Review of Natural Born Killers (1994) by Mohamed A — 29 Mar 2013

Released just long enough ago to be forgotten by today's standard of speed amnesia, this film by Oliver Stone is worth seeing again. The violence in it was sickening just a few years ago, but such things have quickly gotten normalized in our culture's ongoing desensitization.

Ironically, this very process of media desensitization is precisely the topic of this film's satire. NBK has since even been the subject of copycat crime sprees, or so the culprits claimed. This is troubling, because while the film works hard to analyze the dubious process by which violent killers are turned into romantic heroes in the mass media, NBK seems unable to escape from the same orbit, ending with the killers as living happily ever after, justified by the brutality of their backgrounds, and morally superior to the prison officials and popular journalists who pursue them.

But as a postmodernist satire of media saturation-violence, from wrestling to sit-coms to real crime dramatizations to obsessive live news interviews, Stone's film is a thought provoking exercise that is stylistically mesmerizing.