Screen Scene
Natural Born Killers
By John Carlos Cantú [1994. Directed by Oliver Stone. Cast Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tommy Lee Jones, Rodney Dangerfield. Warner Bros. 119 mins.] T here's enough senseless violence in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers to fill this year's body bag quota in American cinema Yet this simplistic observation alone accords the film as being all flash with no thunder - and nothing could be less accurate.
For there's a shrewd madness to his method. Just because many major film critics have fallen distressingly prey to the hackneyed notion that Natural Born Killers is merely superficial gore doesn't mean that all's you see is all you get in Stone's latest missive on modem-day America. Repeating ourselves: Nothing could be less accurate.
Oliver Stone has simply done what other American filmmakers have been straining towards - and would love to do - if their agents and production companies were only willing to risk occupational unemployment. Hollywood has long lacked the guts to admit (without resorting to sophomoric sensationalism) that there's a remarkable amount of violence taking place behind America's living room walls.
David Lynch's Blue Velvet was once thought to be the final word on the subject... but not any more.
Scratch into Stone's shocker and you come up with the scariest snapshot of American familial life this side of Leave It to Beaver. According to Stone, where Eddie Haskell once had the only mean streak in town, we're all getting into the act these days.
Admittedly, he relies on Quentin Tarantino's story to sketch his nightmare, but the final reckoning is all Ollie. When Micky Cox (Woody Harrelson) tells Ns fatuous interviewer, Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.) of television's American Maniacs, that he and wife, Mallory (Juliette Lewis), have been "naturally born bad," he's merely paying tribute to the seeming non-stop barrage of ritualized violence that has recently disguised itself as "family values" on TV.
From the Menendez Brothers to O. J. Simpson, and despite Dan Quayle's vapid generalizations otherwise, some of these questionable values have indeed shaped America's home front through this last decade. For the first time in history we can all see the disastrous patrimony that was once hidden behind aluminum siding by way of the evening news' satellite hook-up. Our daily dosage of murderous pop culture comes freewheeling at us nightly with an update at 11 pm. Stone has just tapped into this psychic undercurrent and regurgitated it through a synesthetic barrage in Natural Born Killers.
Not that this really matters much to him in the final analysis. For he's apparently determined to out- Peckinpah the master himself. Yet even the weirdest Sam Peckinpah urban jungle - The Getaway, for example - ostensibly sought to sound out the ethical implications of modern day violence. Ollie, by contrast, says "to blazes with all the penny-ante moralizing."
We don't need to know much about leading characters, Micky and Mallory. In a remarkably maudlin confessional, we find that she's come from an unrelievedly depressing middle-class background that is played out as a sit-com from hell. But, then again, this insert is only a flimsy plot contrivance for Micky to whisk Mallory outta town after they've laid waste to her nuclear family.
The next thing we know, we're cruising down a New Mexico highway sharing in a rampage of more than 50 random corpses scattered along the roadside. It's apparently enough that M&M have declared their eternal love over the bodies of everyone that inadvertently crosses their path.
It's also only after our star-crossed lovers have been cornered, and turned into a 1990s' faux-Bonnie and Clyde, that we're introduced to sleaze-master Gale. This Robin Leach-warmabe decides Micky will make the perfect guest for his program on Super Bowl Sunday. But Micky, apparently nuanced in the vicissitudes of cinéma vérité, manages to spark a riot in Warden Dwight McClusky's (Tommy Lee Jones) maximum security prison as he's undergoing his deceptively casual Q&A.
Flaking off the law and their companions one by one, the young couple escape in a miraculous hale of bullets to continue their erstwhile adventures in paradise. In fact, polishing off Gale - almost as an afterthought - turns out to be the only real justice realized in the entire film.
Simple enough, but still not quite good enough. For Stone crafts a pyrotechnic wall of sight and sound to dazzle his audience's imagination until it begs for no more. And through it all, he allows for no narrative continuity outside the bare-bone essentials to keep his film's momentum moving forward. Instead, it's the sheer virtuosity of the film's scatological humor that hammers his message home. One can only imagine his satisfaction in creating a crime wave that Inside Edition would kill for.
The single lasting image of Natural Born Killers is Mallory 's Dad (Rodney Dangerfield) bellowing at the top of his scabrous lungs as he salaciously leers at his nubile eldest. Dangerfield's pocked marked face bursts forth from the screen with his Adam's apple bobbing wildly. As horrific as he initially seems, he's the fitting personification of the peculiarly familiar pater of America's familia firmus.
After all these years of hiding behind his standup comedy, America's favorite hard-luck story has taken off his mask. Staring deep into Dangerfield's misanthropic, watery eyes we know immediately what Natural Born Killer 's badlands of apocalyptic domesticity really mean. And what they have meant for all these years.
Just ask Oliver Stone: It tastes great... and it's less filling.
WILD WHEELS [1993. Directed by Harrod Blank. Cast 46 very happy car owners. Zoom-ln ProductionsTara Video. 64 mins.]
What are you going to do with a film about a select group of car owners who've decided to turn their vehicles into rambling expressions of their personalites? Well, of course, you're going to have to roll with it. For Wild Wheels is easily one of the quirkiest documenrtaries to be released in many a showcase model.
From Gene Pool's "Grassmobile," that was created by gluing and manicuring seed beds to the body of his auto; to Eric Staller's computer-sequenced 1,400 mini-bulb "Lightmobile" (starting to get the picture?); to Joe Barnes' "Ultimate Taxi" (with flashing disco lights, smoke machine, and complimentary stereo karaoke); to Larry Fuentes' "Cowasaki" roaming the wide frontier (you have to see this one to believe it), Wild Wheels explores this unusual subculture of common folk whose identities are more firmly bound to their vehicles than to their common sense.
Yet what's so grand about this film is director Harrod Blank's heartfelt take on his subject-matter. There's no ridicule being cynically poked at here. Rather, Blank (for good reason, as the documentary shows us early on) allows the owners of these eccentric vehicles to explain for themselves what in the world has possessed them to paint, lather, shellac, sculpt, and polish their "wheels."
In every instance, there's an affectionate story behind what initially seems to be a rather odd choice for a hobby. And it just goes to show you that there's beauty lying in wait at every corner you turn.
Just don't be surprised if someday a museum of art passes you one day on the freeway... as Blank tells us in his giddy documentary: It's just another select set of Wild Wheels happily making their way across America.