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December 1994, Week 1

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From:
Rick Prelinger <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 7 Dec 1994 23:23:55 -0500
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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
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