Though I'm shy about adding to the body of verbiage that has sprung up around Natural Born Killers, and generally frown on intervening in aging debates, I recently saw the film and was most impressed. At the outset honesty forces me to reveal that N.B.K. uses four short shots from my archives, for which I sent a handsome bill and received a substantial check. The existence of a business relationship between me and a high-profile commercial production almost always means that I disrespect the final product, but this was a rare exception. I have never thought much of the few Stone films I've seen, and what little I know of the man himself has made me see him as kind of a media-driven bully, relying on shock, aggression and rug- pulling as an intellectual underdog's alternative to more reasoned and creative discourse. What redeems N.B.K. for me, and in saying this I know I am taking a few steps down Route 666, is that it's quite simply an ecstatic film, a hyper-commercial picture that ironically, ends up fulfilling many of the extravagant claims made for the movies by Twenties avant-gardes. Now, this isn't intended to grant undeserved authority to a media product whose most profound success is ultimately its gross in the tens of millions. The "social commentary" vis-a vis the mass media as an accelerator of violence is depressingly pedestrian and almost makes N.B.K. look and sound like a student production with a record-setting budget. Attend to this simplistic moralizing at your peril. But when else has a big-screen, big-budget movie honored theoretical notions of pure cinema and celebrated the total arbitrariness and irrelevance of sacred dualities like film/video, B&W/color, S8/35mm, live-action/animation, contemporary/archival? And when has a Hollywood feature been fractured between its necessary portentious narrative and an undisciplined mix of images and sounds that looks to be about little more than the pleasure of the mix itself? The values N.B.K. upholds trace back to experimental filmmakers rather than serial killers, and I think its sublimation of violence into the structure of the film is much more defensible than, say, Pulp Fiction's tedious attempts to make a joke about an accidental murder and a blood spattered car. N.B.K. is also one of the first studio films since Do the Right Thing that doesn't go down like a smooth long drink of warm water. Now, the times are not friendly for those trying to make Marxist movies, but I think some of Brecht's old ideas are still valuable...especially that one about how the "epic theatre seeks to divide its audience." Like much Nineties media, where sleepy work tends to hide behind glitzy camouflage, movies all too often present trivial, unchallenging shared experiences. In contrast, here is a scalable movie, playing different ways to different audiences. I suspect younger people see a completely different film than boomers like me do -- so much of the narrative is carried forward by shots that are only a few frames long, shots that older people are often literally unable to process. Like the best of television (Homicide, Mystery Science Theatre) this film lends itself to apprehension on several different levels of complexity. Maybe most important of all, the prison setting problematizes almost every social assumption and moral value that those of us living outside the walls cling to. I was reminded of Brian Henderson's assertion in his "Weekend and History" paper (Film Quarterly, early 70s) that the murder plot in Godard's Weekend is in fact the quintessential _bourgeois plot._ I have a hunch that N.B.K. may have just displaced it. Each serial killer movie now seems to be just another splotch on the landscape. But at least, in my opinion, N.B.K. places the alleged ecstasy of the murderous couple in balance with the visual pleasure of the movie, and I think the movie wins out. I guess some will say my critical faculties have been softened by a picture you might characterize as an "archivist's wet dream," for all of its found imagery. And who knows, they might be right. Rick Prelinger Prelinger Archives, New York City [log in to unmask]