Juliette Lewis is a Lunatic

I'm seriously convinced that Juliette Lewis is crazy. And Natural Born Killers did not change my mind. Not only did she actually have corn rows at one point in her life... but the characters she plays are always nuts! I don't know if anyone else has seen the movie Kalifornia, where she co-stars with Brad Pitt, but it's a lot like Natural Born Killers. Pitt's character is crazy and kills people on a whim, usually for no reason. And Lewis' character is the adoring girlfriend who goes along for the ride. It was an incredibly disturbing movie that made me have nightmares about Brad Pitt... something that I never thought was possible.

I am in no way surprised that this story was written by Quentin Tarantino. His movies always disturb me. There is always excessive violence, drug use and graphic sex. I'm not really a fan of violence; I'm not yet desensitized to it. And the way it is used in Tarantino movies is really peculiar.

The diner scene reminded me of the diner scene in Pulp Fiction. The intensely in-love couple works together to commit their crime. Except in Natural Born Killers, they kill everyone for no reason. In Pulp Fiction, they just wanted to rob the cash register and I don't believe they actually murdered anyone, if my memory serves me.

The way the movie was filmed was really interesting. Sometimes it would be in color, but then it would cut to black and white. And in countless scenes, there would be flashes of another picture (like Woody Harrelson covered in blood). And sometimes in the backround there would be another image playing. It was really strange. It made the movie what it was, though.

After discussing the movie in class, I realized that the flashes of Mickey and Wayne covered in blood represents the "demons" that they are. They were either smiling or screaming while they would be covered in blood. It would only be for a split second, but it made an impact.

An aspect of the movie that I really liked was the incorporation of the media. It showed how the media was glorifying the murderous couple. They committed unspeakable, horrible crimes. No one in their right mind would think this was honorable. It's creepy when people worship serial killers like Charles Manson. And how about when women write to murderers in prison and fall in love with them? That's beyond weird. The film shows how the media portrays serial killers and how they end up glorifying them. They take the horrible occurrences and use it to improve their ratings or be a break in someone's career.

Robert Downey, Jr's character reminded me of Nancy Grace. You can see her on her show, acting very outraged at certain situations but it is so obvious that she is full of crap. Anything for a story right? I was actually watching a Law and Order episode the other day. Some teenage girls were missing and the police were trying to find out what happened to them. A Nancy Grace-esque woman was acting like a friend of the parents to get exclusive interviews and juicy footage. It irritated me then and it irritates me now. I do believe that we need the media and we need journalists. But those talking heads with their own television shows where they just yap yap yap are not true journalists. They are looking out for their ratings. Downey, Jr's character shows this exceptionally. He was obnoxious and would do anything to improve his ratings. He even put himself in a very dangerous situation by interviewing Mickey in jail.

The creepiest character, though, was the police officer. I think his name was Jack. He was supposed to be tracking down the murderers. He should have been the moral force. Instead, he was a sexual deviant who murdered a young woman and was obsessed with Mickey and Mallory. I felt that he was turning himself into Mickey in a way. He hated the pair and was devoted to catching them, but then he strangled a young woman while he was in an intimate situation with her. That was, in my opinion, parallel with the scene where Mickey has the girl he kidnapped bound and gagged.. then subsequently rapes and murders her.

So... to the reading. I was surprised when I began reading the part about incest. It was obvious in the film that Mallory's father had been raping her for quite some time. It actually gave me the creeps that they talked about all those horrible things while there was a laughter reel in the background. But I guess I never watched those old sit-coms and felt that their was an incestuous undertone. However, the author points this out. There was usually a "Daddy's Girl" in these old television shows where the father was the patriarch. I'm not sure if I buy that there was intentional incestuous undertones, though. Though I do think that's an interesting thing to look into. I'm also not sure that the movie is actually promoting incest. Maybe the movie is promoting our male dominated society, since Oliver Stone is known to be quite the womanizer, but I don't think (or at least I hope not) that the movie is promoting something such as incest.

Tarantino and Stone are obviously very complicated people. As the reading reveals, Stone considers himself to be an inherently violent person. And I think it's pretty scary that the author refers to Natural Born Killers as a prayer or worship to the "god of violence, a feeding of the 'demon'". If Stone modeled Mickey after himself, or saw himself in Mickey, I'm not sure what that says about him...