Shallow Born Critic

I read Killer Instinct, the story of the making of Natural Born Killers by Jane Hamsher on the recommendation of a commenter at Alicublog.

Natural Born Killers is one of my favorite movies. No that doesn’t do it justice. Natural Born Killers is one of the greatest movies of all time. It is great on every level. The story is great, the cinematography, the acting, the soundtrack, the editing, you name it.

And it wasn’t an accident. Everyone involved in the film went for greatness. They went for it on every level, threw caution over the cliff and took a flying fuck at the pantheon. I’m not going to regurgitate the plot or link to any reviews. If you haven’t seen it, see it. If you saw it and were disgusted, see it again with an open mind. That’s all I have to say on that level.

Although I’ll happily put Natural Born Killers up there with Apocalypse Now or A Clockwork Orange, I’m not going to claim that Jane’s book is War and Peace or anything, but it’s a great read. I don’t usually go for those Hollywood insider or how the movie was made stories, so I can’t compare it to any other book. If anything, it reminded me of Hearts of Darkness, the film about the making of Apocalypse Now, but I wouldn’t quite put it in that category.

Nevertheless, it is a page-turner and provides interesting portraits of a great number of Hollywood characters. And it’s good on a level beyond the day-to-day story it tells, because we recognize universal human traits in the Hollywood snivelers and other flawed characters that Jane so thorougly dissects. It helps the interest level that some of the these snivelers (Quentin Tarantino) and flawed characters (Oliver Stone) are so well-known.

Yea, I can’t deny it, I get a kick out of learning that Tarantino is every bit the low life talent-challenged asshole he appears to be on tv. But I was sorry to see what an ass Stone can be. But at least he had his noble moments. I was genuinely saddened that Trent Reznor was such a putz in the story, taking credit for someone else’s work.

But hey, that’s the stuff of drama. Can the hero overcome his faults and succeed in the end? That’s what keeps us watching. And although these famous people, as well as the losers in the story, act out their flaws in over-the-top Hollywood performances, the same shit happens every day among the cubicles and factory floors. People are people -- the vain, selfish, venal and back-stabbing will always be among us, and sometimes we manage to produce great stuff nevertheless. And so do they.

Before reading the book, I had forgotten about the controversies surrounding Natural Born Killers, the copy cat killings. the questions of artistic irresponsibility, or complicity in the murders of innocents. This was a bit strange because I was personally involved in one of those incidents. Around that time, my former step-brother and his girlfriend went on a cross country killing spree, ended up killing my best friend’s aunt and uncle in the Arizona desert and stealing their RV. But unlike Mickey and Mallory riding the highways in their RV at the end of NBK, poor Toney died in a shoot out after a short, laughable RV chase with the cops outside of Barstow. The future wasn't so kind to him.

But the comparison came only from the press. It’s very unlikely that Tony had ever seen Natural Born Killers. My friend whose aunt and uncle were murdered knew enough about all the parties involved to know exactly how it went down, and we’re sure there was no artistic inspiration at the bottom of it.

Quite the contrary, that story illustrates one of the reasons that Natural Born Killers is such a great fucking piece off art. I remember Tony when he was 9 years old, everyone had gone way overboard to give him a great Christmas because he had been so deprived up until that point. When he walked into the living room and saw all of those presents, his face looked just like the boy who played young Mickey in the movie and on other days when his asshole father yelled at him, or beat him, that hurt that was captured so poignantly in the film was written all over his face. I wouldn’t describe him as a natural born killer though. Natural made killer would be much more accurate, and the same is true of Mickey and Mallory, but that fact takes nothing away from the film. Ya gotta give em some dramatic leeway.