Sometimes, as an artist, or maybe just as a person, you need to go back to the very first movie that made you think ‘wait. I think this is art.’ Also sometimes, on a basic human being level, you need to watch a movie where somebody kills a whole lot of people so you don’t go through life picking fights with people you care about who also happen to be incredibly annoying. Unfortunately for my reputation as someone who is mostly not cringe, I can do both of those things at the same time.
Straight up I gotta say: I am not objective about this movie. I thought I would be. I haven’t seen it since high school because I was so worried I would watch it and realized it sucked and I wanted to keep that Memory of being 14 and being deemed Mature enough to pick any movie I wanted from my stepdad’s dvd collection and watch it with him and my mom and being Blown Away by what, when I was fourteen year old, was most artistically ambitious thing I had seen thus far in my life. And the thing is. It held up.
And I don’t think it would hold up, necessarily, if I was Being Objective. But I’m not. I can’t. Because I am indebted to this movie for my entire of work. My favorite aesthetics, a lot of my dialogue quirks, a lot of the themes I like to wrestle with, all trickle down from here. And I did not realize this until I rewatched it! Which is why you do have to revisit old favorites, from time to time.
Even or especially cringey edgelord old favorites. Because the thing is. I was a terrible edgelord at age fourteen. There were, perhaps, in retrospect, reasons for that. The other thing is, I think this was the first movie, maybe the first piece of fiction, that I ever encountered that touched on sexual abuse within a family and the role in plays in creating wider atmospheres of violence. I mean, I read Flowers in the Attic, but really interpreted it more as taboo romance, and any Problem Novel ya books were about sinister stepdads and mom’s boyfriends. Stuff where I could never make even half a connection to my own problems. My stepdad was a great guy who had no idea what movies were appropriate for what age demographic. It was my actual relatives who were the problem.
But the sitcom parody scene in Natural Born Killers changed me. I didn’t understand what had happened to me until well into adulthood, and well after I understood that my deep love of 90s crime schlock was kind of embarrassing. But I still knew that that scene, which takes the domestic cruelties of a sitcom and layers intertwined threats of sexual and physical violence, and the helpless complicity of the mother, and the jeering dismissive laughter of the younger brother and the laugh track Understood Something about my life that no other art I had so far encountered in my life had before. I remember feeling stunned that something so honest and so revealing of things Nice People don’t talk about was allowed to be in a movie, and that I was allowed to watch it, that by the time Woody Harrelson, blood covered and the hottest he ever was or will be, (though…..Zombieland…..) came through the door I was ready for wherever the movie wanted to take me.
And like. Okay. Is the sexual abuse stuff well handled? Probably not really. It’s mostly hampered by 90s misogyny and the very sensationalism it’s trying to parody. But. But you have the psychiatrist on the interview footage saying it didn’t happen and “I never believe what women tell me.” But you have Scagnetti, ‘Supercop’, killing a woman and coming back to Mallory with sexualized violence over and over and over. But you have Mallory objecting to Mickey wanting to rape a hostage over jealousy and not the actual sexual violence and seducing and killing a rando and like. Again. I’m not objective here. But the movie presents it all as a soup of violence that all informs each other and there’s a Reason that resonated with a scrawny 14 year old who had the shit kicked out them a lot. The movie’s worldview is juvenile, but it meant a lot to me as a juvenile.
And stylistically I do still think it’s so damn cool. The rapid switches between color and black and white. The intercuts of animated sequences in fight scenes. The sickly green light when everything is Going Wrong. The intercuts of stock footage from old tv and movies and real deal actual factual commercials. It creates a cacophonic overstimulating environment that honestly feels a little like it anticipated tiktok culture 30 years early. Is it as cool as I think it is or just nostalgia? Can’t tell you.
Because look, man. Sometimes you need a movie that is part of your Personal Canon that, regardless of actual Quality, is still Your Movie. This is one of mine. It is a little embarrassing. When most people talk about a ‘movie that saved my life’ they mean something like, socially edifying, or at least not a grimy shoot ’em up. A Shawshank Redemption or a Good Will Hunting. But that 14 year old edgelord still lives within me and he still is utterly gleeful at everything going on here except for like, the racism. But again: 1994. We’re grading on a curve, here. And now I know that this, somehow, is my Single Biggest Artistic Influence. God. I should probably lie about that. But I don’t think I will. You write better when you’re honest about your bullshit.
Do I recc this movie? I do not possibly know how to answer that question. If you think Woody Harrelson is sexy then absolutely yes. But if you think that you’ve probably already seen this movie, since most people I have told about this crush react in complete bafflement. Otherwise. Man. It’s a guilty pleasure, right? It’s a movie that knows exactly what it is and what it’s doing and why it’s doing it. It’s not always successful in these things but damn if it’s not ambitious. This is not a movie that a Good Progressive Artist admits to liking but like. See point: guilty pleasure. So who’s to say! Watch it or don’t. I am better for having done a rewatch and excavating Feelings, and maybe you’ll feel better after watching some hot people beat the shit out of some cops. You never know.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 