Justifying Natural Born Killers Essay, Research Paper

Natural Born Killers is a type of movie that sends new ideas to peoples heads. This movie seems like it is trying to justify murder. In almost every scene of the movie we can see images of demons or other evil things, for example the sign of the triple six, which stands for the mark of the beast. All of this adds to the glamorization of murder. The movie seems to be glamorizing murder, and it tries to give an excuse on why people like Mickey and Mallory, commit murders.

In the beginning of the movie we see a show called “I love Mallory Show” which is made to look like the “I love Lucy Show.”(Stone) But this show is nothing like the Lucy shows. Instead it is about the sexual abuse that Mallory receives from her father, and how the mother doesn’t help or even object to the fathers actions. In the end of the show, Mickey ends up killing Mallory’s father, as Mallory watches in enjoyment. Later she tells Mickey to kill her mom as well because her mom never helped her when she was getting abused by her father. In the background the viewer can hear laughter which makes the audience watching the movie want to laugh also. But when the viewer stops to think at what he or she could have been or were laughing at, it can make someone feel uncomfortable because he or she was actually laughing at murder, and sexual abuse. The whole movie seems to follow this pattern; the viewer gets so involved with the movie that he or she forgets what they are actually siding for, and begin to justify everything that Mickey and Mallory do. The movie uses cartoons and comic book illustrations of Mickey to persuade the audience to like him. This approach works because a lot of people liked the Lucy show, or enjoy watching cartoons, or reading comic books. At this point one could be thinking that Mickey and Mallory are harmless because they are just cartoons, but in fact they are very dangerous, as we see threw out the movie. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish the imaginary from reality and this movie is one of those instances.

In some parts of the movie, the director is also trying to show us that violence breeds violence. Mallory was abused sexually as a child, and we could see that she uses this rage on certain victims. For example there is a guy from a gas station that she kills by first taunting him to have sex, and later killing him as if he were her father. After many murders committed by Mickey, he also has flashbacks of how he was physically abused as a child. When the audience sees all of this abuse, they can understand why Mickey and Mallory committed these murders, and sometimes forgetting that a murder is still a murder no matter what the reason behind it is. Throughout the movie, the media is trying to exploit the two murderess. We can see crowds, mostly made up of young adults, cheering for Mickey and Mallory. This sometimes happens in real life because people don’t separate the real from the fake. They get to caught up in the story because it does not sound like someone would actually do these things, so they fell like it is make-believe. When the viewers saw the crowds on TV cheering the murders on, it made them want to cheer them on as well. By exploiting murder on television, murder is being glamorized. Later on in the movie, the director tries to show that Mickey and Mallory do have a good side. He does this by letting us know that they did not want to kill the Native American because he was the only person that is showing them love. Mickey and Mallory believed that demons were the ones that caused them to commit all the murders. An according to Mickey and Mallory, love kills the demon, so when the Native was showing them love, he was also killing their demons. At the end of the movie, Mickey and Mallory do not want to kill anymore; they just want to be happy. At this point, the audience is happy for them because they want to stop their killing rampage, and they want to change their lives. This once again can cause the audience to side with Mickey and Mallory. After Mickey and Mallory are escaping from jail, the viewer wanted to see them escape because by that time the viewer started to like these two characters and understood why they did all those murders. After the movie was over most people would still think that murder is wrong, but some people don’t escape from the movie’s trance. There have been cases were people begin to copy actions from the movies, as was the case with this movie (there were segments on the news that there were copycat killers, and they blamed it on Natural Born Killers)(Patten). With all the glamorization of murder done in the movie, one’s point of view of murder can change, showing that film does have influences on people’s lives. Bibliography PATTEN,DOMINIC- “Rising Body Count” September, 1997 Copyright 1999 Salon Internet Inc.Salon Magazine Stone, Oliver – Natural Born Killers 1994 Warner Bros.