Tuesday, September 19, 2017
Blood Lust, Flesh Best, Guns Fun!
QUENTIN TARANTINO – OLIVER STONE – NATURAL BORN KILLERS – 1994
This film is both cultish and scandalous, if not horrifying. A standard viewer in a standard audience would react along three main lines according to their belief whether the film is a true story or not. Imagine two young people who in three weeks killed fifty-two people. And it all ends in a prison riot and a prison break that leaves dozens of people dead in the prison. I will stick to the director’s cut and its official ending, not the alternative ending. In this official ending the couple survives after their prison break by getting underground and lives a long happy life with something like three children, the whole family living in a mobile-home moving from mobile-home camp to mobile-home camp and you can imagine if they moved often they would not attract too much attention and could easily blend into the American landscape, social or not.
The first reactive line would be: “It is a true story and it is a frightening fact that such people do exist in our society and they get to killing dozens of people if they can on a very regular basis.” The feeling then is a feeling of fear, the simple fear that one day you may find yourself in a public place where such a mass killer would turn up and start shooting. But let me be clear: that is NOT terrorism. That is pure mass killing and the causes are not some political or even social objective. It is the result of a mentally deranged psyche and that deranged person has been through various causes evoked in the film: disrupted family, unemployment, family violence from the father, alcoholism, very often abuse from one parent onto the children, boys or girls indifferently, father or mother indifferently too, and at times the monetization of this abuse onto the children with outside grown-ups paying for the opportunity. And you have to keep in mind in such a situation a child who needs contact, physical contact and love will accept anything that will provide him or her with that contact and that love, even if it is more rape and exploitation than love. How can he or she know?
The second reactive line would be: “It’s a true story and our police is ineffective to stop such criminals, when they are white at least, and the people I work with or I meet in the street or who just go along in the street might be such sick killers ready to start again anytime.” Here fear is amplified by the obvious ineffectiveness of the police to protect me, you, us all against such sick people who find pleasure in killing other people including children. This is paranoia for such viewers of such films, but this paranoia is quite justified in real life, even if such crimes are marginal, even if we take into account terrorism which is nothing but mass killing with a political, religious or ideological dressing. Mass killers, particularly terrorist mass killers do not survive nowadays: they explode themselves or kill themselves after doing their “business”; they are killed on the spot during the attack by some security force; or they are killed in the manhunt that follows their escape. In such situation the police seem to generalize the attitude of theirs towards Black offenders: Kill first, even with five bullets like in Saint Louis in 2011, and ask questions later, if you have any time to waste. So you can imagine the fear of viewers who know some of these mass criminals or mass murderers do survive and get underground.
Watching such movies for people who are slightly paranoid on the subject of mass murderers, serial killers, or mass criminals is like people who are prone to experiencing vertigo in some situations and who cross the Grand Canyon on a flimsy pedestrian rope bridge, if possible on a windy day and looking down over the ropes, or between their legs to the river a few hundred yards lower. But it takes all sorts of fearful people to feed the paranoia of our consumer society.
The third line is to know this film is fictional and then the fear is only short lived and the end of the film will give a tremendous relief with a big sigh: “That sure was a good film. I nearly wet myself. But let’s get an ice cream cone to push the film down.” That’s why fiction is so useful: to provide people with fears and other emotions that they might never experience for real in humdrum everyday life.
But, surprise, surprise! The film was an obvious fictional story based on a real couple of mass murderers. “The horrific murder spree of Charles Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend Caril Fugate ended much like bank-robbing folk heroes Bonnie and Clyde—in a hail of bullets. The only difference was that both Fugate and Starkweather survived and were finally apprehended after leaving eleven people dead in their wake—including Fugate’s parents and her two-year-old sister who Starkweather stabbed to death.” (http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_real_mickey_and_mallory_candid_pics_of_mass-murderer)
So enjoy the film, wet your panties and survive the experience. Do not compensate with eating too much popcorn. Keep some appetite for the T bone steak of tonight after the film. You will imagine it is a T bone steak cut out of Charles Starkweather’s side, and that will be a really good experience: subliminal cannibalism.
Technically the film is great because we never know if it is a real film or if it is some kind of collection of TV shows, news programs, documentaries, in situ reports, oscillating between the black and white of old archive documents and the colors of modern coverage, but after all at times it looks as if the black and white sequences were the color-blind vision of one of the two murderers who could not see the world the way it was but only the way they like it: as a shooting target alternating black and white circles.
Have a good trip!
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Older Review, AMAZON.xxx, JANUARY 16, 2007
WHY NOT KILL THEM AT BIRTH, OR EVEN BEFORE? (Amazon.com)
THE DEMONSTRATION IS SIMPLISTIC, NAIVE, CRUEL AND CONSERVATIVE (Amazon.co.uk)
KILLING IS A SOCIAL TRAINED FATALITY AND CURSE (IMDb)
This is Apocalypto in the all-American modern version. Our society produces, be they born or not born, a whole fringe of killers that absolutely know what is wrong or right, good or bad, but who do not care a fig about it, even if at times they do not find any pleasure in murdering.
The film explores the destiny of a couple of two young people who meet by accident but find in themselves so many common alienations and frustrations based on about the same social, cultural and personal environment : sexual abuse and violence from parents, rejection from society, total lack of care and help in education that is inexistant or social counselling that is just impotent.
They end up taking what they want by force since it is not provided to them free. But the film goes a lot further. It analyzes the role of the media that systematically sell paper and prime time advertising with this showing of violence and with fake or unfake interviews of murderers and other criminals. The lower, the better. The nastier, the more profitable. The bloodier, the tastier.
Then the film also shows that the prison system is a system of incarceration and containment, in no way of reform, education and improvement. These prisoners are there to survive because no one dares execute them all. They are the sacrificial victims of society that needs them to regenerate its lost virginity, purity and morality. They are the sacrificial victims of a god that has nothing to envy the Maya gods. This god is the god of selfish greedy consumerism.
Till it explodes. And the official end of the film shows that such criminals can disappear in society forever, and they are then living among us unknown and unseen. The alternative ending shows that you need the intervention of an angel to execute these criminals. The film preaches and advocates that these criminals are natural born killers, hence that they will never be anything else, hence that they have to be purely and simply executed as soon as they are noticed and as fast as possible to avoid as many victims as possible, why not at birth ?
This vision of crime in our society is criminal in itself because it produces the criminals concerned by considering there is no other way, it is their fate and ours.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:15 PM 
