Episode 157
Natural Born Killers (1994) with David Hering
In this episode of Left of the Projector, I discuss Oliver Stone's 1994 film, Natural Born Killers, with Dr. David Hering. We explore the film's chaotic narrative, its historical context, and its provocative commentary on media and violence. Dr. Herring reflects on his first viewing experience and we critique the film’s stylistic choices, questioning whether they convey a meaningful political message or merely emphasize chaos. Our conversation also addresses the film's portrayal of societal issues, particularly race and systemic violence, while recognizing its bold visual style and enduring relevance in American culture.
David Hering:
https://x.com/hering_david
https://www.davidhering.com/
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Transcript
Intro: Hello and welcome to Left of the Projector. I am your host, Evan,
Speaker:Intro: back again with another film discussion from the left.
Speaker:Intro: You can follow the show at leftoftheprojector.com and subscribe for bonus content
Speaker:Intro: and to support the show at patreon.com slash leftoftheprojectorpod.
Speaker:Intro: This week on the show, we will be discussing the 1994 film Natural Born Killers.
Speaker:Intro: It was directed by Oliver Stone and stars Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis,
Speaker:Intro: Robert Downey Jr., Tommy Lee Jones, and Tom Sizemore.
Speaker:Intro: The story was originally created by Quentin Tarantino, but was sold off and
Speaker:Intro: picked up by Oliver Stone with help from David Vellos and Richard Rutowski on the screenplay.
Speaker:Intro: This week on the show, I have Dr. David Herring.
Speaker:Intro: David is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool.
Speaker:Intro: His writing has appeared in publications including the New York Review of Books,
Speaker:Intro: Guernica, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the London Magazine.
Speaker:Intro: He is a author of David Foster Wallace, Fiction and Form, which came out in 2016 from Bloomsbury.
Speaker:Intro: He is currently working on a book about cinema and memory.
Speaker:Intro: And I guess that is a perfect segue to the bring in David on this conversation
Speaker:Intro: to talk about the 1994 film Natural Born Killers.
Speaker:Intro: I hope you enjoyed this week's episode all.
Speaker:Evan: Right people thanks for joining today it's a pleasure,
Speaker:Evan: Yes, yes. So I mentioned in the opening, we're talking about the 1994 Oliver
Speaker:Evan: Stone film Natural Born Killers.
Speaker:Evan: And, you know, before we get into this kind of crazy movie, it had been quite
Speaker:Evan: a long time since I saw it.
Speaker:Evan: I thought as a little quick, you know, thought exercise, if you will,
Speaker:Evan: I'm usually asking people if there's any, you know, if there's an actor living
Speaker:Evan: or dead, doesn't have to have anything to do with natural born killers.
Speaker:Evan: It could be, but if there's someone out there that you would,
Speaker:Evan: you know, be nice to have a drink, coffee, a dinner with, would you, uh, who would you pick?
Speaker:David: Can I pick a director? Yeah.
Speaker:Evan: Oh, please. That counts.
Speaker:David: I only, I only asked this because I, I was recently having a conversation that was, um,
Speaker:David: along the, along the lines of, you know, a similar thing
Speaker:David: who would be kind of a approachable or good
Speaker:David: company and a name that came up for someone who
Speaker:David: potentially would be difficult company was um andrei tarkovsky uh for the simple
Speaker:David: reason that his films are very complex and um poetic and and i you could i have
Speaker:David: you have a kind i guess a kind of image of what he might be like in real life
Speaker:David: which would be quite taciturn or quite a complex person.
Speaker:David: But then I heard a story about how he had screened Solaris for Akira Kurosawa,
Speaker:David: who was a great hero of his, and took him out to dinner afterwards.
Speaker:David: And he was so nervous that he drank the best part of a bottle of vodka and turned
Speaker:David: the music off in the restaurant and started singing the theme to Seven Samurai at the top of his voice.
Speaker:David: So I thought, actually, I bet he'd be a great dinner party guest.
Speaker:David: So I'm going to go with Tarkovsky, I think.
Speaker:Evan: That's certainly a good one. I have an ongoing kind of every quarter,
Speaker:Evan: I guess, if you will, or every three months, I've been doing a couple of his films.
Speaker:Evan: I've done Solaris, Stalker, and then I did Ivan's Childhood.
Speaker:Evan: And he would be interesting. I've read his book, and he seems very humble,
Speaker:Evan: but also he's very serious about his craft.
Speaker:Evan: So it would be interesting to talk to him.
Speaker:Evan: I always have trouble with this one because I feel like I've named all the good
Speaker:Evan: ones I have in other episodes.
Speaker:Evan: So the one I was thinking about, not maybe a glamorous one, would be Andy Serkis.
Speaker:David: Oh, yeah.
Speaker:Evan: Just because I love Lord of the Rings. I love his portrayal of Gollum,
Speaker:Evan: and he's going to be doing and directing a new version, a new movie in 2026.
Speaker:David: I believe so.
Speaker:Evan: Just to hear him do the voices and all the things and just kind of how he ended
Speaker:Evan: up being stuck on Lord of the Rings. as if it was, he just did the impression for someone somewhere.
Speaker:Evan: And then all of a sudden, I'm sure there's a story about this.
Speaker:Evan: I just don't know what it is, but I'd like to, he's not dead,
Speaker:Evan: but I would still like to have a chat. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker:Evan: I think he's from, I know he's from England. I don't know where in England he's
Speaker:Evan: from, but perhaps Northern England.
Speaker:David: I think he's from Southern England. I once walked past Andy Serkis in London.
Speaker:David: That's my, that's my Andy Serkis story.
Speaker:Evan: That's it.
Speaker:David: Literally, I just walked past him on the street. There is no,
Speaker:David: there's no more or less to this story.
Speaker:Evan: I okay so apparently he's from middlesex right so southeast england okay you're
Speaker:Evan: right so that's that's uh much better than my made up uh prediction,
Speaker:Evan: but yeah i'd love to love to um chat with him i don't know what kind of person
Speaker:Evan: he is but i guess uh going into the the film natural born killers i guess what
Speaker:Evan: uh made you choose that one and then maybe also tied to the same thing?
Speaker:Evan: I don't know if you've seen it until you saw it recently for this.
Speaker:Evan: Did you have memories of being a movie you liked or is it more just a fascination?
Speaker:Evan: I guess what got that movie in your head?
Speaker:David: I have a very long and complex history with this film, which is the reason I picked it.
Speaker:David: And I watched it again a couple of weeks ago for the first time in a very,
Speaker:David: very, very long time, probably at least...
Speaker:David: 10 years, I would imagine. To outline the story of my first viewing of this film,
Speaker:David: I have to explain the particular situation that around Natural Born Killers
Speaker:David: release in the UK, because it had a very particular controversy around its release.
Speaker:David: So basically, the film was due to come out and then was effectively banned by
Speaker:David: the British censors in 1994.
Speaker:David: It was due to come out, it had a release state and then
Speaker:David: there had been a we were in the middle in
Speaker:David: the 93 94 of a kind of moral panic about
Speaker:David: screen violence after a series of um murder
Speaker:David: cases in which there had been
Speaker:David: kind of mixed into the case that had been the suggestion
Speaker:David: of um the the exposure to
Speaker:David: kind of violent content this is all pre-internet of course but
Speaker:David: the violent videos had yeah had had a kind of um
Speaker:David: you know manchurian candidate style kind of
Speaker:David: activation of some something kind of murderous in
Speaker:David: people now obviously we we know that that's not true you know
Speaker:David: we know that i mean maybe if someone is living in a home where they're
Speaker:David: exposed to incredibly violent films all the time that speaks more
Speaker:David: to the level of care in the home than it does to the actual quality of
Speaker:David: the video itself but anyway the bbfc which is the british censorship board which
Speaker:David: was at that point was kind of a fiefdom that was run by this guy called james
Speaker:David: firman who kind of really controlled what people saw and what people didn't
Speaker:David: see and had a lot of quite peculiar ideas about what should and shouldn't be seen.
Speaker:David: So, for example, you couldn't see The Exorcist on home video in the UK until
Speaker:David: 2000, I think it was, which is when he left, because Furman had the idea that it made...
Speaker:David: It had a kind of effectively magical effect on teenage girls.
Speaker:David: And he was convinced that it would make them kind of hysterical.
Speaker:David: This gives you an idea of the kind of idea of the person you're dealing with.
Speaker:David: Anyway, they were very, very sensitive about violent movies in about 93, 94.
Speaker:David: And this is when Tarantino, for example, first comes through.
Speaker:David: And so Reservoir Dogs got a cinema release, but not a video release.
Speaker:David: And True Romance got a cinema release and not a video release.
Speaker:David: And effectively, it got to the point where anything that was even vaguely Tarantino-related
Speaker:David: was seen with great kind of suspicion.
Speaker:David: And it was a year or two before Reservoir Dogs appeared on home video.
Speaker:David: And as a result, I had to wear three overcoats and sneak into a cinema to see it.
Speaker:David: That was the first time I saw it. It was like a midnight screening because you
Speaker:David: couldn't see it at home. And it's pre-internet, so you couldn't download it or look it up.
Speaker:David: And then Natural Born Killers was due to come out. And then,
Speaker:David: I don't know if you recall, but there were a couple of specific murder cases,
Speaker:David: I think one in France and one in the US, where the murderers actually said that
Speaker:David: they were specifically influenced by the film.
Speaker:David: And it was like, in both cases, it was young couples, a young man, a young woman.
Speaker:David: And basically, the BBFC got absolute, took total fright over this and did not
Speaker:David: issue a film certificate, a cinema certificate for the film.
Speaker:David: So the film was effectively banned in the UK. So my first viewing of Natural
Speaker:David: Born Killers was not at the cinema. It was not rented from Blockbuster or whatever.
Speaker:David: It was on a bootleg VHS tape.
Speaker:David: That I had bought it from someone in the school playground for,
Speaker:David: I think it was the sum of two pounds.
Speaker:David: I'd heard that this guy was selling VHSs. This makes the school system in the
Speaker:David: UK in the 90s sound quite insalubrious.
Speaker:David: But yeah, I got this VHS tape, which was a very poor, but watchable bootleg copy of the film.
Speaker:David: And so the first time I watched it was as a bootleg at home.
Speaker:David: And, of course, when you see something as a bootleg, it's the same as I saw
Speaker:David: Clockwork Orange around the same age. Clockwork Orange you couldn't see in the UK either.
Speaker:David: And these films have these – if
Speaker:David: you can't see them, they have this kind of tantalizing aura around them.
Speaker:David: I mean, you know, I was probably one of the first people generally in the UK to see that film.
Speaker:David: Weirdly, um or one of an early number because it
Speaker:David: was nearly a year before it was released at the
Speaker:David: cinema so everything i had was on this very scrappy vhs
Speaker:David: and it was so scrappy in places that the picture was i mean
Speaker:David: it wasn't it wasn't terrible i could see what was going on i could hear what
Speaker:David: was going on um but it was not you know
Speaker:David: it was not the greatest quality and certain images were
Speaker:David: hard to see um and you know i watched this
Speaker:David: and this tape was passed around me and my friends
Speaker:David: and and we were very excited about it because
Speaker:David: it was it was a an illicit film
Speaker:David: you know it was not supposed to be seen um and
Speaker:David: you know it was like a violent crime movie and as for a
Speaker:David: bunch of like 13 14 year old boys you
Speaker:David: know violent crime movies played rather
Speaker:David: a large part and also tarantino we were all into tarantino at
Speaker:David: that time as well so we were really cool but also
Speaker:David: to be fair we were all being quite movie-headed people
Speaker:David: we were all also like into oliver stone and we'd seen jfk and
Speaker:David: we'd seen platoon and wall street and all that so we were curious
Speaker:David: and we also knew that tarantino didn't like it
Speaker:David: either or that tarantino had been elbowed out of
Speaker:David: the process so we were very curious to see it and
Speaker:David: i we'd read all this stuff about it's on you know five different film stocks
Speaker:David: and there's animation and there's canned laughter and and so you know that we
Speaker:David: were really kind of jazzed to see it so when we all kind of first saw it we
Speaker:David: were kind of quite dazzled by it which is.
Speaker:David: I mean, I think there still are elements of the film that are quite dazzling.
Speaker:David: And we probably weren't thinking too hard about the kind of politics of it or
Speaker:David: about its internal consistency or anything like that.
Speaker:David: And, of course, the other thing as well at the time was that it was an early
Speaker:David: example of stunt casting,
Speaker:David: because Woody Harrelson, I mean, was Cheers and then you know white men can't
Speaker:David: jump they were like the things that Woody Harrelson was famous for he was famous
Speaker:David: for playing a kind of goofy character and then he had they had him as this kind
Speaker:David: of skinheaded serial killer so that was you know,
Speaker:David: that was a big, that was an unusual thing as well. So it was very,
Speaker:David: it felt very illicit and it felt very new and different.
Speaker:David: And so, and as a, you know, 14 year old boy, that's all you,
Speaker:David: that's all you want, you know? So I wasn't critical at all.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah, no, that, that makes sense. I saw it, I don't have quite as a,
Speaker:Evan: you know, um, I didn't know about it being banned there.
Speaker:Evan: I do remember reading once going down a rabbit hole of all the different,
Speaker:Evan: I guess they were called like copycat crimes.
Speaker:Evan: I even think that the Columbine killers, Columbine shootings in the United States
Speaker:Evan: in 1999 had some connection where they had put the NBK killer,
Speaker:Evan: natural born killer code in their journal and things.
Speaker:Evan: So there's lots of violence that they've claimed from this and I guess that's
Speaker:Evan: another conversation we can get to of what to take from it, like what should
Speaker:Evan: one take from it and does Oliver Stone,
Speaker:Evan: do people who make movies like this have any, is there culpability in that But
Speaker:Evan: one thing you mentioned as having a bootleg, I sort of imagine it almost at
Speaker:Evan: times feels like you're watching something that is like a bootleg.
Speaker:Evan: Every – like the imagery and the way the camera changes and the color grains
Speaker:Evan: and all these different things, it feels almost – it's like chaos at times.
Speaker:Evan: Especially the first third of the movie, I think, is probably the most crazy.
Speaker:Evan: You posted it on Twitter, like the Rodney Dangerfield and Flames and all these crazy things.
Speaker:Evan: It is a very incredible movie. And it's very much unlike Oliver Stone's other films. I love JFK.
Speaker:Evan: It's nothing like this. Or even all of his other films are very different.
Speaker:Evan: And so I don't know, as far as like the Oliver Stone kind of thing,
Speaker:Evan: and also them being part of the Quentin Tarantino universe, is I think this movie and also –,
Speaker:Evan: Kill Bill were supposed to be part of like the same universe.
Speaker:Evan: Not Kill Bill. You mentioned the movie just a minute ago.
Speaker:David: True Romance.
Speaker:Evan: True Romance. True Romance and this like part of the same kind of universe.
Speaker:Evan: And so he sold both scripts to make Reservoir Dogs, which is the story or what I've read.
Speaker:Evan: And I guess that's not really a question, but I don't know. Like,
Speaker:Evan: what do you think about this, the imagery in the movie?
Speaker:Evan: And is it like, does it hold up?
Speaker:Evan: Do you think having your memory of it being so much like I, as a youth watching
Speaker:Evan: this and And now watching it as an adult, you know, does all that craziness,
Speaker:Evan: maybe even forgetting the plot, just the imagery and the visuals like hold up to you?
Speaker:David: I mean, I think that my opinion on this film has changed so much.
Speaker:David: I've kind of flip-flopped a lot.
Speaker:David: The most recent time I saw it a couple of weeks ago, I was left with a very
Speaker:David: strong feeling that it was really not a very sophisticated film in terms of
Speaker:David: what it was trying to do or say.
Speaker:David: I mean, maybe we'll get to this. it it it came across
Speaker:David: as much more kind of simplistic than i'd remembered
Speaker:David: it um and and quite glib
Speaker:David: in some ways as well although we can maybe talk about
Speaker:David: that more in a minute but um conversely the
Speaker:David: the the the look of the film and the kind of the the way that it's effectively
Speaker:David: a kind of two hour montage um is even more striking i think 30 years on because
Speaker:David: it's 30 years old isn't it this year, 30 years on.
Speaker:David: It's really remarkable that, I mean, there's several remarkable things about it.
Speaker:David: One is that, you know, Oliver Stone, really, at the time, he,
Speaker:David: to a certain extent, his reputation, if not his reputation, but his presence
Speaker:David: has faded quite a lot in the last few years. But I mean, in 94,
Speaker:David: you know, he was coming off...
Speaker:David: You know, Platoon had won Best Picture, and then he'd got Best Director for
Speaker:David: Born on the Fourth of July. He'd done Wall Street.
Speaker:David: He'd done The Doors. You know, like, he was really, really famous.
Speaker:David: And, you know, he was about as famous
Speaker:David: as a director, certainly an American director, could get at that point.
Speaker:David: And then he'd chosen to do this, and that it was considerably wilder than anything
Speaker:David: that he'd done before was really interesting.
Speaker:David: That the it's also interesting that it's one of his collaborations with um uh
Speaker:David: the cinematographer robert richardson and it was clearly a very kind of fruitful
Speaker:David: partnership you can see it in a few films at that time in fact the film that
Speaker:David: followed this uh nixon um still there's a little hangover.
Speaker:David: Stylistically from natural born killers and they
Speaker:David: do change the color and they change the stocks occasionally and
Speaker:David: there's little bits and pieces even there might even be a little bit of that happening
Speaker:David: in jfk i can't remember but um you
Speaker:David: know the the hugely celebrated director would be able to do this and would do
Speaker:David: something this wild was quite was quite extraordinary it's also extraordinary
Speaker:David: now to see it that it was distributed by warner brothers i mean you know i mean
Speaker:David: you know one of the idea that warner brother well i mean warner brothers is a you know,
Speaker:David: Not as a total basket case at the moment, right?
Speaker:David: I mean, the idea that Warner Brothers would... The idea, frankly,
Speaker:David: that any major studio would distribute this film now is completely out of the question.
Speaker:David: I mean, there's just absolutely no way that this film would get...
Speaker:David: A film on this budget with that director, with those actors, would get funded.
Speaker:David: I just simply don't believe it would happen. So in that sense,
Speaker:David: it's really interesting as a kind of piece of film history and as a kind of timepiece.
Speaker:David: The way that the film looks is,
Speaker:David: I mean, I've always taken it to be, and actually now, with the benefit of hindsight,
Speaker:David: I feel like I can actually see the film more clearly than I could at the time,
Speaker:David: because it's very, very much a film of its time.
Speaker:David: It's very, very much a film of the Clinton era of the mid-90s in America,
Speaker:David: of that era of television, of that era of MTV.
Speaker:David: And I think, you know, what Stoner is trying to do is to effectively kind of
Speaker:David: mimic that kind of cross-channel cutting, that kind of switching around from one thing to another.
Speaker:David: I mean, the film literally ends with channels being changed.
Speaker:David: I mean, it's not a film that is subtle or politically kind of evasive.
Speaker:David: It's always a film that says what it's saying to you at the absolute top of its voice all the time.
Speaker:David: So it's not like you have to kind of hunt around for the meaning or anything
Speaker:David: like that. But it is very clear.
Speaker:David: On the other hand, like as a sheer work of montage, it is spectacular.
Speaker:David: And I mean, there are moments that still are really, really stunning and effective.
Speaker:David: I mean, the opening credits, for example, over which you have...
Speaker:David: Overlaid spoken word poetry. You have Patti Smith, you have Leader of the Pack,
Speaker:David: you have stock footage, you have footage of Vietnam, you have them driving in
Speaker:David: front of rear projection.
Speaker:David: It's a really thrilling bit of montage.
Speaker:David: This might be one of the main issues of the film, is that the film is in love
Speaker:David: with the effect that it's creating.
Speaker:David: But of course, it's also trying to distance itself from that kind of narcotic
Speaker:David: effect at the same time you know it's it's it's you know it's trying to have
Speaker:David: its cake and eat it it's it's it's you know it is a really exceptional worker
Speaker:David: montage but at the same time it's also trying to kind of say the opposite.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah i almost wonder this is this slightly leads me to just a curiosity i have
Speaker:Evan: if quentin tarantino maybe didn't have to sell this script and he directed it
Speaker:Evan: himself i mean i think you have a much i don't know what his original screenplay
Speaker:Evan: looked like what it would have been like i know that he said he doesn't like
Speaker:Evan: this movie at all. He really hates what happened to it.
Speaker:Evan: But I think Oliver Stone almost seemed to do too much.
Speaker:Evan: He went too far over that line. I feel like if he'd used the montage style more
Speaker:Evan: on a limited nature basis and struck more towards, I don't know.
Speaker:Evan: I don't really know what you would do differently.
Speaker:Evan: We don't need to be here saying, oh, I would have done this.
Speaker:Evan: I would have done that. I'm not a filmmaker.
Speaker:Evan: But I think it's just too much. And this time, I couldn't actually believe as
Speaker:Evan: I was watching it aside from just the message and used to thinking this movie
Speaker:Evan: was like really cool when I was 17 to now thinking like,
Speaker:Evan: wow, this is, this is kind of, I don't know what's going on here.
Speaker:Evan: Like I lost my, you know, you, I don't know.
Speaker:Evan: It's, um, it, my perception of it all changed. So I don't know if,
Speaker:Evan: uh, if he had toned it down more, maybe they could make it, you know,
Speaker:Evan: would have been more effective. I just think that you're visually blinded.
Speaker:Evan: Getting just like punched across the face with all the different changes.
Speaker:Evan: And then you have the very violent, you know, nature of the movie,
Speaker:Evan: plus the actual violence in the movie.
Speaker:Evan: It's just, uh, it's, it's too much for me. And even though the media at that
Speaker:Evan: time had this very big obsession with, you know, OJ trial in America and all
Speaker:Evan: these different, I can think of countless different trials that were on TV.
Speaker:Evan: This is when like court TV in America became a thing and, you know,
Speaker:Evan: true crime was in its probably its height. Although I guess it's kind of coming back.
Speaker:Evan: All the MTV, all of all that stuff.
Speaker:Evan: I could see what he was trying to do, but it just doesn't work for me.
Speaker:Evan: It's fine, but it's not – I hate to call it a good movie, but it's not a bad
Speaker:Evan: movie. It's an okay movie.
Speaker:David: I think the interesting thing is that one of the points that – one of the kind
Speaker:David: of legs that the film seems to be supposedly supported by is that rather than
Speaker:David: – one of the kind of main elements of the satire is rather than them being kind
Speaker:David: of castigated for what they did, they become elevated to celebrities.
Speaker:David: The weird thing is that the film doesn't really spend any time dealing with that.
Speaker:David: Like the the film you know you have the you
Speaker:David: have the interview and you hear that they're famous and you
Speaker:David: get this little montage of people saying that they're famous but it
Speaker:David: doesn't really drill down into into
Speaker:David: why people want this you know or kind
Speaker:David: of it doesn't ever turn the lens really on the audience
Speaker:David: either you know there is a very there is a kind of lightning rod
Speaker:David: for this media hypocrisy which
Speaker:David: is the the Wayne Gale character um but
Speaker:David: really who is you know literally a devil
Speaker:David: in one of the scenes you know he's literally like dressed as the
Speaker:David: devil again you know it's about the most on-the-nose film you can
Speaker:David: imagine but like one of the things that's interesting
Speaker:David: is that they you know they they allude to the kind of media celebrity but really
Speaker:David: most of that occurs most of what occurs is stuff that kind of occurs around
Speaker:David: them so the punches don't really land when we're talking about the kind of hypocrisy
Speaker:David: of not just the media, but of the audience too.
Speaker:David: Because it's like, one of the things about this kind of phenomenon is,
Speaker:David: well, if you didn't want it, you wouldn't watch.
Speaker:David: And then so the idea that the audience is also complicit is kind of,
Speaker:David: it's almost kind of passed over here, effectively.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah, for some reason, the movie is not at
Speaker:Evan: all anything like this but i was thinking it would
Speaker:Evan: be an interesting kind of like double feature with the movie uh
Speaker:Evan: nightcrawler have you seen that with um jake which
Speaker:Evan: also talks about like the glorification of violence and crime and you know essentially
Speaker:Evan: the media you know crafting narratives as what they want i think that is a much
Speaker:Evan: to me is a lot it's a very smart film whereas this is kind of banging you over
Speaker:Evan: the head with the message of you know the violence but you're right they only
Speaker:Evan: they interview a few like
Speaker:Evan: people like young kids in front of the courthouse being
Speaker:Evan: like oh yeah i love them like oh but you know they kill people it's like oh you
Speaker:Evan: know whatever and it's i don't know it
Speaker:Evan: um it doesn't in some ways one of
Speaker:Evan: the things one of the notes i have i'm kind of jumping around a little bit but one of the
Speaker:Evan: things i wrote was is that it doesn't really grapple the
Speaker:Evan: message of the movie doesn't really grapple with it glorifying their
Speaker:Evan: violence but it never kind of shows you the other way it
Speaker:Evan: doesn't it kind of just glorifies it almost too much it
Speaker:Evan: doesn't ever say okay well yes i really we realize is bad like you know he could
Speaker:Evan: they kill at the end as a spoiler they kill uh gail you know the actor played
Speaker:Evan: by or the character played by robert downey jr who did a phenomenal job i have
Speaker:Evan: to say in in the movie but there's never really any reckoning unless do you
Speaker:Evan: think that's the case in the in the kind of i.
Speaker:David: Was i was thinking about this a lot actually when i
Speaker:David: when i saw it and i mean there's there's a
Speaker:David: very very very very generous reading of
Speaker:David: the film which i'm not sure i really share which
Speaker:David: is that you know the fact that they are just effectively
Speaker:David: at the end of the film they're simply seemingly kind
Speaker:David: of absorbed back into the fabric of american society seemingly
Speaker:David: without any consequence is um is itself a kind of indictment is it you know
Speaker:David: well well this is effectively you know this this level of violence uh and this
Speaker:David: degree of violence is so naturalized at all levels of American culture that effectively, you know,
Speaker:David: these people pass almost unnoticed or they pass kind of without judgment.
Speaker:David: I mean, the problem with that for me is that.
Speaker:David: I don't necessarily see how that squares with what the rest of the film is kind of projecting.
Speaker:David: I mean, I think that there's what is clearly an attempt to create a kind of dialogic moment.
Speaker:David: It's just literally a long dialogue in the second half of the film with Woody
Speaker:David: Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr.,
Speaker:David: where it becomes pretty clear that the film is supposed to be outlining the
Speaker:David: philosophy of what it means to be or to not be a hypocrite.
Speaker:David: The problem is that the Wayne Gale character, Robert Downey Jr.,
Speaker:David: is a kind of, instead of thinking about the concept of violence,
Speaker:David: there's a distinction made between two types of violence,
Speaker:David: one of which is the violence propagated by the media, and the other which is
Speaker:David: this kind of very nebulously described primal or pure violence that Woody Harrelson,
Speaker:David: Mickey Knox is talking about.
Speaker:David: And the problem is that neither of these characters in any sense have the high ground on each other.
Speaker:David: So what happens is there's a lot of heat, but there's not a lot of light that
Speaker:David: comes out of this discussion.
Speaker:David: There's no question of reflection for any character.
Speaker:David: I mean, I think this leads maybe to a broader question about,
Speaker:David: you know, what are the nature of the characters in this film?
Speaker:David: And I think, you know, it's probably easiest and most satisfying to see the
Speaker:David: characters in this film as kind of larger than life, grotesques, basically.
Speaker:David: I mean, you know, they are physically grotesque.
Speaker:David: You know, Tommy Lee Jones is very, like, physically grotesque.
Speaker:David: I think he's really good in the film, actually. So I think Tommy Lee Jones really
Speaker:David: kind of anchors that second half.
Speaker:David: It's not a subtle performance. I mean, there's not a subtle performance in this film.
Speaker:David: And then, you know, Tom Sizemore, this almost kind of cartoon character looking
Speaker:David: kind of murdering policeman.
Speaker:David: And then, you know, Mickey and Mallory Knox wearing an increasingly kind of
Speaker:David: cartoonish series of outfits and stuff.
Speaker:David: So it almost seems like he's kind of put this bunch of kind of grotesques in the mix.
Speaker:David: And just kind of thrown them together and is seeing what happens.
Speaker:David: Unfortunately, what it seems to end up suggesting is that this kind of primal
Speaker:David: instinct to murder is somehow kind of holy or kind of – there's almost a kind
Speaker:David: of Buddhist quality to it.
Speaker:David: You know, there's again – this is why this is also a very, very 90s film.
Speaker:David: There's a lot of kind of semi-elusive kind of references to Buddhism, kind of pop Buddhism.
Speaker:David: And the idea that, you know, to see oneself truly is to see how murderous the world is.
Speaker:David: Whereas, in fact, you know, the guy is an indiscriminate murderer.
Speaker:David: Like, there's no real sense of kind of grappling with him saying that.
Speaker:David: Which is why I say the most generous reading, which I don't really have,
Speaker:David: is that the film is kind of taking a long look and saying, well,
Speaker:David: none of this will have judgment passed on it because America is such an inherently
Speaker:David: violent culture and nation that everything just passes.
Speaker:David: The problem with that is that the film is then just effectively completely flat.
Speaker:David: It doesn't have any internal movement.
Speaker:Evan: The problem with reading the movie like that, it also kind of, it also absolves.
Speaker:Evan: So yes, I mean, America is a violent place and there is these things and you
Speaker:Evan: could, there's lots of things you can blame.
Speaker:Evan: You could say, oh, well, it's the media or it's video games or it's rap music.
Speaker:Evan: There's all these things that people want to point to when they don't want to
Speaker:Evan: point to just the foundation of America is on violence.
Speaker:Evan: And I think the thing that very briefly is mentioned when I think Woody Harrelson
Speaker:Evan: is talking with – in the interview with Robert Downey Jr., at some point they
Speaker:Evan: talk about how, you know.
Speaker:Evan: Does he say like we call this industry and not murder?
Speaker:Evan: Like they realize that there is a problem with America.
Speaker:Evan: But it's not simply America. It's simply just the foundations of a system that's
Speaker:Evan: built on violence, built on police brutality.
Speaker:Evan: I mean, when I think of Tom Slidesworth's character as a police officer who's
Speaker:Evan: killing people, that is a very over-the-top perception of American police that's
Speaker:Evan: actually not that inaccurate.
Speaker:Evan: I mean, the amount of police in America that commit violent acts in domestic
Speaker:Evan: sense and then also on the job is very, very high.
Speaker:Evan: And so it kind of ignores the systemic problem and kind of just throws it at
Speaker:Evan: saying it's TV, it's media, and kind of ignores, I think,
Speaker:Evan: the real root of the problem, which kind of to me then is why as I watched it,
Speaker:Evan: I'm thinking like, this movie, it's fine visually, it has some good set pieces,
Speaker:Evan: the acting is really good, but it doesn't really give me the message I want.
Speaker:David: I think one of the things that's interesting about this is that,
Speaker:David: okay, so there's two parts here.
Speaker:David: One is the context of Oliver Stone himself, which is that, you know,
Speaker:David: he is really the kind of the last of a generation of American filmmakers who,
Speaker:David: firstly, who saw conflict.
Speaker:David: So he was in Vietnam and I
Speaker:David: mean I'm thinking of people like you know Sam Fuller
Speaker:David: um or Sam Peckinpah there's
Speaker:David: like or um I can't remember if John Milius saw combat but there's a certain
Speaker:David: type of very macho very masculine American director who um who makes very macho
Speaker:David: and very masculine films and who was involved in actually in combat themselves.
Speaker:David: And Stone is a bit of an anomaly because he comes later than those guys.
Speaker:David: Those guys were like World War I vets, World War II vets, sorry. And he's a Vietnam vet.
Speaker:David: But as well as making these films about Vietnam and about, you know,
Speaker:David: and I suppose, I mean, if you think about a film like Platoon,
Speaker:David: it's really, you know, one of the first times the kind of mainstream cinema-going public,
Speaker:David: saw, you know, saw in very large numbers.
Speaker:David: Oh, no, I guess, well, I guess you've got The Deer Hunter as well,
Speaker:David: which is earlier, but at the same time, you know, like from a vet,
Speaker:David: you know, you hadn't had that kind of perspective before.
Speaker:David: And he does have a tendency to,
Speaker:David: You know, his films are always very violent, whether it's emotionally violent or physically violent.
Speaker:David: And there's, I think, often a kind of, it's like the same with Peckinpah.
Speaker:David: You know, there's often, in Peckinpah's weakest films, there's a real lack of
Speaker:David: distinction between the violence that's on screen and the kind of relish with
Speaker:David: which it's being directed.
Speaker:David: Whereas the best stuff that Peckinpah did, you know, there is this really,
Speaker:David: like something like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,
Speaker:David: there is a real kind of serious awareness of the context of where the violence
Speaker:David: comes from and what the violence means and what the violence leads to.
Speaker:David: I think that the other point I was going to make was about the scene in which
Speaker:David: Mickey and Mallory meet the character played by Russell Means as a Native American character.
Speaker:David: This should be the kind of heart of the film, right?
Speaker:David: So this is the scene where they basically decide to stop murdering.
Speaker:David: It's the only accidental killing that they do.
Speaker:David: And we're supposed to get the impression that this is the kind of eye of the
Speaker:David: storm of the film, basically.
Speaker:David: And also that it is hinting at something like what you just said before,
Speaker:David: you know, the fact that America is based on a foundation of kind of genocide
Speaker:David: and a genocide of its native peoples.
Speaker:David: And the problem here for me is that it relegates the Native American character
Speaker:David: to this kind of magical figure,
Speaker:David: you know, an all-wise, all-knowing figure who exists kind of to be murdered
Speaker:David: as a reminder of the kind of genocide that was carried out,
Speaker:David: the colonial genocide that was carried out in America. The problem is, I mean, this is the same.
Speaker:David: Stone has got form with this. I don't know if you remember with the doors.
Speaker:David: There's a whole bit in the door. The doors opens with the young people
Speaker:David: boy jim morrison seeing a native american guy
Speaker:David: killed in a car accident like a shaman and the
Speaker:David: suggestion is that like some of this guy's spirit kind
Speaker:David: of passes on to him and then he goes into the desert and
Speaker:David: there's there's this native american guy on a horse like maybe he's real maybe
Speaker:David: he isn't and he goes into this cave i mean this was being parodied in in wayne's
Speaker:David: world like this was so ridiculous you know and and it carries over into natural
Speaker:David: born killers i think and i it's one of those things where you can see the point
Speaker:David: that it's trying to be made,
Speaker:David: but it's being made with such a lack of subtlety.
Speaker:Evan: Do you think, well, I don't know if this is what you're getting at,
Speaker:Evan: but do you think that the scene with the Native American in this movie,
Speaker:Evan: in Natural Born Killers,
Speaker:Evan: so he decides he's going to quit killing, they're going to change their ways,
Speaker:Evan: and then he accidentally kills him, and they're kind of running out,
Speaker:Evan: and then they go on kind of another murder spree.
Speaker:Evan: Do you think that in some sense, are we meant to think that there continue to
Speaker:Evan: go on a murder spree as almost like a revenge for the white man having killed
Speaker:Evan: all these native people?
Speaker:Evan: Now he's going to take his spirit.
Speaker:Evan: Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I don't know.
Speaker:Evan: The before and after of that scene doesn't make a whole lot of sense in sense
Speaker:Evan: of that as this moment in the movie that feels uh feels off i don't know.
Speaker:David: Uh yeah i mean i think the the the scene would
Speaker:David: i mean he says later on you know that was the kind of moment
Speaker:David: at which you know he wished that he hadn't killed um
Speaker:David: but the scene is the scene is immediately followed by
Speaker:David: murdering a bunch of people when they get so and needlessly
Speaker:David: murdering the the the clerk at
Speaker:David: the at the pharmacy and stuff like so there's there's
Speaker:David: very little rhyme or reason to the
Speaker:David: to the kind of uh this this
Speaker:David: is the i mean i think at heart this is part of the film's problem which is that
Speaker:David: it's kind of intoxicated with its own rhythm and its own style and and and the
Speaker:David: film becomes kind of a hostage to it effectively because it's almost that thing
Speaker:David: if we if we stop you know we can't stop moving because if we stop moving,
Speaker:David: you know, people are going to start to see the kind of strings that are holding this set together.
Speaker:David: So we have to keep, keep going, you know, effectively.
Speaker:David: I mean, I, I sometimes feel a little bit like this when I see,
Speaker:David: um, in a very, in a very, very different way,
Speaker:David: when i see uh christopher nolan movies which which i i feel that i felt with
Speaker:David: something like oppenheimer every scene a very every scene has music under every
Speaker:David: scene is cut like a trailer every scene is kind of montage montage montage montage
Speaker:David: and it's almost like there's a slight.
Speaker:David: Fear underneath of of stopping for too long now i know that's kind of part of his style,
Speaker:David: um but i sometimes you know i found i find myself just wanting a bit of silence
Speaker:David: or a bit of quiet or a bit of thinking time um and i felt the same about this
Speaker:David: you know that there's a kind of,
Speaker:David: there's such a commitment to
Speaker:David: montage because that's really all all there is in the film you know it's.
Speaker:Evan: It's it's funny you that funny you had mentioned the beginning you'd want to
Speaker:Evan: have you know dinner with andre tarkovsky it's like this is like the.
Speaker:David: Anti-tarkovsky movie the opposite where he.
Speaker:Evan: Has a two-minute set piece where you his his goal in movies is to show things
Speaker:Evan: like almost as they're happening, like real time.
Speaker:Evan: And that is not what Oliver Stone was going for in this, where it's just constant moving.
Speaker:Evan: And maybe that's what he wanted to do in that it's this overindulgence or this
Speaker:Evan: just you're getting hit with.
Speaker:Evan: I mean, I remember TV at that time and you didn't have the ability to go onto
Speaker:Evan: a channel that would show you all the different things were on TV.
Speaker:Evan: You're just literally like we're flipping through. So I understand that.
Speaker:David: That's one of the things is really interesting about it
Speaker:David: it's the last big pre-internet movie
Speaker:David: about the media really like it's it's
Speaker:David: it's so fossilized now
Speaker:David: you know it's 30 years old but it's you know
Speaker:David: it's got it it's pre-internet there's no concept of
Speaker:David: the internet in that film at all it's like really just three or
Speaker:David: four years out and it's it's really
Speaker:David: interesting for that reason you know it's all the problem
Speaker:David: is is tv you know and it's it's also
Speaker:David: interesting i suppose think about it's a film about gen x made
Speaker:David: by boomer as well you know and and boomers have
Speaker:David: a particular relationship to tv which is they were they were born without it
Speaker:David: you know and i think boomers never you can see it in fiction as well in you
Speaker:David: know thomas pension or don de lillo or so that the tv arrived in the living
Speaker:David: room and it was it was a it was an arrival whereas you know everyone else had just always had it yeah.
Speaker:Evan: I'm I was trying to think of other, the only movies that I can think of,
Speaker:Evan: I can think of movies that came out, you know, after this talking about,
Speaker:Evan: this is not at all the same kind of movie, but I think of the movie and maybe
Speaker:Evan: it's like five years after this,
Speaker:Evan: Pleasantville, which is about, you know, the old time TV, which is not in the
Speaker:Evan: same way, the same look at media, but, you know, all of those really good ones,
Speaker:Evan: like Network, all were in the 50s, 60s, 70s. And then you had this one.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah, you couldn't, like, I think you said at the beginning,
Speaker:Evan: like, this could not be made now not just they wouldn't make it it just i don't
Speaker:Evan: think it could be made it's uh just a.
Speaker:Evan: It's not the same thing. One of the things that I just, so I just released an episode.
Speaker:Evan: This is before this, before the recording of this on true romance.
Speaker:Evan: And in that movie, I was talking about kind of like the, you know,
Speaker:Evan: seeing people as, maybe was it that movie?
Speaker:Evan: Maybe it wasn't that conversation, but kind of about like antiheroes.
Speaker:Evan: And, you know, you're maybe meant to look at some of the people in this as antiheroes.
Speaker:Evan: And I guess the thing that brings me back to is talking about all the copycat
Speaker:Evan: murders, the Columbine shootings and all these people that use this movie as
Speaker:Evan: a code for evil, where that isn't really what Oliver Stone was going for.
Speaker:Evan: I think of another movie like American Psycho, where people identify on the
Speaker:Evan: right with, you know, Patrick Bateman when it's a satire and it's a similar,
Speaker:Evan: I mean, the satire and this is not nearly, I think is as good as that is.
Speaker:Evan: But does Oliver Stone – did he fail then if he's – do these – I don't know.
Speaker:Evan: Maybe it's just the way that people watch these movies. They're going to read
Speaker:Evan: in it what they want. They're going to identify with the character and they're
Speaker:Evan: going to do it whether it's satire or not.
Speaker:Evan: But does Oliver Stone deserve some criticism for not making it more – making
Speaker:Evan: it less obvious and more interesting or more subtle?
Speaker:Evan: Because it really glorifies violence to an extreme.
Speaker:David: It's weird because, I mean, you can't, like, I'm personally always reluctant
Speaker:David: to say, you know, that the direct, I mean, I've seen so many egregious cases of things.
Speaker:David: I mean, so like, I mean, if you're going to stay on the 90s,
Speaker:David: like a classic example is the Matrix, right?
Speaker:David: You know, I mean, that's, you know, it's, which has been claimed as both a trans
Speaker:David: allegory and also, you know, an alt-right allegory, right?
Speaker:David: So there's no way that the creator can necessarily take the blame for the different
Speaker:David: interpretations of how that works.
Speaker:David: I mean, I think if there's failures in the film, for me, they're structural, really.
Speaker:David: The point that's being made is being made again and again and again and again
Speaker:David: and again. Like, I mean, effectively, you could boil the entire film pretty much down to the.
Speaker:David: Uh the rodney dangerfield scene actually the
Speaker:David: the the uh one that is played as like a kind of 50s sitcom
Speaker:David: um and it's actually a genuinely effective
Speaker:David: moment of satire in the film it's one
Speaker:David: where the kind of form and the uh and
Speaker:David: the structure kind of they work together we get a sense of
Speaker:David: of what's of of the kind of
Speaker:David: um the media image of of the american family
Speaker:David: and then the kind of reality of the american family and and it's
Speaker:David: and actually casting rodney dangerfield in it is
Speaker:David: a genuinely brilliant thing to do like i mean it's
Speaker:David: really because he you know he's an absolute like
Speaker:David: monster and but he's also playing against type you know
Speaker:David: very very heavily against type uh so in
Speaker:David: that sense it's you know that's one of the more successful moments
Speaker:David: of it but i just think that there's it's hard to kind of
Speaker:David: identify i mean okay so some people would say
Speaker:David: well if the film is able to be interpreted in those
Speaker:David: in those ways it's failed i don't necessarily
Speaker:David: agree with that but i do think that like the
Speaker:David: the film is not necessarily successful
Speaker:David: what it's trying to do or maybe you know if what it's simply trying to say is
Speaker:David: too much tv which is it which is literally projected onto the body of a character
Speaker:David: at one point the words too much tv well i mean it's succeeded but it's but then
Speaker:David: it what it's saying is too much tv again and again and again and again and again And I mean.
Speaker:David: Yeah, I mean, it's so if it's a failure, it's a failure of, I don't think it's
Speaker:David: a failure of filmmaking. I think it's very interesting.
Speaker:David: The filmmaking is often very interesting, but I think as a kind of.
Speaker:David: Polemic or an indictment it's just not.
Speaker:Evan: Consistent i don't yeah i don't i don't either think you
Speaker:Evan: can blame the directors for the way that
Speaker:Evan: they're interpreted uh you know and sometimes there even
Speaker:Evan: filmmakers will say like oh i wasn't trying to make a political film and
Speaker:Evan: i always like have to laugh at the like well even if you're going to say that
Speaker:Evan: like it's just not true you know like things are political whether you meant
Speaker:Evan: to do them or not but one thing i was thinking about is you know that you said
Speaker:Evan: they kind of hammered the message over and over like one way that i think they
Speaker:Evan: could have actually maybe told this story in a more effective way that would have maybe,
Speaker:Evan: this is just if I were, I'm not a filmmaker.
Speaker:Evan: This is just would be interesting if the movie was actually the interview between
Speaker:Evan: Gale and Mickey Knox. What's his name?
Speaker:Evan: And Mickey Knox. It would have just been the interview. That's kind of like
Speaker:Evan: the setup for the movie. And then they kind of then go from that to having different,
Speaker:Evan: you know, him telling stories.
Speaker:Evan: And then maybe it becomes a scene where they, something they had done.
Speaker:Evan: And then it goes back to the interview where you could have,
Speaker:Evan: you know, driven more into his character and talked more about it.
Speaker:Evan: And then still had some of those interesting set pieces with Rodney Dangerfield,
Speaker:Evan: which again, I agree was a really good scene and some other ones in there.
Speaker:Evan: And then maybe, I don't know, because there are some good moments where they
Speaker:Evan: talk about, you know, how the media is,
Speaker:Evan: I think he says the media is like the weather, except it's man-made and the
Speaker:Evan: media by themselves feel like all these things are true and very over the top
Speaker:Evan: in terms of them telling you what it is.
Speaker:Evan: But I think they could have been more effective at showing that they also allude
Speaker:Evan: to their childhood, but maybe they could have done more about their childhood.
Speaker:Evan: They also try to say, if your parents were violent towards you,
Speaker:Evan: you're going to be inherently violent.
Speaker:Evan: There's other questionable things in there about
Speaker:Evan: And that's maybe indictment of our own, again, the system not giving people
Speaker:Evan: the proper care when they're in school to identify people who might need support and all these things.
Speaker:Evan: So, I don't know. Those are kind of two separate thoughts. One,
Speaker:Evan: maybe this has been my idea for the movie, my uneducated, unsophisticated take on it.
Speaker:Evan: And then the other is just, I think, they could have been more subtle.
Speaker:Evan: Again like i think of american psycho like the the satire is more subtle where
Speaker:Evan: it's easier i think to take the wrong message from it because it's less obvious
Speaker:Evan: but you know it's there if you look under the.
Speaker:David: Layers yeah i i think so and i think the the risk is that much of the film can
Speaker:David: risk ending ending up kind of looking either kind of glib or or just in poor
Speaker:David: taste i mean that that's that's the other thing as well you know i mean i i
Speaker:David: don't think i'd noticed it maybe until recently maybe because I hadn't seen
Speaker:David: a decent quality copy for a long time,
Speaker:David: but there's a sex scene in a hotel room in which there are images of the Holocaust in the window.
Speaker:David: And it's like, well, at that point, it's like this has no connection to what
Speaker:David: you're talking about in this film.
Speaker:David: It's like if you're going to display images of such gravity,
Speaker:David: then then there really has to
Speaker:David: be a kind of systemic connection here to
Speaker:David: to the broader point that you're talking about otherwise it just
Speaker:David: looks it's just an empty provocation and
Speaker:David: you know extremely poor taste so it it
Speaker:David: really does depend on on the
Speaker:David: on the way in which it is uh the way
Speaker:David: in which a particular thing is is deployed i guess
Speaker:David: so so cross-cutting as they do earlier on
Speaker:David: with images of american westerns and
Speaker:David: images of of things like that and then having the
Speaker:David: kind of native americans from villainous native
Speaker:David: americans from the old westerns and then the um the
Speaker:David: war and american war movies and stuff that's more
Speaker:David: kind of logically and internally consistent because it's talking about the image
Speaker:David: that america made of itself um so yeah i mean i think it's yeah it's it's it's
Speaker:David: too scattershot and it it leaves it open to you know accusate credible accusations
Speaker:David: of really being very glib.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah i think the the thing with like using the holocaust it seems like he was
Speaker:Evan: really pushing heavy down on you know things being like the devil and evil and
Speaker:Evan: all these things like in a very black and white kind of way you know he had
Speaker:Evan: you know the rodney dangerfield with the fire and devil and i think they called you know um They called,
Speaker:Evan: I think at some point, numerous characters were referred to as devil,
Speaker:Evan: like Mickey Knox was the devil and Wayne Gale was the devil.
Speaker:Evan: And the, you know, what was the time of the Jones, like the warden McCluskey,
Speaker:Evan: you know, he's the, you know, they're all these devils and it just kind of.
Speaker:Evan: Again, it's one of those things where they just pile on too much and it becomes kind of flat.
Speaker:Evan: But one part of the movie that I actually thought was also interesting and maybe
Speaker:Evan: worth talking about, it's the ending scene before the moment where I think you
Speaker:Evan: mentioned where they kind of just ride off into the sunset and just become travelers,
Speaker:Evan: have kids, and everything is fine. and they just fold back into the fabric of society.
Speaker:Evan: But the moment when they're leaving, there's a riot in the prison,
Speaker:Evan: and they have what basically amounts to a war scene, which we know Oliver Stone
Speaker:Evan: has successfully filmed numerous times in other movies.
Speaker:Evan: So it's, you know, it's very, you know, you could say it's shot pretty well.
Speaker:Evan: But the message that I took from those was the America has now become this uncivilized
Speaker:Evan: place, which is what we as Americans or the media or the, you know,
Speaker:Evan: leaders like to call other places.
Speaker:Evan: Like, oh, well, we have to colonize Africa and do things there because they're uncivilized.
Speaker:Evan: They need our rule to be better or Latin America or whatever it might be.
Speaker:Evan: And it seemed like America had become the thing that we were claiming other
Speaker:Evan: places were like all the time.
Speaker:Evan: And it's, you know, maybe to show that, you know, America always was like this.
Speaker:Evan: I think I mentioned before how, you know, the formation of the United States
Speaker:Evan: being on the genocide of a people that were living here already.
Speaker:Evan: So, I did find it effective. I don't know if that's what Oliver Stone was going
Speaker:Evan: for, but I did think it was interesting.
Speaker:Evan: And they also referred to – the prison was called Beckinsville.
Speaker:Evan: I can't remember now. I had it written down.
Speaker:Evan: For some reason, it sounded – the name of the prison almost sounded very,
Speaker:Evan: I don't know, So, like a foreign sounding name to almost evoke that same kind of message imagery.
Speaker:Evan: But I don't know. I don't know if you thought the same thing when you saw the
Speaker:Evan: kind of the prison riot and all that.
Speaker:David: I think that one of the things that's interesting about the prison stuff is
Speaker:David: it's actually, I mean, it's remarkable for a number of reasons.
Speaker:David: One is that it's a real prison and that he's using real prisoners in the riot.
Speaker:David: I mean, again, literally, like I cannot imagine a studio allowing that to happen
Speaker:David: now. I mean, genuinely, you know, I mean, it's extraordinary that it even happened then.
Speaker:David: I do think he's actually, weirdly, the film is a bit ahead of its time in terms
Speaker:David: of the stuff in the prison.
Speaker:David: In that, I don't think we were seeing in mainstream movies.
Speaker:David: Anywhere near mainstream American cinema at that time, any kind of serious reckoning
Speaker:David: or depiction of the, you know, mass incarceration,
Speaker:David: the squalor of and injustice of mass incarceration in the US.
Speaker:David: Really, that's, you know, in terms of public perception, that's really come
Speaker:David: more to the surface of public perception, really maybe more in the last 10 years.
Speaker:David: But prison movies, you know, So they didn't perhaps, you know,
Speaker:David: you could have like grim prison movies, but they didn't project that image.
Speaker:David: I mean, there's obviously a certain verisimilitude to this because it's a real
Speaker:David: prison and real prison and, you know, real prisoners are acting the roles.
Speaker:David: There's a certain edge that this film has in regard to those scenes in the prison
Speaker:David: that I've not really seen in any.
Speaker:David: There's not really present in anything else around that time.
Speaker:David: And for that reason, it is very interesting.
Speaker:David: It's also interesting because I was thinking when I was watching it about how
Speaker:David: there was this focus in the scenes of the Native American guy and a lot of kind
Speaker:David: of implicit or explicit mentions of the genocide of Native Americans.
Speaker:David: But there's virtually not a single mention of slavery in the entire film.
Speaker:David: Um which i thought was interesting you
Speaker:David: know um on the other hand i mean
Speaker:David: i wondered if what was happening was the the incarceration sequences which and
Speaker:David: of course the rate of uh of african americans incarcerated is vastly vastly
Speaker:David: disproportionate um and you know many many people have written about disproportionate
Speaker:David: incarceration of black americans and of course.
Speaker:David: There are, you know, a lot of black prisoners in the prison who are kind of featured characters.
Speaker:David: And I wondered if, you know, there was a, you know, there was a way that what
Speaker:David: Stone, again, this is probably a generous reading, but what Stone was saying
Speaker:David: about, you know, here's the land outside, used to belong to the Native Americans, then we took it.
Speaker:David: And here inside, locked in, are all the people, you know, the descendants of
Speaker:David: the people that we kidnapped and enslaved.
Speaker:David: You know, so there's a sense that, you know, outside is this and inside is this.
Speaker:David: But it is interesting that there is virtually no discussion of race in the film at all.
Speaker:David: And actually, in a film about American violence, that is actually pretty interesting.
Speaker:David: And then while it addresses it, I think, again, you know, it speaks to a particular
Speaker:David: era, perhaps, more than anything else.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah. And especially, I mean, you think about, I think you mentioned earlier,
Speaker:Evan: it's like the Clinton administration at this time, you know,
Speaker:Evan: you have the crime bill that was literally putting people behind bars,
Speaker:Evan: you know, as this movie is being filmed or, you know, released and all of that.
Speaker:Evan: And I didn't realize that it was, I knew that it was an actual correction.
Speaker:Evan: I did not know that many of the people were actually inmates,
Speaker:Evan: which is quite shocking, honestly.
Speaker:Evan: I mean, Oliver Stone always seems to do these crazy things. Like with Platoon,
Speaker:Evan: they didn't get military support. So they had to buy used machine guns,
Speaker:Evan: military gear from the Russians and other places.
Speaker:Evan: So it seems like the kind of thing that he tends to do. But one thing I did
Speaker:Evan: see just as a funny note in the Wikipedia just now was that
Speaker:Evan: There's that Coca-Cola polar bear ad, which because again, they used it as an
Speaker:Evan: interview after the Super Bowl, which is totally the way this would actually
Speaker:Evan: go if they were going to do something like this, you know, exclusive with OJ
Speaker:Evan: Simpson after the football game.
Speaker:Evan: And they apparently approved them to use the ads before they knew what the film
Speaker:Evan: was about. And when they saw the film, they were just absolutely – they wanted
Speaker:Evan: to pull it from the movie.
Speaker:Evan: But they said, oh, well, you already agreed to it. So, you know, tough shit.
Speaker:Evan: Which I think is just kind of
Speaker:Evan: funny in a way to use Coca-Cola in a way that's, you know, angered them.
Speaker:Evan: Because, you know, we know what
Speaker:Evan: they've done in South America and in general. But, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker:David: I think this is part of Stone's persona, right? I think this idea of the kind
Speaker:David: of rebel filmmaker is very kind of integral.
Speaker:David: And it doesn't always necessarily have to be that consistent in the way that
Speaker:David: it's applied across the films.
Speaker:David: I mean, the idea, I think, I remember in contemporaneous interviews with Stone,
Speaker:David: where he made a big deal of the fact that, you know, he shot in a real prison,
Speaker:David: he shot with real prisoners, that everything was just on the verge of flying
Speaker:David: out of control at all times, almost as a kind of point of pride,
Speaker:David: you know, that in order to get to the kind of chaos and violence,
Speaker:David: you really had to kind of whip it up, you know.
Speaker:David: And again, it's in that lineage of someone like Peckinpah.
Speaker:David: In that sense, he's slightly out of time in that way.
Speaker:David: And maybe that's one reason why Stone hasn't quite carried across to the contemporary
Speaker:David: era in the same way that other directors have. I don't know.
Speaker:David: I don't know whether it's the case that he's now seen as being a kind of iconic
Speaker:David: director of the 80s and 90s, because his films are so tied to that era in so
Speaker:David: many ways. I mean, Wall Street kind of is the 80s.
Speaker:Evan: What would he have to say now, right? What would his message be now?
Speaker:Evan: I feel like it's almost like he's, I don't want to say he's like old fashioned,
Speaker:Evan: but it's almost like he doesn't have a, I don't know what his message would
Speaker:Evan: be about kind of modern. His politics are a little interesting.
Speaker:David: Yeah, well, here's something interesting. I actually saw Oliver Stone in person
Speaker:David: doing a talk a few years ago at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
Speaker:David: They screened Wall Street,
Speaker:David: And, and it said, and afterwards will be a Q&A with Oliver Stone.
Speaker:David: Um, and he spent most of that Q&A talking about what a wonderful and misunderstood
Speaker:David: man Vladimir Putin was because he just shot those eight hours of interviews with Putin.
Speaker:David: Um, which was, I think it went out on TV. I think they were at TV interviews.
Speaker:David: Um, and he was surrounded by bodyguards as well.
Speaker:David: This was something I'd never seen. So it was a kind of interesting little kind
Speaker:David: of glimpse into, well, this was probably 2018, maybe something like that.
Speaker:David: So this is a kind of interesting glimpse into kind of the most recent version,
Speaker:David: as far as I'm aware of where he is.
Speaker:David: I mean, this is pre-Ukraine, but it's still interesting that,
Speaker:David: you know, this is, I don't know, you know, I don't know what his position was
Speaker:David: on, for example, like WikiLeaks or Snowden.
Speaker:David: You know, I imagine he's someone who's very invested in that kind of,
Speaker:David: I think, that particular kind of anti-American free speech element. And I think.
Speaker:Evan: It's… Especially given his JFK movie, right? Because he got a lot of shit for
Speaker:Evan: talking about things related to whether true or not, just, you know,
Speaker:Evan: kind of breaking that out.
Speaker:Evan: And he also, there's another thing he's done recently. He was interviewed during
Speaker:Evan: a documentary about the usage of military –.
Speaker:Evan: Uh funding for for films i'm blanking i
Speaker:Evan: think it's called i'm blanking on the name of the documentary it's
Speaker:Evan: he may he might have produced it it's um and it's
Speaker:Evan: uh it's a it's a pretty good documentary it's a little bit repetitive there's
Speaker:Evan: also a book about this by the same person who made the about the documentary
Speaker:Evan: um starts with an a i'm blanking on i have to look it up and i can add it in
Speaker:Evan: the notes but he he definitely likes to talk about that too you know where the
Speaker:Evan: influence of the government.
Speaker:Evan: So it seems like he's anti, he's like anti-government, but he has kind of like
Speaker:Evan: a weird streak about how he views it.
Speaker:Evan: So I think he would view Snowden and those in a very positive light in the sense
Speaker:Evan: of, you know, bringing to light the crimes of America.
Speaker:Evan: Like he, you know, he did that in Platoon and JFK and, you know, Salvador, other films.
Speaker:Evan: But yeah, I don't know. he um he's an interesting uh he's interesting i had
Speaker:Evan: someone on actually when we did the true romance where they actually don't actually
Speaker:Evan: don't like a lot of his films they kind of find that he's,
Speaker:Evan: maybe overrated with some of them i think some of his films are quite good but
Speaker:Evan: it's interesting he's kind of kind of a very good 80s a very good 90 or i guess
Speaker:Evan: a very very good 80s uh early good 90s and then kind of yeah i mean he's swept away i.
Speaker:David: Think he's a very very much of a particular time. I mean, I think that's why...
Speaker:David: And that ends up, I think, being what's interesting about him.
Speaker:David: I mean, I still think JFK is a really interesting movie and often a very successful movie.
Speaker:David: I don't find myself going back to,
Speaker:David: his stuff very much, frankly. Although I watched most of them when I was young,
Speaker:David: because he was such a big name at that time.
Speaker:David: But I wonder if he maybe is, as you say, a figure of the 80s and 90s really
Speaker:David: more than... It's like seeing Coppola reappear now.
Speaker:David: It feels really strange and a bit anachronistic because he feels like so much
Speaker:David: a figure of the 70s and a little bit of the 80s you know it doesn't it especially.
Speaker:Evan: The movie that he's done it's it's almost like it like it's almost seems not.
Speaker:David: Not real uh.
Speaker:Evan: I mean i wouldn't mind if oliver stone came back and made i'd be curious to
Speaker:Evan: see if he would make something but something tells me he's not going to make
Speaker:Evan: a any movies like this and i don't know if even a studio would touch him at
Speaker:Evan: this point like you'd have to probably make something with a smaller uh a studio you know but uh.
Speaker:David: Yeah and i think that's that that's one of the things that is
Speaker:David: interesting i think that really remained with me after
Speaker:David: seeing this which is that this i mean this really is
Speaker:David: a kind of filmmaking that american studios aren't aren't making anymore i mean
Speaker:David: they're just not and i think also very specifically this kind of film which
Speaker:David: is a film with with movie stars um with a not insignificant kind of budget and
Speaker:David: you know uh and locations and technical specs.
Speaker:David: I mean, this film, even now, to make a film like this is just not accessible
Speaker:David: to someone working on a smaller budget, I don't think. It needs the big money.
Speaker:David: And so it is something that we're just not now, maybe not for the foreseeable
Speaker:David: future that we're going to see, not just this kind of film, which feels very
Speaker:David: singular, but this particular film.
Speaker:David: That kind of free hand for filmmaking there's usually kind of a small number
Speaker:David: of directors who have a reasonably free hand with a studio like nolan is an
Speaker:David: example or paul thomas anderson or someone like that but but really or tarantino
Speaker:David: actually to come back to tarantino um.
Speaker:Evan: But yeah but.
Speaker:David: But really something like this really does feel like a bit of an artifact now.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah it really does feel like that there are a lot of i mean i've done a
Speaker:Evan: lot of 90s movies on this podcast primarily that's
Speaker:Evan: the you know arab movies that i grew up watching and
Speaker:Evan: there really are a lot of them that feel that way and
Speaker:Evan: actually i don't know if we've talked about this in the true romance episode
Speaker:Evan: but even though that's a very of its time a
Speaker:Evan: movie i feel like it actually holds up better than
Speaker:Evan: this does as far as a you know modern you
Speaker:Evan: know kind of looking at it's a much different movie so
Speaker:Evan: it's hard to say but given that they're kind of like two babies
Speaker:Evan: in the same womb almost like twins and then they kind of separated to
Speaker:Evan: being very much different kinds of you know different directors one tony scott
Speaker:Evan: and then oliver stone so it's interesting um how those kind of movies hold up
Speaker:Evan: but um but david any uh any do you have any i guess final thoughts on on the
Speaker:Evan: movie that we maybe we didn't uh that you didn't touch on i'm.
Speaker:David: Trying to think i don't necessarily think so
Speaker:David: i think that um no i think it's it's it's more that you know yeah i just you
Speaker:David: know as in summation it's it's really a case that i think actually from a technical
Speaker:David: perspective there are still elements of this film that are really interesting
Speaker:David: and and often actually quite dazzling um,
Speaker:David: in terms of just kind of in and of themselves but as
Speaker:David: a whole um you know when i was when i was in my teens I was you know this felt
Speaker:David: very new and interesting and and now it's interesting really because of because
Speaker:David: of what it is because it because of the age it is and because it's become almost this kind of timepiece.
Speaker:Evan: Yeah I kind of feel the same way whereas there was a moment where this was you
Speaker:Evan: know I really I loved Oliver Stone movies when I was in college watch platoon
Speaker:Evan: all the time and in those in this one maybe not as much but now I just think
Speaker:Evan: they they just hit differently and I think we can appreciate it again as a,
Speaker:Evan: as a pretty incredible piece of filmmaking, you know,
Speaker:Evan: visually, but maybe it just doesn't, uh, just doesn't quite hit in,
Speaker:Evan: uh, 2024 as it did in 1994.
Speaker:Evan: But, um, but yeah, David, uh, again, thank you for coming on to talk about natural born killers.
Speaker:David: Thanks for having me.
Speaker:Evan: Of course. And you can, uh, of course, follow this show on, uh,
Speaker:Evan: on all platforms at left of the projector.com and we will catch you next time.
