Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Natural Born Killers
1994 · Oliver Stone · Natural Born Killers on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the film's look change from shot to shot. (light)
Richardson shoots on 35mm, 16mm, Super 8, video, and black-and-white within the same scene, so the texture itself keeps shifting under you.
Payoff: Each format change is telling you whose eye or camera you're supposedly watching through.
Watch how fast the images cut against each other. (cutting)
Corwin and Berdan built the film from thousands of cuts, colliding a predator, fire, or religious icon against the action rather than explaining it.
Payoff: Each collision produces a third idea neither image alone was carrying. In the reading: montage-organic/pathetic (the shock-collision). The reading calls this the pathetic cut: a collision of images that forces a new meaning to leap out.
Watch a background change behind a character mid-scene. (staging)
Rear projection puts a demon on a wall or turns a sky apocalyptic behind a window, so the setting shifts like a thought rather than a place.
Payoff: The environment behaves like something being projected, not somewhere anyone actually stands.
Listen for pop songs and dialogue samples layered together. (sound)
Reznor builds the soundtrack as its own collage, sampling and layering music, effect, and speech rather than composing one continuous score.
Payoff: The soundtrack argues the same point as the picture: everything here is footage, remixed.
Compare Harrelson and Lewis's scenes to Downey's tabloid host. (performance)
Mickey and Mallory play close to naturalistic in their trauma scenes, while Downey Jr.'s Wayne Gale performs as broad tabloid caricature in the same film.
Payoff: The uneven acting styles tell you which parts of the world are real and which are broadcast.
Once you have seen it
Watch the prison broadcast turn the riot into television. (structure)
Wayne Gale's live feed becomes the accelerant of the very violence it claims to cover, closing the gap between the event and its coverage.
Payoff: By the end there's no event left behind the broadcast; the broadcast is the event. In the reading: the relation-image (the mental-image / knowing third). The reading calls this a relation-image: meaning built from a connection the film forces you, the viewer, to supply.
Watch the I Love Mallory sitcom sequence and its laugh track. (staging)
Domestic abuse is staged with studio applause and a brightened set, a number that figures the trauma instead of dramatizing it directly.
Payoff: Turning abuse into a sitcom is the film's clearest demonstration of how broadcast form absorbs anything. In the reading: the attraction-image (montage of attractions). The reading calls this an attraction-image: a staged number that figures an idea rather than acting it out.
Notice a shot's format changing your sense of who's filming. (cutting)
When the picture flips from glossy color to camcorder grain inside one scene, it isn't telling you what happens next, it's asking what register you're now inside.
Payoff: You end up reading the format the way you'd read a sentence.
Carry this in: Watch the seams between formats, not just the killers. The film already knows you're watching.