“Natural Born Killers” just turned 20, and it’s still as much of a lunatic fever-dream as it ever was. It has aged well. Here’s a look at five ways Oliver Stone’s Southwestern serial-killer odyssey foretold the future:
Woody Harrelson, badass
At the time Stone cast him as psychopath Mickey Knox, Harrelson was known to the public solely as the amiable child-man barkeep Woody on “Cheers.” Casting him as a depraved, snarling rage-case seemed as laughable as if Stone had announced Gabe Kaplan, Jerry Lewis or Michael J. Fox as his lead. But it turned out Harrelson’s gentle-doofus act was the one that would become hard to associate with him.
Tabloids quickly seized on the nugget that in real-life, Harrelson’s own father, Charles, was a professional hitman who, after receiving two life sentences in the murder of a federal judge, would go on to die in prison in 2007. Harrelson went on to specialize in twisted roles such as a pornographer in “The People Vs. Larry Flynt,” a bounty hunter in “No Country for Old Men,” a sadistic cop in “Rampart” and, most recently, a cynical detective in “True Detective.”
The death of the sitcom
Early in the movie, a funny and mean parody of “I Love Lucy” about the teen life of future serial killer Mallory (Juliette Lewis) before she met Mickey, stars Rodney Dangerfield as a cruel, abusive, loutish dad from whom Mallory can’t escape fast enough.
The garish colors, blurry video, trite setting, dumb jokes and laugh-track cues were all typical of family-oriented sitcoms that dominated network TV at the time. Shows like “Coach,” “Full House,” “Home Improvement” and “Grace Under Fire” ruled the ratings — now, the formula is all but extinct.
ADD America
Stone directed the movie in a frenzy of distraction, switching every few seconds from black-and-white to color, or from scratchy, washed-out 8 mm to pristine 35 mm, while slathering the frame with multiple images, digital effects, movie and documentary clips and layered sound.
At one point, four songs play on the soundtrack at the same time. The smartphone hadn’t been invented yet, but Stone captured how the forthcoming info tsunami would sweep all of us away in a torrent of smashed attention spans.
Tats
Body art was just getting a grip on the American imagination, and still had a slightly edgy aspect to it, when “NBK” slammed into theaters in August 1994. Both Mickey and Mallory sport tattoos to signal their outlaw status — hers is a scorpion below her waist; Mickey has two rattlesnakes intertwined on his chest.
Today, every junior banking VP and his mother has tats, but tattoo parlors were still illegal in many places at the time — including in New York City, which legalized them in 1997.
The massacre blame game
Since the film came out, a long list of murderers cited it as inspiration including, most notoriously, the Columbine High School mass killers, who even used the code “NBK” for their bloody plan.
Courts have consistently ruled that artists can’t be held responsible for what deranged people will do with their products, and the real-life killers missed Stone’s central and most obvious point anyway — that a pathetic, empty craving for media attention helps tip angry, lost people into genuine savagery.
These days, it has become routine to try to link mass killings to the movies or video games adored by the warped souls who carried them out.