than smug. It is a very hard movie to describe coherently. It tells the story of Mickey and Mallory Knox, who go on a cross country killing rampage notable for its randomness and lack of any real purpose. Not money, not injustice, not any of the things usually done to heroize the criminals in most movies. They kill for the fun of it and mix in a dose of narcissism by leaving one person alive at each killing site so that person can tell the media that it was Mickey and Mallory that did it. The two leads Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis are brilliantly evil. Stone says he cast Harrelson, then mostly known for the TV comedy Cheers because "frankly, he had that American, trashy look. There's something about Woody that evokes Kentucky or white trash." Yep. Juliette Lewis is just as good—completely wild and unhinged. They never once show any trace of goodness or admirability, a remarkable thing in itself in a two hour film.

Director Oliver Stone is a bit of a whack-job conspiracy theorist (e.g. JFK), but here he is a radical virtuosic stylist. There is a mash of primary colors, LSD animation (below), weird lighting (above), crazy angles. His camera moves, tilts MTV style, and dissects his characters from all angles and all distances. Fast cuts, psychedelic colors, and jarring music keep the whole thing like a sustained roller coaster ride. I know I was in the presence of something special when the newlyweds kill Mallory’s sexually abusive father (a creepy Rodney Dangerfield, of all people) to the strains of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck (specifically the moment when Wozzeck kills his wife). Brilliant. I have watched the film twice and am just beginning to appreciate all the wild film devices—you cannot lose focus for a second, or you miss some special effect. They drive along a road, and suddenly we see violent cartoons through the car window rather than the passing landscape. They sit in a restaurant, and we see bits of Leni Riefenstahl’s Hitler in Triumph of the Will in the window behind them, then cutting to concentration camp films, then to 1930’s gangster movie footage. So this film is at the same time a psychedelic fantasy, a compendium of Great Sociopaths Through the Years, and a two hour sustained cocaine trip. The one “serious” theme that Stone approaches is the role of the media in sensationalizing such news. Robert Downey puts in his usual brilliant character role as a reality TV host who attaches himself to the murderous couple to get ratings. This including accompanying them as they break out of a rioting prison. Stone is amazing in this prison sequence, portraying sheer carnage like I have never seen. I am not certain why I enjoyed this so much—no character development, no message, no social significance except for the anti-media message. But somehow this completely over-the-top radical film style makes the whole thing work in a way that Tarantino never achieves. Pulp Fiction is about the director Tarantino. Natural Born Killers is about the end of the universe.

I’ll briefly mention an inspiration for this film, Bonnie and Clyde. This was very much a product of the violent 1960’s, and was notorious in its time for its brutal closing scene, when the pop-culture heroic bank robbers are machine-gunned down in ultra-slow motion agony. This was repeated famously in The Godfather five years later when Sonny Corleone is gunned down at a toll booth. In fact the film was a harbinger of the following generation of films than focused a lens on violence, appealing both to artsy viewers and a popular audience just looking for mayhem on the screen. So in the following years we got Easy Rider (1969), the Godfather movies (1972-74), Taxi Driver (1978) and Scarface (1983), each more virtuosic than the next in its portrayal of violence, and each one becoming more sociopathic and neutral in its point of view.

The gangster movies of the 1930’s portrayed bank robbers as heroes, aligned with the Depression populist resentment of the banks. Bonnie and Clyde looks like these films superficially, but the characters here are stultifyingly normal (e.g. the pretty and bland Warren Beatty)—nothing special except that they rob banks. Director Penn seems to see them more as products of their culture than as individuals, perhaps a comment on how the 1960’s were spinning out of control. Bonnie and Clyde is not a very good film because it really is not about anything at all. Take away the controversy about violence--now pretty tame, at least put beside Natural Born Killers--and not much is there. But it got the sociopath film tradition going.