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Oliver Stone’s 1994 thriller, Natural Born Killers, brings the cinematic portrayal of violence to an extreme. ... In between killings, they laugh, dance around their victims, and kiss and hug each other, making evident their lack of concern for the violence they inflict, and the fear they invoke in their prey. ...
Gratuitous displays of violence are evident throughout the film in gory depictions of bloody deaths; when the waitress in the diner is shot, her blood covers the wall behind her and splatters a patron standing next to her. ... Moreover, Mickey and Mallory engage in violent acts which are considered vile to contemporary audiences, such as taking a female hostage and beating and raping her, and killing Mallory’s parents by drowning her father in a fish tank and tying her mother to a bed and setting it on fire. This more tangible, yet still grotesque, violence is made more disturbing by rear screen projections of images like many-headed monsters, faces dripping with blood, and headless bloody bodies (Prince, 245).
Aside from its horrific portrayal of violence, Natural Born Killers attempts to make a broader comment on the demoralization of the media in its frantic glorification of the serial killers. ... However, to all but the most intelligent of audiences, this goal is lost in gratuitous violence, and as one critic states, “the movie becomes the very thing it wished to expose” (Prince, 243). Nonetheless, ignoring its post-modern message, the film can be seen as one of the most similar forms of what Paul Plass refers to as the “publicly sanctioned violence” (56) of ancient Rome.
Like the gladiatorial games, violent movies are, in contemporary times, one of the most popular forms of entertainment for mass society, and they are “public occasions for suspending the routine of daily life” (28). Because contemporary society does not condone real, live displays of raw violence, films like Natural Born Killers are the closest one can get to viewing the sort of violent behavior conducted in the Roman arena, and the act of viewing these films becomes, in ritual, similar to being a spectator at a gladiatorial game. ... This sort of torture, however fictional, is not dissimilar from the displays of torture which took place in the Roman arena.
Approximate Word count = 1872
Approximate Pages = 7.5
(250 words per page double spaced)
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