Oliver Stone on trial
for cinematic crimes in the first degree

By Jim Emerson

A lot of people still consider Oliver Stone to be a serious political filmmaker.  I used to -- up until I saw Natural Born Killers.  Then I saw him for what he really is: a sensationalist -- an exploitation filmmaker who, instead of making movies about zombies and bikers and big-busted women in prison, applies his exploitation-film sensibility to fragments of American history or pop culture. His style was perfect for Platoon as a way of immersing you in the disorienting sensations of combat.  And even the senseless hodge-podge of film stocks and techniques that Stone applied to JFK seemed appropriate for a movie about piecing together a crazy quilt of conspiracy theories. 

But with Natural Born Killers, Stone revealed his true nature -- not just in his relentlessly pandering and derivative "stylistic" doodling, but in the way he took all the satirical energy and purpose out of Quentin Tarantino's original script.  In Stone's hands, Natural Born Killers was no longer about the way society (and particularly Hollywood filmmakers) glorify murderers and then sell them back to the public as celluloid rebels; it's about Oliver Stone striking back at the press who have begun to see through him, and a desperate (and apparently successful) attempt to cash in on the middle-brow, MTV-bred youth market by force-feeding them trippy visuals -- and by riding Tarantino's "hipster" coattails.

(By the way, I hope you find this page as sensationalistic and gaudily overdone as I find Natural Born Killers to be.  I figured it was appropriate to the subject.)

Let's take a look at the evidence:

Exhibit #1: The Screenplay

Quentin Tarantino was horrified by what he found out Stone and his fellow writers were doing to his script.  It was something he had written years before and he considered it an early, immature work that he was no longer interested in directing himself.  He sold it to a friend for a dollar, who then turned around and sold it to Stone for a bit more than that.  Tarantino was not happy about this situation. He privately met with Stone to express his displeasure at being re-written, then publicly disowned the screenplay (he wanted his name removed, but was given a "story" credit). 

Tarantino's script was done like a documentary, and featured a hilarious excerpt from a Hollywood exploitation movie about Mickey and Mallory called Thrill Killers.  As you can see from reading this excerpt, there's nothing in Stone's movie that makes fun of the media's perceptions of Mickey and Mallory (or of Mickey and Mallory themselves) as much as this movie parody.  Why did Stone cut it out?  Probably three reasons: 1) he's notorious for having no sense of humor; 2) it has a satirical point of view that the rest of Stone's film lacks; 3) the movie Stone actually made is much closer to Thrill Killers than it is to Tarantino's send-up.  Read for yourself.

Excerpt from Thrill Killers, from Tarantino's original screenplay.

You can also read the entire screenplay at the website Quentin Tarantino: A God Among Directors.

Exhibit #2:  The "Director's Cut" documentary

Warner Bros. was happy to disown Natural Born Killers after the original theatrical and home video releases.  Once the company had fulfilled its contractual obligations, it was only too glad let the movie go (this is according to some of the Burbank-headquartered marketing/publicity folks I know who worked on the film over their own moral objections).  And so, in 1996, Vidmark Entertainment released Stone's authorized "director's cut" of NBK on VHS and laser disc.  The Warners logo is nowhere to be seen, on the film or the packaging. 

Stone claims that some of the cuts, which he made in order to get an R rating instead of an NC-17 from the MPAA, removed much of what he calls the "black humor" from the film. And, indeed, the "director’s cut" is much, much funnier than the theatrical version – not because of the restored footage, but because of the hilarious and hypocritical contrast between what Stone says in the accompanying interviews and what’s actually in his movie.

And then Stone says: "Natural Born Killers comes from a very emotional moment in time, those two years that I really felt disgusted. Everything was coming up. I just felt sick, disillusioned – and I just expressed myself the way a kid would by just throwing paint on a canvas. And I just let it go, I didn’t censor myself at all."  Somehow, throwing paint on a canvas (or blood on a screen) like a kid and then labelling it "satire" is equated with not censoring oneself.  You know, I'll bet Wayne Gayle (or, for that matter, John Wayne Gacy) could say the exact same thing about reporting for tabloid TV or serial killing.  Gosh, they were just expessing their disgust with society and not censoring themselves.

In an interview appended to the beginning of the NBK "director's cut," Stone says: "What I like about these director’s cuts is that it trusts the audience, it allows them to think for themselves. It doesn’t monitor or censor their thinking." And then he offers a 62-minute documentary that tells you, in detail, exactly how you are supposed to think about every aspect of the film. (He does it scene-by-scene on the laser disc and, like the "smoking gun" White House tape in the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace which is preceded by a lengthy explanation of why what you’re about to hear is not what you’re about to hear, no amount of after-the-fact rationalization can do a thing to change the evidence of what’s right there in front of you. No wonder Stone felt drawn to Nixon.)

"The irony is that, in cutting these three minutes, I think that much of the black humor in the film was lost. A shot of a knife going through a window, a bullet going through a hand and creating a hole in it, take the edge off and make the film, in a way, more comfortable and easier to watch, because you realize it’s ridiculous. And I think that by cutting some of that stuff it makes it grimmer and allows certain people to not completely grasp the attitude of the movie." -- Oliver Stone; intro to NBK

And then: "A lot of the, you know, younger filmmakers – I’m surprised that they think violence is cool and hip. And they play it that way – which is fine, you can make a couple of films like that, but I can’t see making a career out of it. Morally, it’s a repugnant point of view to me, because I’ve been in Vietnam, I’ve seen the effects of guns, and it’s pretty terrifying....

"There’s no question that movies, by the standard of real violence, are a pale approximation, almost a joke. So I think a lot of the younger filmmakers, because they can’t get the realism, just go the other way, and they dismiss the consequences of violence. You kill someone and it’s fun, it’s hip, it’s cool. I could never take part in that, personally, because of my own experience in life." -- Oliver Stone, in the interviews accompanying the director’s cut of NBK.

OK, my head is spinning (though not as fast as Ollie’s, apparently). Let’s see: The original version of NBK lacked some of the black humor – like the bloody see-through gunshot wound in the hand – that should make the film less grim and easier to watch. Those kinds of things allow you to better grasp the movie’s attitude because they are supposed to be funny and ridiculous, although Stone himself (the director and co-author of the screenplay) finds that attitude morally repugnant because he’s seen the real effects of violence in Vietnam and violence should not be portayed as fun and cool and hip, the way those younger filmmakers do. Right. But, uh, how again does the "black humor" and making the violence fun/funny different from what Stone is accusing those younger ‘90s filmmakers (a direct slap at Quentin Tarantino, who hated what Stone did to his script?) of doing? And how does this "black humor" clarify the film’s "attitude"? Who does the film encouraged to laugh at, the killers or the victims of their violence?  Whose side is the film really on?   What consequences do Mickey and Mallory -- embodiments of Violence in Society -- face because of their violence? Why are the killings presented from the killers’ point of view, and the victims always made comically loathsome and somehow "deserving" of their deaths -- oh, except for the racist stereotype of The Indian, that is.  It's "bad bad bad" to kill those noble Native Americans, isn't it? (See Mississippi Burning for more examples of this kind of extra-perverted racism.)

I could go on. (I do go on.) But Stone can’t answer any of these questions because, frankly, he hasn’t a clue. It’s pretty simple: Either the effects of guns are "pretty terrifying" or they’re played for laughs (and kooky/kicky shots of holes in hands and bullets that spin and pause right in front of their victims’ faces before killing them) that make those effects less grim and easier to watch – make up your mind. Oliver Stone: You can’t have it both ways. If you really had something to say, you’d have the courage to take a stand.

Exhibit #3: The movie

Click above for further detailed discussion of NBK.

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