Natural Born Killers Movie
There is a scene in one of the later “Cheers” where Frasier is pontificating on the need to vent one’s anger and Woody, the sweet, naïve bartender from the farmlands, demurs, saying that anger should be pushed down in a box deep inside, no matter how much you have to struggle to cram it all on in and lock it all up. Frasier just mumbles “tick, tick, tick.”
Woody Harrelson Natural Born Killers
That ticking exploded in 1994 when Woody Harrelson re-emerged as Mickey Knox, Quinton Tarintino’s serial killer seen through the eyes of director Oliver Stone in Natural Born Killers. While Stone shifted the original script’s focus from the killers themselves to the media coverage of the killings, we see the origin of Tarantino’s killers in Pulp Fiction. Mickey and Mallory are emotionally detached from their victims, wrapped up in themselves while indifferent to the apocalypse they are bringing down all around them.
Mickey and Mallory Knox
One might see Mickey and Mallory Knox as adolescent versions of Jules and Vincent, of Pulp Fiction. While Jules and Vincent are detached from all emotion, their own and that around, Mickey and Mallory Knox wallow in the chaos they are creating. They take a delight in their fame and in the brutality they bring to the act of killing. They need the audience that Jules and Vincent have shunned.
Mickey and Mallory are driven by their inner urges. They react to and act on their immediate urges. That’s how the Navaho shaman is shot. They always leave a witness behind to tell the tale, giving no thought to the long-term consequences to themselves. Jules and Vincent, on the other hand are coldly professional. While it’s the heat that make Mickey and Mallory so terrifying, Pulp Fiction’s cold-bloodedness gives the later move its edge. Even Jules recitation of the biblical verse is a matter of routine. There is simply nothing exciting about what he and Vince are doing.
The next step in this evolution is The Bride from Kill Bill. True, she goes on her killing spree out of vengeance, but before that killing is her job. But she is even more detached from her work than Jules and Vince were. They are defined by their work as much as Mickey and Mallory are, because there doesn’t seem to be anything for them outside of work. Even when they are sitting in the diner talking, the talk is of work, of killing. The Bride, on the other hand, has, or at least had, a life outside of her vocation. She was going to get married and all that that implied. She can have a conversation in a bar (in Japanese, no less) that doesn’t have anything to do with work, albeit she is, in effect, undercover so that she may get on with the killing.
Stone vs Tarantino
If there is one defining difference between the directorial work of Stone and that of Tarantino, it’s that Stone’s works are very much public ones. Stone’s works need the addition of Robert Downey Jr.’s Wayne Gale to shine the spotlight on Mickey and Maude. In Stone’s America, society needs more than simply being told what to pay attention to, it needs to be told how it feels as well.