Diego, I don't know how much the following ideas will help you, but I hope they
will.
First though, I don't see _Natural Born Killers_ as a violence-as-bliss movie
so much as I see it as a violence-as-style movie. The direction taken in
_Natural Born Killers_ is that the killers are record breakers; they are merely
running up the score, so to speak. Record breakers get media attention as well
as all the glamour, celebrity, and fame that belongs to them as media darlings.
I think the key scene in the movie is the scene with the Native American. After
all, this scene has all the clichés relative to the idea of the spiritual
journey, but I don't see a spiritual journey here. I see a violation, a kind of
sacrilege. Perhaps I have yet to make full sense of this scene. Maybe it works;
maybe it doesn't.
As a movie that purports a message of violence-as-bliss, I think you may have a
good case to show that _NBK_ does just that, but even if you do have such a
case, I think the argument of violence-as-bliss can only serve as a rhetorical
strategy of the killers in their pursuit of style . . . . After all, violence
does not necessarily bring them bliss, does it? Their pursuit is celebrity, and
I think this issue, more than any other, links _NBK_ to _Bonnie and Clyde_,
where celebrity itself becomes a driving force behind the violence.
Too, _The Executioner's Song_ may be a better representative of a
violence-as-bliss movie than _NBK_.
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The Bliss Movement: In the early to middle 1800s, both American and German
literature begin to incorporate a mixture of Eastern religion and Kantianism.
This movement is evident in Emerson and Thoreau as well as in Schopenhauer, but
in Schopenhauer, the question of the will becomes paramount. How does one bring
an end to the eternal striving of a Faust--by aligning one's will with that of
the universe? by . . . . The end to the will is bliss.
A Star is Born: A young Nietzsche writes _The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit
of Music_: the focus is on the Dionysian, the chaotic, and the life-affirming.
Critics expose the work as lacking in scholarship, but the fascination with
violence as the source of art has its articulation. Art is the ritualization of
fundamental violence. Realism, Naturalism, Expressionism . . . all partake of
this sense of fundamental violence.
Wagner/Nietzsche: The young Nietzsche adores Wagner; the late Nietzsche
lambastes Wagner as a decadent who returns out of weakness to Christianity:
Wagner is Parisifal. The late Nietzsche also describes Wagnerian music as
"Rausch"--noise. Nietzsche formulates the aesthetic code for a rock star with
his own history of Greek theater and with his criticism of Wagner. Wagner, it
seems, really is a kind of rock star.
D.H. Lawrence: Lawrence gives the violence-as-bliss theme his own twist: _The
Plumed Serpent_.
Primitivism/Modernism: Frazer, Picasso, the explanation of ritual as a codified
kind of violence, re-mythologizing in T. S. Eliot, William Yeats, and Claude
Levi-Strauss, the primacy of violence as style in Hemingway, Faulkner, . . . .
Existentialism/Documentary: Camus inherits Hemingway: _The Stranger_ . . .
mindlessness and violence.
_In Cold Blood_ . . . .
French New Wave/Warhol: Violence as Style, Fame . . . .
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Another Model: Paschal Sacrifice--The Easter Pageant:
. . . betrayal, arrest, trial, torture, execution, resurrection, . . . of
Christ.
. . . criminality and violence and what it means to be a god.
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Can violence ever satirize violence?
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JMC
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