There is a moment about ninety minutes into Natural Born Killers where the movie stops pretending to be about murder. Mickey Knox, shackled, in a prison interview room, tells the tabloid host who has flown in to profile him that media is like weather, except man-made. The host, Wayne Gale, nods like a man who has just been handed a great quote. He does not understand that he is the weather. Neither, in 1994, did we.
That is my thesis, and I am going to spend the rest of this defending it against people who think the movie is about something else: Natural Born Killers is not a film about two killers. It is a film about one hour of television, and it is the first American movie to understand that attention is a natural resource, that it is extracted from bodies, and that the people who own the extraction equipment are never the ones who get hurt. Everything else in it, the acid-trip editing, the Rodney Dangerfield sitcom, the fifty-odd corpses, is packaging. Loud, ugly, deliberately unpleasant packaging around one idea that was true then and is truer now, and that nobody wanted to hear from Oliver Stone.
I was the friend who saw it
Before the argument, a confession, because the way a movie reaches you is part of what it means.
I saw Natural Born Killers in a theater, on the original run, which puts me in a smaller group than the box office suggests. Fifty million dollars sounds like a lot of people until you remember that most of them saw it the way most people saw everything in 1994: later, on a rented tape, on a 27-inch television in a basement, tracking lines rolling up through the diner scene. I saw it in the dark, big, with strangers, and the thing I remember is not the violence. It is the sound of a full house laughing at the I Love Mallory sitcom and then, about forty seconds in, stopping, one row at a time, as it dawned on people what they were laughing at. You could hear it travel across the room. Nobody had told us it was that kind of movie. The trailer had sold a road picture with a cool soundtrack.
That is the nostalgia, and it is a specific one: the last moment when a studio film could ambush a full room. Nobody had seen a clip. Nobody had read a thread. You walked in with whatever a friend had told you, and the friend had usually said “it’s insane” and nothing else, because he could not explain it either. I walked out and became that friend. For the next year I was the person at the lunch table who had seen it, trying to describe the laugh track and the green-lit pharmacy and the demon in the motel window to people who thought I was exaggerating, and I was the one who told them there was supposedly a longer cut out there, and they didn’t believe me either.
Everybody else got it in pieces. Trent Reznor’s soundtrack, assembled as a collage with dialogue bleeding into songs bleeding into static, sat in more dorm-room CD towers than the tape ever sat in VCRs: Leonard Cohen’s “Waiting for the Miracle” up top, the Cowboy Junkies’ funeral-slow “Sweet Jane,” Nine Inch Nails’ “Burn” written for the film. You could own the entire emotional experience for sixteen dollars at Sam Goody without seeing a frame. Then the tape, long clamshell case, Harrelson in shades on the cover, on the shelf at the video store where they kept the titles somebody’s parents had complained about.
So here is the strange fact about a movie whose subject is the machinery of attention: it reached its audience through the last attention machinery that ran on word of mouth. A film about television that most people heard about from a person. I was one of the people. That is what I miss. Not the movie. The job.
Four things everybody knows about this movie
I have had some version of the Natural Born Killers argument at least a dozen times in the past thirty years, at parties and in cars and once at a wedding, and the argument always rests on four premises that everybody accepts. All four are wrong.
1. It’s a Tarantino movie. It is not. Tarantino wrote a script, sold it, and Stone rewrote it with two other men so thoroughly that Tarantino took a story credit and disowned the result. Per Inside Pulse’s review of the 2023 4K edition, the two of them have never once discussed the movie with each other. This matters because the parts people hate are the parts Stone added, and the parts people hate are the point. Tarantino’s draft was, by every account, a cool crime story with a media subplot. Stone inverted it: the media is the story and the crime is the subplot. If you go in wanting Reservoir Dogs you will spend two hours annoyed. Go in wanting a nervous breakdown about television and it is the only movie that delivers.
2. It caused murders. This is the one people are most sure of and it is the one that is most precisely backwards. In March 1995, two Oklahoma teenagers watched it on tape, then killed a man in Mississippi and paralyzed a woman in Louisiana. John Grisham, a friend of the dead man, argued that the lawsuit was Hollywood’s last hope for discipline, and the paralyzed woman sued Stone and Time Warner under a product-liability theory, the way you would sue a company that sold you a space heater that caught fire. It took six years to get thrown out. The shooter later said the movie link was a defense lawyer’s invention and that they’d also watched Fantasia that night.
Here is what the movie actually caused: a decade of newspaper stories that put the words “Natural Born Killers” in the headline and the victim’s name in paragraph six. Which is, scene for scene, the plot of the movie. Stone’s argument was that the coverage is the crime. The country responded by covering the crime and blaming the argument. You could not design a cleaner proof.
3. It’s about violence. Ebert, who gave it four stars, made the observation that you see much less actual violence than you think you do; the sense of carnage comes from the tone and the cutting, not from the wounds. He was right and it is worth sitting with. The most disturbing sequence in the film has no blood in it at all. It is the I Love Mallory section, where Mallory’s childhood is staged as a multi-camera sitcom with a studio audience, and the audience laughs when Dangerfield paws at his daughter. Nothing about the scene is violent. Everything about it is unbearable, because the laugh track is us. Stone is not asking whether you can stomach a shooting. He is asking whether you noticed that you’d been laughing.
4. It was ahead of its time. No. It was exactly on time, which is rarer and harder. The O.J. chase was in June. A Current Affair, Hard Copy, and Inside Edition ran back to back in the half hour after the local news, with those synthesized stinger sounds and the freeze-frame on the suspect’s face, and every household in America had a parent who claimed not to watch them and a living room where they were somehow always on. Court TV was three years old and had already figured out that a trial with commercial breaks is a series. The film opened at number one, on a Friday in late August, with $11.2 million, and the critics did not argue about whether it was accurate. They argued about whether it was allowed. Rolling Stone said it had become cruelty as entertainment, the very thing it claimed to mock. The Washington Post said the hysteria came from inside Stone rather than from the culture. Both of those are true. Both of those are also what a mirror gets accused of.
“Ahead of its time” is the compliment you give a movie so you don’t have to admit it was describing you. Natural Born Killers was not describing 2026. It was describing 1994, and the reason it still works is that 1994 never ended. It just got better production values.
The laugh track is the key to everything
If I could keep one minute of this film and burn the rest, I would keep the first thirty seconds of I Love Mallory. Not because it is the best-made minute (it isn’t; the prison riot is a technical miracle) but because it is the minute where Stone shows you the machine.
Think about what a laugh track is. It is a recording of an audience that is not there, played to an audience that is, so that the second audience will feel what the first one supposedly felt. It is the purest form of manufactured attention that has ever existed. It is man-made weather. And Stone put it under child abuse, and then, about twenty minutes later, he put a real crowd of real screaming fans outside Mickey and Mallory’s courthouse, and then, at the end, he put Wayne Gale’s real ratings on the screen. Laugh track, fan crowd, ratings. Three versions of the same object. The movie is a single idea told three times at increasing volume, and the idea is that nobody in the audience is innocent because there is no such thing as an audience that only watches.
The prison sequence, incidentally, was shot at a real maximum-security facility in Illinois with real inmates as extras, which is a fact I’ve never seen anyone put next to the laugh track, and I think it belongs there. Stone used actual prisoners to play a crowd rioting at a fake interview about a fake killer. He built the extraction equipment out of the extracted. He may not have thought of it that way. I can’t stop.
A game you can play
Here is something I have done with this movie and recommend, in the sense that I recommend anything about it.
Watch the interview scene with the picture off. Just audio. What you hear is a fairly ordinary long-form crime interview: a charming subject, a host trying to get a quote, a producer’s voice in the background worrying about the satellite window. It sounds like a Dateline segment. It sounds like the middle of a podcast. It sounds like normal.
Now watch it with the sound off. What you see is a man in chains being lit like a rock star while another man in a good suit leans toward him with an expression that is not fear or disgust but hunger. Nobody in the frame is watching the killer. Everybody is watching the camera watching the killer.
The film is the gap between those two experiences. In 1994 the gap was enormous and that is why the movie felt insane. Now the gap has closed, because we have lived inside the audio version for three decades and taught ourselves not to see the picture. That’s the whole trick. The reason Natural Born Killers feels less shocking now is not that it got tamer. It’s that we did the thing it was warning about, all the way, and stopped noticing the lighting.
What Downey knew
Robert Downey Jr.’s Wayne Gale is the one performance in the film that keeps getting better, and I want to be precise about why. It’s not the accent, which is Australian for no reason anyone has ever explained. It’s that Downey plays Gale as a man who is fully aware that he is a parasite and has made his peace with it, and then, in the last act, discovers the parasite has been eaten. He picks up a gun on live television and keeps narrating. That is the joke and it is not a joke.
Remember who Downey was in 1994. He was the kid from Less Than Zero who everyone assumed had been playing himself. He was eighteen months off an Oscar nomination for Chaplin, which he had somehow earned while being the industry’s most reliable cautionary tale, the guy whose name in a People item meant you did not have to read the item. He was eighteen months from his first arrest and a decade from his last. He was, at that moment, a person the tabloid machine was warming up to consume, and everybody in the theater knew it, the way you know when a song is about to modulate. And then he was consumed, and then, in the strangest reversal in modern celebrity, he came out the other side and became the most bankable actor alive and won an Oscar for playing a bureaucrat. Watch Gale now and you are watching a man rehearse being devoured by the thing he’s satirizing, knowing (because you know) that he survives it. The film could not have intended that. It doesn’t matter. The movie’s argument was that the camera decides who you are. Downey is the only person involved who beat the camera, and he did it by becoming the one thing it can’t resist: a comeback.
Hypothetical: Wayne Gale gets out alive
Mickey and Mallory shoot him at the end. Suppose they don’t.
He is airlifted out of the riot. He does the rounds. Barbara Walters in the fall, a book by spring, called something like Inside the Cage. The interview footage, which he owns, becomes the most rerun hour in the history of the network. He testifies at their trial as a witness and a victim, and the two roles never conflict because the culture no longer distinguishes them. By 2001 he is hosting a syndicated crime show. By 2010 he is a talking head on a documentary about himself. By 2020 he has a podcast, and the podcast has a merch line, and the merch line has a hoodie with the shackle-and-microphone logo, and the hoodie is sold out.
None of that is a stretch. That is the career arc of at least four people you could name without looking them up. The film’s only real fiction is that Gale dies. Stone killed him because in 1994 he could not imagine a world where the man with the microphone gets away clean. That was the last thing he got wrong. Everything else he got right, and getting it right is why nobody thanks him.
Where this leaves us
I don’t like this movie. I have never once put it on for pleasure. It is loud where it should be quiet, obvious where it should be sly, and it has the moral subtlety of a man shouting in a parking lot. And I would put it on a syllabus before Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, and The Shawshank Redemption combined, because those films tell you what 1994 wanted to believe about itself and this one tells you what it was doing at night.
Man-made weather. He said it in a prison, in chains, to a man who wrote it down and did not understand it, in a movie that a country mostly watched on a rented tape and did not understand either, and then sued. I saw it in the dark with strangers and spent a year trying to explain it. The theater is probably a pharmacy now. The friend I dared into it has a podcast. Thirty-two years later the forecast holds.
