If I was a mass murderer, I’d be Mickey and Mallory
No cinema visits this week.
Natural Born Killers (1994)
Quentin Tarantino’s original script for this movie was published in the Faber script frenzy that followed the lengthy delay in awarding Reservoir Dogs (1991) a video certificate in the early 1990s. It was designed to be shot by Tarantino himself possibly in 16mm on an even lower budget than his eventual debut. Tarantino’s script has only one location: the jail cell where Mickey gives his interview to Wayne Gale, though a lot of the interaction with the camera crew that made it through to Stone’s finished film first turns up in Tarantino’s version of the screenplay. There was never any attempt to depict Mickey and Mallory’s killing spree, no indication of the continual changes in film stock, all of what could be fairly described as the intense postmodernism and breaking of the fourth wall that goes on in the first half of the film, there was no direct indictment of the media, all of the stuff that continues to make the film compelling 13 years later in other words, when real life has upped the ante on celebrity culture to an extent unforeseeable back in 1994. The whole famous for being infamous thing has got a whole lot worse since then, to the extent that celebrities are now being deliberately manufactured for no other reason than to celebrate their celebrity in celebrity magazines, and not because these people have any talent or skill, or are likely to acquire any talent or skill in the future, or ever possessed any talent or skill in the past. What Natural Born Killers looks like now is a dire warning from the heart of the Tabloid Decade, when murderers became more famous than their victims through their presentation, celebration and glorification in the media. Natural Born Killers does likewise, both having its cake and eating it, glorifying its two killers while at the same time showing how the media plays as big a part in creating their notoreity as they do themselves. And Mickey and Mallory are meant to be fictional. Chantelle and Preston, Jordan and Peter, Cheryl and Ashley, Victoria and David: are these couples any more real than their fictional counterparts? Are their lives any more worth chronicling in unending detail? Is there really an insatiable appetite for this material, or will there come a line that shouldn’t be crossed, that is then crossed anyway? As there was when Heat magazine thought it was a jolly good laugh to circulate a badge making fun of Jordan’s handicapped son? There will be more of this, it will only get worse, our non-culture will continue to feed on these non-celebrities with their non-lives, non-liposuction, non-breast implants, non-breast reductions, non-weight loss, non-weight gain, until someone somewhere takes the kind of decisive legal action that will end it all forever because a celebrity magazine has taken it over the edge. That day is coming, and it cannot come soon enough. Either that, or Britney Spears, hounded by paparazzi and stalkers and users and abusers, will turn into Mickey and Mallory Knox and the whole house of cards will topple down in flames.
I don’t watch television, and this is why.