I was there for the 1990s. All of them. It was the first full decade I was wholly alert for. It was a magical time. Independent movies boomed across the landscape. The radio was the most diverse it has ever been, rotating through a boom of hip hop, grunge rock, later metal, college pop, boy bands, swing, and bizarre-yet-credible novelty-ish acts like Squirrel Nut Zippers. Soundtrack records were the coolest, and even garbage movies could recoup their financial losses with a carefully constructed OST. MTV was still relevant. SNL movies were still good. The country was in a financially comfortable place, there were no wars as previous generations had known them, and everyone was happy.
Only everyone wasn’t happy. I recall that the general youth malaise of the 1990s was one of self-aware dissatisfaction. With no wars to fight, and the Berlin Wall gone, my generation began to look inward. What we found was a general lack of identity. We had nothing nationally dramatic to define ourselves the same way previous generations had. As such, a lot of our art, our movies, and our music reflected a loss of identity. Poetic angst was the word of the day, and a lot of our social impulses were very dark. We started fires (thank you, Beavis), and our movies became more casually violent. Romance was out of the question, unless it was tempered by something pointedly unwholesome.
It was into this mindset – 20 years ago today – that Oliver Stone’s bizarre ultra-violent experimental love story Natural Born Killers was released, and we lucky Gen-Xers (and Gen-Yers) were presented with what can be perhaps be considered the most perfect romance of the decade. Mickey and Mallory Knox loved more intensely than any of us could have possibly hoped to.
Natural Born Killers, plotted by Quentin Tarantino and penned by Stone and a few friends; it one of the most audacious movies of a decade marked by audacity. It is a treatise on abuse, an examination of the origins of rage, an aggressive declaration of the freeing power of extreme violence, and a cynical deconstruction of the inevitable ethical entropy of news media. It was forcefully arty as well, employing more varieties of cameras than any production before or since, and contained surreal asides, animated sequences, bizarre expressionistic lighting, and a host of dream-like visual afterthoughts.
But more than anything – and the reason the film struck such a powerful chord with its many fans – was it a love story. Mickey and Mallory Knox, played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, were not just energetic psychopaths. They were lovers first. They loved so intensely, they transcended morality and decency. They burned hotly and passionately, deliberately hoping that their fire would destroy the world around them, and claim the attention and adoration of the survivors. This was a fire so strong, it made two miserable people into one glorious, amorphous monster. Burn, they said to us. Burn.
The messages of Natural Born Killers are more relevant today than they were in 1994: The media, with its ever-increasing and seemingly insatiable appetite for sensationalism, violence, and controversy, has only become more and more saturated with nasty things viewers can tut-tut and get outraged about. In the internet age, the news is less about keeping you informed, and more about keeping you angry. Outrage means more clicks, and even innocuous news stories are re-worded to make sure you’re kept at a gentle simmer. Mix into that a good love story, and a fair heaping of sex – that commonest of spices – and you have the news story of the century. Stone was savvy in his examination of where the media was to go in America.
But it’s not that message that had audiences really latching onto Natural Born Killers. Indeed, it was only one layer in a maze of intriguing elements. On the surface, you had the raw, visceral thrill of the extreme violence. Right underneath, you had the aggressive cynicism about the state of the country. Underneath that was the criticism of mass media and America’s addiction to sensationalism. Beneath that layer was that utterly disturbing theory that murder, however horrible it may be, may actually possess the ability to grant the murderer peace of mind. And then, at the blackened, beating heart of this demonic onion, was what really touched us: The world’s most perfect love story. The love story of the 1990s.
Mallory was an abused teenage girl who imagined her early life as a dark mirror to a TV sitcom. Her wretched father beat and berated his wife and son, and treated his teenage daughter with lascivious promises of incest. Mickey, a victim of domestic abuse himself, breezed into her life one afternoon, and it was love at first sight. He speaks of fate. They were meant to be together. Only together could they commit the atrocities they truly needed to be happy. To an embittered 1990s denizen, we saw that love, the release, and the perfection of these two demons intertwining. We were so desperate for honesty and truth in our romances – typical romcoms were laughably, churlishly artificial – that we too were willing to suspend morality to root for these two hearts that were, finally finally!, beating real blood. It was poison blood, but it was real.
In 1994, the world was split. Amongst the top-grossing movies of that year were the sentimental Forrest Gump, the I-guess-it-was-okay family goof The Santa Claus, the not-smart Dumb and Dumber, and the largely horrendous The Flintstones. Some audiences longed for nostalgia, for warmth, and for a generic brand of bland comfort food. Meanwhile, an entire generation was aching for something genuine. Something honest. Something real. That’s what Natural Born Killers provided. Your cynicism about the world is justified, it called to us. You can wreck the world.
And there was something so romantic about that. Once the world is destroyed, and you stand on a pile of rubble, the two of you can finally be alone. You can gaze into one another’s eyes, smile quietly, and declare a warm and honest triumph. We did it. Natural Born Killers exemplified – to a lurid extreme – the prevailing 1990s disdain towards all that was regular. If the 1990s were a decade of self-awareness, Natural Born Killers gave a voice to our hatred of normalcy, normalcy that we could finally stare into the eyes of and dare to dismiss. Mickey and Mallory turned our desire for chaos into a coherent adoration.
Happy anniversary, you crazy kids. May your love continue to burn bright.
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly Trolling articles here on Crave, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
