Style
Natural Born Killers is shot and edited in a frenzied and psychedelic style consisting of black and white, animation, and other unusual color schemes, and employing a wide range of camera angles, filters, lenses and special effects. Much of the movie is told via parodies of television shows, including a scene (I Love Mallory) presented in the style of a sitcom about a dysfunctional family. Commercials which were commonly on the air at the time of the film's release make brief, intermittent appearances. In his DVD Director's commentary, Oliver Stone goes into great detail about the look of the film, explaining scene by scene why a particular look was chosen for a particular scene. A selection of quotations from that commentary can be found at the IMDb FAQ for the film.
Stone considered Natural Born Killers his road film, specifically naming Bonnie and Clyde as a source of inspiration. The famous death scene in Bonnie and Clyde used innovative editing techniques provided by multiple cameras shot from different angles at different speeds; this sporadic interchange between fast-paced and slow-motion editing that concludes Arthur Penn's film is used throughout the entirety of Natural Born Killers.
Furthermore, both films fall under the road movie genre through their constant challenges of the society in which the characters live. While Bonnie and Clyde attempt to disintegrate the weakened economic and social landscape of the 1930s, Mickey and Mallory try to free America from the overarching conventions which influence the common masses, primarily the media. However, whilst Bonnie and Clyde concludes with a pessimistic outlook regarding individual freedom within the American sphere of influence, Oliver Stone sees Natural Born Killers as having an optimistic finale. In Bonnie and Clyde, the police's ambush of the couple exhibits the empirical control of law enforcement over the individual. Natural Born Killers, however, ends with the couple symbolically destroying the mass media, as represented by Wayne Gale, and successfully fleeing together to live a relatively "normal" life. As Stone himself says, "In its own way, Natural Born Killers is ultimately a very optimistic film about the future. It's about freedom, and the ability of every human being to get it."
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Famous quotes containing the word style:
“His style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. It is not literary or classical; it has not the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)