I understand that Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers was not strictly based on the Charles Starkweather case; original screenwriter Quentin Tarantino may have based the premise loosely on the mythic status of the case but never explicitly set out to adapt it into a serious analysis of the true life crimes.
However, after watching the four-episode docuseries on the Starkweather affair, titled The 12th Victim, it’s hard to watch a movie like Natural Born Killers and not feel that the whole idea of the film (in particular the character of Mallory Knox as played by Juliette Lewis) is predicated on a humongous lie.
The 12th Victim is an engrossing study of the murder spree that Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Fugate embarked upon in the late 1950s; the common view in the public eye was that the couple were complicit in the murder of the teenaged Fugate’s family and the subsequent killings. The 12th Victim goes over the facts of the case to make very clear that Fugate was most likely (and by her own admission) not a participant in the crimes and instead was held hostage by Starkweather, whom she’d broken up with before the rampage; according to the docuseries, she was not even aware that her family had been murdered by Starkweather, who told her that they were being held at an undisclosed location and that if she went along with him they would be spared. She did not learn the truth until after Starkweather had been apprehended and she asked the authorities if she could call her mother, certainly not the action of a girl who purposely arranged to off her parents.
Fugate served time for the killings while Starkweather was executed by electric chair. However, the passing of time has not been kind to Fugate, who (despite being paroled in the mid-70s) was recently denied a pardon for her perceived role in the murders. The second half of the series follows as she struggles to clear her name from her association with the infamous Starkweather, trying to extricate herself from the seemingly prophetic curse he saddled on her when he declared that if he couldn’t have her then nobody will.
Many films and documentaries have been made in the wake of the Starkweather murders, from Terence Malick’s Badlands to Tarantino’s True Romance and the first draft of Natural Born Killers. These adaptations almost always without exception paint a romanticized portrait of star-crossed lovers rebelling against respectable society by lashing out in the most extreme way possible.
Perhaps a large portion of the infamy and shock of a case that is over 60 years old is the notion that the adolescent Fugate was a willing accomplice, if not the murderous muse that masterminded the entire thing. Starkweather, despite much evidence to the contrary, is cemented in crime lore as being a violent white trash version of James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, a misunderstood loner paying back the powers that be with sharpened knives and gunfire. So it is only fitting that his female sidekick should be what can only really be described as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murderess: anything less would deflate the myth that has been built up over the decades.
Mallory Knox in Natural Born Killers is probably the logical manifestation of this image: malicious, angry, lowbrow, vulgar, sexually provocative, and completely devoted to her man, who cherry-picks the qualities he adores about her as to serve his own criminal fantasy. At one point near the end of Natural Born Killers, Mallory suggests that she and Mickey Knox, as played by Woody Harrelson, break out of a prison in the throes of a riot with guns drawn, going out in the stereotypical blaze of glory that cinema often bestows upon its antiheroes. Mickey gently tells her that her plan is “poetry” then goes on to say that they’ll follow her plan “when all else fails”. In other words, he’s not really going to consider it.
In light of watching The 12th Victim, a movie like Natural Born Killers becomes an exercise in picking apart the character of Mallory and discovering how much of her narrative is determined by the male protagonist’s view of the outside world. It’s as if the story of Mickey and Mallory is told strictly through Mickey’s eyes. I can almost imagine a different cut of the movie where the action is interrupted periodically by Juliette Lewis giving narration to provide counterpoint to what’s being shown a la the TV series Arrested Development: “No, that’s not how it really happened. Mickey didn’t rescue me from my family, he killed them then told me to get in the car otherwise he’d do the same to me.”
Even if director Oliver Stone hadn’t heavily rewritten Tarantino’s script, one of the dominant themes of Natural Born Killers is that Mallory is just as much a badass as her male counterpart. She can keep up with his insatiable blood-and-sex lust and even goes beyond it in certain situations. The only man she defers to is Mickey, who is also the only man who understands her murderous impulses. Unfortunately, it becomes obvious in The 12th Victim that Caril Fugate was anything but the sociopathic, devious, Machievellian rebel that the public has taken into their collective unconscious. It’s a contrived scenario that was propagated by none other than Starkweather himself, who upon incarceration first stated that Fugate was blameless but later flipped and implicated her in the crimes when he realized she didn’t love him. Love and the fantasy behind it is a big factor in all of this. Stone takes a different approach to the fantasy scenario by stating without any subtlety that “love beats the demon”; Mallory’s unfailing commitment to Mickey is ultimately redemptive.
There is always a hint in this genre of cinema that the female half of a criminal pair is somehow empowered by destroying would-be rapists, sadistic perverts, and leering male authority figures. Whether it’s Patricia Arquette’s Alabama fighting back against a hitman in True Romance or Laura Dern dealing with scummy Willem Dafoe in Wild At Heart, or even Faye Dunaway as Bonnie to Warren Beatty’s Clyde, there is a clear line drawn between the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murderess’ consensual psychopathic paramour and the undeserving letches that wish to take his place. Because she chooses who she wants to manipulate and exploit her, it is somehow a step forward for feminism.
True, there is much catharsis watching Mallory Knox dismantle a redneck creep in the opening scene of Natural Born Killers, but that’s only if you buy into the MPDGM ideal. I was someone who bought into that me-and-my-girl-against-the-world mentality when I was a younger man and saw these movies for the first time. It’s the same thread that runs through popular songs like Cake’s “Short Skirt/Long Jacket”, where the singer pines for a strong yet sexy Warrior Princess because she is more than his equal and may even be better at kicking ass than he is. Imagine a pimp whose hoes wage war against greedy johns on his behalf but only fuck him… which is basically the gist of The Bride’s relationship with the titular character in Kill Bill, another Tarantino film. Watching The 12th Victim, though, has made me rethink this position. It’s the position of a young man who has only a sliver of an idea of what women must endure in a man’s world but still wants to get freaky; to refer to that song again, it’s the position of men who want to have their Cake and eat it too.
Oliver Stone, when he’s not overtly politicking in his films, also possesses this immature position. It reaches a zenith in The Doors, wherein Meg Ryan gleefully labels herself as an “ornament” while Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison hazily christens her his “muse” when she’s really just the only woman who will consistently tolerate his awful behavior. But in Natural Born Killers it almost gets Freudian when you remember that Stone spent the ‘60s in harrowing Vietnamese jungle shit, taking lives for a country that he later had major reservations about (much like Ron Covic in Born On The Fourth Of July). He is the natural born killer of the movie’s title; he spends the duration of the film rearranging Tarantino’s tropes to explain his PTSD. As a filmmaker he is also a media figure, and so the centerpiece of Natural Born Killers— the live interview between Mickey and tabloid journalist Wayne Gale — is almost an internal dialogue come to life. Viewed through the lens of Stone’s personal military experience, the interview is a literal manifestation of the two warring sides of his personality: the soldier who killed lest he be killed rationalizing his actions to the entertainer who dwells on lurid subject matter and exports it to the masses for a profit. Listening to Mickey rhapsodize about the purity of killing, then reading an account of Stone’s first certified kill while in Vietnam, one can’t help but feel that he is justifying the trauma of taking another human’s life at the expense of his chosen profession.
It also bears noting that Stone made Natural Born Killers in the midst of a divorce from his second wife. Wayne Gale (played by Robert Downey Jr) unceremoniously dumps his wife over the phone during the prison riot in Natural Born Killers while being held hostage by Mickey and Mallory. This is Wayne being swept up in the chaos of the moment but it is very telling that Wayne wants to cross over to the criminal couple’s side. Mickey, the killer side of Stone, does it all for love; Wayne, the Hollywood side of Stone, does it all for ratings. Mickey and Mallory killing off Wayne at the end of the movie is Stone acknowledging that he’d trade all the money and fame for a chance at real love. (Mickey and Mallory killing Wayne is a holdover from Tarantino’s original script; with the amount of rewriting Stone did on it, it’s not a coincidence, conscious or otherwise, that he left it intact for his cut of the movie)
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with filmmakers and artists in general hashing out their personal neuroses and issues through their work. It’s what connects them to us as individuals, after all. I can still appreciate the skill that went into constructing a madhouse experience like Natural Born Killers or any number of movies I’ve mentioned in this essay. Deconstructing art is at the core of the mass entertainment machine. But maybe it’s time we pay service to the real-life inspirations for so much psychoanalysis on celluloid. Because if Caril Fugate were a screenwriter or director, the movie she’d make wouldn’t be about a nihilistic Lolita who is handy with a razor or a handgun, doling out punishment to gas station attendants who are bad at giving head or slimy police detectives with homicidal tendencies, all the while sitting shotgun in a convertible with her ex-con Humbert Humbert at the wheel. Her movie would probably be a lot like The 12th Victim, the story of a young girl from the heartland who got mixed up with an anti-social loser who dragged her along on an insane blood fest of his own delusional making then threw her under the bus right before he left this mortal coil, only for her to fight against the widely held perception of her as a degenerate monster for the rest of her life.
And she can title it Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murderess if she wanted to, but the point might get lost depending on who buys the rights and who gets cast and (most importantly) who gets to do the Page One rewrite.
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