Natural Born Killers · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A laugh track plays over a beating. That is "I Love Mallory" — the sitcom Oliver Stone carves out of his heroine's childhood, studio applause and a brightened set and Rodney Dangerfield leering as the father, the whole cozy apparatus of domestic comedy wrapped around incest and fists. You flinch. You also, for half a second, almost laugh, because thirty years of broadcast form have trained the reflex into you. That half-second of complicity is the film's real subject. Natural Born Killers isn't finally about two killers. It's about the machine that turns them into something you'll watch, and about your own eye as a working part of it.

Start with the cutting, because editing is the author here. Hank Corwin and Brian Berdan built the film from a reported thousands of cuts — far past any norm — and from every stock Robert Richardson could load: 35mm, 16mm, Super 8, Hi8 video, color reversal, black-and-white. Each carries its own smell. Video is surveillance and tabloid TV; grain is memory; slick 35 is the official record. Stone refuses to dissolve these into one clean world. He leaves the seams showing.

Deleuze, reading Eisenstein, named the kind of cut that doesn't just join two images but slams them so a third thing leaps out — a meaning, a shock, a new quality that lives in neither shot alone. He called it the pathetic moment of montage: collision producing a qualitative jump. That is the grammar of NBK, except Stone has rewired Soviet dialectic to the speed of channel-surfing and the music video. A predator, a fire, a religious icon, a sitcom cutaway drop into the murder like ad breaks, and the third meaning that jumps out is always the same: this is being broadcast. The dossier's own line — montage "consciously descended from Soviet montage, but accelerated to the rhythm of channel-surfing" — is exact. Eisenstein wanted the cut to forge a revolutionary thought. Stone wants it to expose a culture that thinks in cuts.

Which is why the older Deleuzian category for this film is the noosign — the image that thinks, the screen turned into a brain rather than a window. Watch the staging: the dossier notes that backgrounds shift behind the actors so "the environment behaves like projected thought rather than stable location." A demon crawls up a motel wall; a sky goes apocalyptic behind a diner window. Rear projection stops being a budget trick and becomes literal — the world here is what's being projected onto the characters' minds and onto ours. The room is not a place. It's a thought, and the film is having it out loud.

A window doesn't make you read it; you just look through. NBK's images make you read them. When the texture flips from glossy color to camcorder grime inside a single scene, the change isn't telling you what happens next in space — it's asking what register is this, who's filming, can you trust it. Deleuze's word for the image that has lost its automatic sensory-motor sense and must be deciphered like text is the lectosign, the readable image. Stone makes nearly every shot one. The format itself is a sentence you have to parse.

And this is where the film stops merely depicting and starts incriminating. Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr., tabloid Australian, gleeful) is the figure through whom Stone stages his thesis as spectacle rather than argument — Eisenstein's old "montage of attractions," the staged number that figures an idea instead of acting it out. The whole "I Love Mallory" sitcom is one such attraction: trauma performed as broadcast entertainment, ironized in the very act of being explained. The film hands you the abuse that "causes" these killers, then films it as television so you can't take the explanation straight. Cause arrives pre-mocked.

The meaning, then, is never on the screen alone. It's in the relation you're forced to complete — the recognition that this murder is a ratings event, that you are the knowing third the broadcast needs. Deleuze called this the relation-image, meaning built from connections the viewer supplies. NBK weaponizes it. By the prison-riot climax, where Gale's live feed becomes the literal accelerant of the carnage it claims to cover, the relation snaps shut: there is no event behind the coverage anymore. Coverage is the event.

Place it in the line. The Brechtian rupture-kit — intertitles, direct address, collage, media-critique — comes straight from Godard's Weekend; the tonal whiplash from slapstick to balletic slaughter is Dede Allen's cutting in Bonnie and Clyde; the ironic pop-scored stylized violence is A Clockwork Orange; the thesis that TV manufactures and feeds on spectacle is Network, here taken at its word and set on fire. What Stone added is the seam itself — format heterogeneity as argument, the apparatus never allowed to disappear.

Downstream, this is the missing hinge between Soviet montage and what theorists later called post-continuity (Steven Shaviro's term, not Deleuze's): cinema that drops spatial coherence for pure immediate affect, the database-fast, recombinant editing of the digital decade. NBK got there in 1994 on photochemical means and lab labor, before the tools existed.

Rewatch it and watch the seams, not the killers. The film already knows you're watching. That's the joke, and the indictment.