MY LIFE IN HORROR: THAT’S YOUR SHADOW ON THE WALL

Never mind the action on screen, the very editing itself, the soundtrack, the lighting, it’s all fucking furious, and it wants you to know it.

​My Life In Horror

Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.

This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.

This is my life in horror.

That’s Your Shadow On The Wall

This one has been on and off the list a lot. Up to very recently, I was leaning towards not covering it. Truthfully, if I hadn’t noticed I was heading towards writing not one but three essays about white hip-hop artists from Detroit as the finale, and realised it’d be best to break that run up, lest I test your already superhuman patience with my bullshit entirely past breaking point, you might not be reading this at all.

And a big part of the problem is that I can’t do the usual pack drill with regards to when, where, how old I was. None of it. Did I see it? Yes, yes I did, on a small screen, sometime in my late teens/early twenties. Did it peel the top of my skull back and take a loving shit over my brain? Well, now you mention it, yes, it did.

And yet.

The fucking rep this movie had, too. I mean, Reservoir Dogs had a rep, and so did Pulp Fiction, but this bad boy was next level; like, ‘banned’ from a video release (yes, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s what I understood at the time) next level. It ran into a couple of very UK-centered shitstorms, which, okay, yeah, I guess we do need to get into that, don’t we.
Okay.

So. In the UK, in 1993, a 2-year-old boy was abducted from a shopping centre in broad daylight, taken to a second location, tortured and murdered. His horribly damaged body was discovered two days later on a nearby railway line.

The perpetrators were charged 8 days later. They were two 10-year-old boys.

Yeah.

Now, a lot of people had an awful lot to say about what could possibly have caused this kind of unfathomably awful crime. And, because we have a uniquely vicious, virulent and stupid right-wing tabloid press tradition in the UK, every single aspect of the perps life was poured over in obscene detail.

And it turned out they’d probably watched a few horror movies.

The main focus of ire was, and I shit you not, Child’s Play 3, as there seemed some certainty that the boys had seen it, perhaps even owned a copy. Point is, it kicked off a weird and thankfully short-lived second ‘video nasty’ type scare, with all the attendant moral panic bullshit. You’re a horror fan, you know the drill by now; corruption of innocence, sick, depraved Hollywood, monkey see, monkey do: Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children?

So when NBK found itself up before the BFCC in the summer of 1994, the tabloid press went into full-on Ban This Sick Filth mode, and some nonsense reporting about possible copycat killings in the states led to a delay in certification. Ultimately, the movie (cut by 3 minutes to achieve a US R rating) was given an 18 certificate and made it to theatres, but the miasma of controversy was well established.

And look, I’ve talked about this before, but truthfully I’m kind of a wimp when it comes to ‘extreme’ cinema. Last House On The Left did permanent damage, I’ve never seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I’m pretty confident I’ll go through my entire life without ever watching a Saw movie. Some of that is a basic squeamishness about blood and guts, sure... But I think there’s more to it. I think that certain movies have a reputation for me that, itself, has become a kind of psychological barrier to entry. 

And I think, for me, thanks to the sheer volume of tabloid panic (exacerbated when the movie’s proposed VHS date coincided with the Dunblane massacre, leading the distributors to unilaterally decide to ‘ban’ the movie until 2001, despite securing an 18 certification for home release), Natural Born Killers became one of those movies.

Which, when you consider what many of the obsessions are that drive the movie, is pretty fucking funny, really.

I don’t think I caught the Channel 5 broadcast, shown while the movie was still in limbo in terms of a home viewing release. For one thing, Channel 5 was a dicey proposition in North Devon at that time. For another, I suspect that rep just made me steer clear. So I think - and it really is just a guess, but - I think I must have bought it on DVD, when it finally came out in 2001. Which, logically, must be because I’d by then become familiar enough with Oliver Stone’s other work (especially JFK, which hit me with the force of revelation in my late teens) that my desire for more work from this man was enough to override my previous fears.

I was finally ready. Or so I thought.

It’s frustrating, not being able to do what I usually do, and reconstruct the shock of that first viewing. On the other hand, this is a movie that I’ve seen, many, many times, and yet its power to shock me has barely diminished at all; indeed, there are ways in which I find it even more disturbing now than I did as a young man.

The sheer ferocity of it, is what lingers the most. Sure, the violence; both the overtly, hyper-stylized opening diner massacre and the later gruelling and gruesome prison riot scenes. Both sequences have, in their own way, made their marks on me, on my imagination. But also, one of the things the movie does, with it’s shifting modes of storytelling, kaleidoscopic soundtrack and dizzying use of different film stocks, is present the viewer with an interrogation of the form itself; the movie, especially through the first half, appears to be in a state of constant transformation, creating moods, inhabiting genres, only for those states to collapse upon themselves, as if they’re unable to bear the weight of the story they’re trying to tell (or, perhaps, the rage of the characters the movie is concerned with). We shift from hyper-stylised action movie to oversaturated colour to sit-com (complete with monstrous laugh track); and in between, these collages of film and sound, as Mickey and Mallory’s Cadillac appears to be travelling through some portal between worlds, haunted by monsters and black and white streets.

Never mind the action on screen, the very editing itself, the soundtrack, the lighting, it’s all fucking furious, and it wants you to know it.

Because, sure, the film is about violence. Mickey and Mallory are both products of violent childhoods, escaping via the nihilism of a shotgun barrel pointed at anyone that gets in their way. Similarly, the deeply fucked up cop pursuing them is also a product of childhood trauma. Violence perpetuates violence throughout the movie, including, in the second half, the mass violence of the carceral state. I don’t think the movie revels in the violence, exactly (and the accusation that it celebrates it is not just fatuous but Actually Wrong, IMO), but it sure doesn’t pull away from it, either.

Still, that’s not all it’s about.

The story goes that as the movie was being made, Stone realised the movie could be much more than a straight-up fucked up crime thriller about two mass murderers. At some point in the process, Stone started to realize it was about America; and more specifically, how America saw itself, down the lens of a TV camera. As with Don't Look Up, later, NBK is absolutely excoriating in its treatment of the media, and the venal race-to-the-bottom of ratings uber alles.

And that tendency is given flesh in the person of Robert Downey Jr, giving for my money a career-best performance as the slug that walks like a man, Wayne Gayle.

He is magnificent. A surface smarm/charm that is almost instantly obliterated by his monstrous ego, Gayle quickly takes the movie over from about the one-third mark; as soon as he appears, the story of Mickey and Mallory starts to warp in his hands; footage of the pair replaced by actors shot from salacious angles, and full of artless cuts and inserts. It’s ballsy as hell, when you think about it, given just how gonzo the filmmaking has been thus far; almost as if Stone is winking at us as he says ‘of course, this can be done badly, if you don’t know what you’re doing’. And yet, does Gayle have his own dark, awful attraction? Sure he does. He’s so awful, you can’t take your eyes off him. You are - I am - both disgusted, and delighted by my disgust. Every time I feel he can sink no lower, Gayle plumbs yet further depths of narcissism. He’s the perfect avatar for the worst that infotainment represents.

I mean, is it any wonder the press weren't thrilled with this one?

They’re still at it, by the way; a recent Google search showed that on the 25th anniversary, The Guardian ran a piece saying the movie failed because it ultimately blamed the media for Mickey and Mallory’s violence. Yeah, somebody got paid to write that. Given what we’ve already discussed about how the film portrays violence as a cyclical, generational phenomenon, it’s hard not to take such a poor misreading as deliberate; in that respect, I guess you have to give Stone credit that more than 25 years later, the movie is still making media types sore enough that they feel defensive.

Because, no, obviously, the media isn’t to blame for the violence.

What the media - specifically, the news media - is guilty of, is the sensationalized coverage of the violence (If It Bleeds, It Leads), turning murderers into celebrities, trials into circuses, and, often, matters of scientific fact and political reality into matters of opinion and topics of ‘debate’ or ‘controversy’.

Seen through that lens, the fact the NBK predates the establishment of Fox News by two whole years gives the movie an aura of eerie prescience. The utterly amoral, value-free rendering of ‘reality’ as entertainment is a poison that, in 2022, feels likely to be terminal, as we continue to ‘both sides’ ourselves off the cliff of climate apocalypse and the flapping gums whose only job is to keep us informed of what’s actually going on shake their heads, shrug, and say ‘gosh, it's complicated, isn’t it?’

It’s not that NBK predicts that, exactly; it’s that in the movie, you can see the contours of the trends that will lead us there; you can almost feel the rough beast of Murdocks poisonous News Station child slouching into place.

I think that’s what I mean when I say I found it more disturbing on a rewatch than I did as a young man. Back then, sure, it seemed bad, but, well, a) it was America, they’re all nuts, everybody knows that, and, relatedly, b) It Couldn’t Happen Here. Back then it was the violence that got to me, the electric confrontation between Gayle and Mickey, and the teeth-grinding tension of the jailbreak - which, to be fair, is no less raw and darkly thrilling as it was on first viewing.

But now?

Shit. Now it’s 2022, and it is happening here, and it’s happening everywhere, and I just don’t know anymore. The anger of this film used to sing to me; it used to light me up, helped me feel like less of an alien. Because, on some level, based as it was in emergent trends and then-current concerns, it felt like satire, still; overblown, caricatured. It has some serious things to say, but it still felt like a warning.

Now? Shit. Now it feels like a prophecy of something it’s become too late to fix.

And a world in which Natural Born Killers no longer feels like an exaggeration is a scary fucking place to be.

KP
8/6/22

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