in regard to this discussion and the ref.s to NBK. the following essay, which I have some sympathy for, was part of the Z-cluster newsletrter a few years ago (the z-cluster is a group of chaos magicians). not quite audience, not quite reviewers, not quite academic, it has its own peculiar take. any comments on the essay to the author at the bottom not to me please... matt lee _Natural Born Killers, The Demonology of Oliver Stone_ Rumor has it that Quentin Tarentino, author of the original screenplay of the cinematographic tour de force "Natural Born Killers",and the director, Oliver Stone, quarrelled over changes Stone made in the script. At a guess, and knowing Tarentino's wildly popular "Pulp Fiction", I would imagine that Tarentino, fundamentally interested in the possibility of redemption from a life of violence through an act of unnatural intervention, disagreed with Stone's interest in the relationship between violence and the media. Readers of this article may remember that Jules, played by Samuel L.Jackson, the Afro-American assassin in "Pulp Fiction", surviving gunfire that should have killed him and his partner, regarded the event as an act of divine intervention and gave up killing. His partner, Vince, played by John Travolta, ignored the message, and was soon shot to death. Fans of Stone will admit to his continual interest in the effects of popular culture on the human psyche. However, Stone is also interested in the problem of good and evil, an interest that is neither theological (as is the case with Scorsese in "The Last Temptation of Christ") nor philosophical (for example Coppolla in "Apocalypse Now"), but socio-psychological. His films focus on the origin of evil and whether it is a conditioned response or a natural inclination. Stone seems to believe that it may be both, but leans towards the nurture side of the argument. In addition, his films deal with deterministic issues, the extent to which freedom is possible in a person's life, the extent to which the path of the life of an individual is predestined. The film "Natural Born Killers" was generally misinterpreted as a satire on public fascination with mass murderers or an attack on the alleged encouragement of acts of violence by the entertainment industry. Neither view bears close analysis, despite disinformative press conferences by Stone. As Jon Katz noted, Stone encouraged the perception of "Natural Born Killers" as anattack on the media: >"My point was to show the American landscape in the l990s as reflected in the >media," Stone told his admiring America Online audience. He then added that he >hoped Natural Born Killers would "make my audience think about the >consequences of this social and cultural violence." Katz evidently swallowed this tidbit of disinformation whole, forgetting that he was discussing a movie director whose manipulation of the organs of the entertainment industry has allowed him to make very popular films about issues that American society as a whole would usually rather forget. Thus Stone directed public attention to the continuing psychic wound of the Vietnam War in "Platoon", the vicious treatment of Vietnam Vets in "Born on the Fourth of July", the habitual governmental rewriting of history in JFK, the treatment of Vietnamese immigrants in "Heaven and Earth" and the toxic effect of hierarchy in "Nixon". None of these films dealt with populartopics, but Stone not only managed to get them made, he also made them commercial successes, albeit in many cases, from video sales rather than theatrical release. This is strong sorcery indeed! My partner and I saw the film in Key West during a rare holiday and were quite surprised by the clear analysis of demonology outlined throughout the movie. For readers who have not seen the film, or for those of you whose memories of it have faded, I encourage you to rent or buy the video, and watch it with your finger poised on the pause button. The film is filled with very rapid, perhaps only 5 to 15 frames, shots of the faces of demons. References to demons recur throughout,and the movie can be analyzed as an essay on demonology. However, the demonology presented is not the familiar grimoire of traditional ceremonial magick, but the black magick of the chaos practitioner. That is to say Stone is interested in modern, or even postmodern approaches to the existence of demons. He tends to view them as psychological artefacts, but entities of such power that they may as well be real life horned and bloody creatures on an equal footing with human beings. To what extent the references to chaos magick, a form of postmodern ceremonial magick that uses popular culture as well as traditional methods to perform magickal acts, was deliberate is a matter for conjecture. I have always been of the school of criticism that allows a work of art to stand separate from its creator, just as a child may stand apart from its parent. It is also a matter of conjecture whether the frequent images of coyotes refer to Native American shamanism or is an allusion to the chaote/coyote pun of the Temple of Psychic Youth. However, the general theme of the film is concerned with the origin, development, and exorcism or assimilation of personal demons. The plot of the movie concerns a three week killing spree by Mickey and Mallory Knotts, played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, the events leading up to this spree, their capture, and, after the passage of a year, their successful escape from prison. Stone uses a variety of techniques to present this nar- rative, including cartoons, found images, sophisticated matting, alternating black and white and color, historical footage and as noted above, images that are shown on the screen so rapidly they can almost be characterized as subliminal. Stone satirises a number of television formats during the film, including situation comedies, news programs, and "true crime" dramatizations of the "America's Most Wanted" genre. Film critics seemed to have been particularly threatened by Stone's use of satire. Jon Katz wrote: >Oliver Stone has defected. He has joined the editorial boards, J-school >deans, religious fanatics, righteous boomers, Janet Renos, and other >blockheads who hold popular culture responsible for the decline of America. Read popular film critics for popular culture and Katz' plaint becomes slightly more comprehensible, although just as wrong. One woders how Katz reconciles Stone's happy ending with this alleged conservative view. Tom Keogh, relentlessly following the pack of other film critics who persisted in superficial analysis of the film, stated: >And that's the problem with using the jabber of trash culture against itself: >It's still jabber. While Stone certainly maintained a critique of the relationship between popular culture and violence throughout the film, the heart of the movie is concerned with more archetypal issues. Soon after the opening scene, a prelude that features many of the dominant motifs of the film (apparently random coloration, stop action photography, sudden turns into schmalz, horror, and complex visual and social jokes), Stone uses the form of a sitcom to describe Mallory's childhood and her first meeting with Mickey. In an extremely brave parody of himself, Rodney Dangerfield,in the role of Mallory's sexually abusive father, sets the scene for a dramatic denunciation of the modern late Neolithic nuclear family. Hakim Bey has ascribed many of the problems of contemporary society to the decision of paleolithic society to forsake hunter-gathering in favor of neolithic agriculture, a choice that necessitated the development of urban civilization and ultimately the nuclear family. It is to be noted that Mickey and Mallory, during their killing spree, return to a paleolithic, hunter gatherer lifestyle. Mickey, in his pivotal speech during his interview in prison by Wayne Gale (Robert Downey, Jr.), defines himself as a hunter, a kind of a feral rabbit, and as a "natural born killer". The elements that awaken the demon in Mallory are rapidly outlined as sexual abuse, the refusal of a parent to protect a child from an abuser, the need to develop violence as a means of self defense, and a sense of powerlessness. These are, of course, circumstances that are repeated again and again in the histories of the child- hoods of serial killers. Stone reinforces this point with flashbacks to Mickey's childhood also.Both of Mickey's parents are shown to be abusive, physically and mentally. In addition Mickey witnesses the violent suicide of his father, and has recurrent visions of his father's body, its head blown off, rising from an armchair in front of a television. Stone also points out that neither Mickey nor Mallory associate their traumatic childhoods with their adult violence. Both refuse to deal with childhood issuesthrough conventional therapy (Mallory strangles the psychiatrist who asks her about her father). Mickey explicitly denies that his environment made him into a killer, terming himself a "natural born killer." But this approach leads him to a position that cites evil as inborn. "We all knew we're just a piece of shit from the time we could breathe," he tells Wayne Gale, and Mallory is filmed in her high security cell singing "Born bad, naturally born bad". Stone's flashbacks to their respective childhoods, however, suggests that he ascribes their violence as much to nurture as to nature. Mickey states that he understands the nature of his violence. He tells Wayne Gale "Everyone got the demon within you. The demon lives in here. It feeds on your hate, your cuts, kills, rapes. It uses your weakness, your fears. Only the vicious survive." However, by this time Mickey has had a year in prison to consider the effect of the exorcism that the rattlesnake shaman per- forms before Mickey accidentally kills him. Prior to this he exclaimed to Mallory "I'm no demon." His self understanding has been bought at a price. Mickey and Mallory begin their killing spree by first murdering Mallory's mother and father. Mickey has been jailed for grand theft auto and is freed from a prison ranch by an act of divine or demonic intervention that creates a tornado and allows him to flee. Spiral symbolism recurs throughout the film in snakes and tornados. Spirals, in symbology, refer not only to the cyclical nature of the natural universe, but also to discursive, dualistic, or discriminatory thinking. Spirals are used to trap demons in English folk magick, and there is a sense in most mystical traditions that the fall from paradise is a result of dualistic thinking. Thus Adam and Eve eat of the the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (dualism), encouraged by the demon snake (dualistic thought). The murder of Mallory's parents can be seen as justified and cathartic, but their deaths do nothing but strengthen the demons within Mickey and Mallory. Standing on a high bridge, Mickey and Mallory bind themselves in marriage with their own blood, and as their blood falls, it turns into writhing cartoon snakes. In most Eastern metaphysics, and to an extent in western, paired snakes are a frequent metaphor for the lifeforce (the caduceus, the ida and pingali of Yoga). The Knotts' wedding rings are paired snakes, and Mickey, at one point later chides Mallory for removing her ring, directly ascribing magickal powers to their rings and stating that their whole venture is worthless if she loses hers. The suggestion is that the paired snakes are a symbol for psychic integration, in this case, Mickey hopes, through violence. Paired snakes, or a snake eating its own tail are archetypal symbols for integration, or the defeat of dualistic thinking. Thus the killing spree, in the terms of the metaphysics indicated in the imagery of the film, is an attempt by the Knotts to integrate their demons, to assimi- late them, to unify their personalities, fractured by the abuse of their childhood. But violence is no solution, even violence that takes the form of magickal sacrifice, for Mickey's bloodletting can certainly be seen in these terms, and as the spree continues the relationship between Mickey and Mallory begins to deteriorate, and the demons within them become so powerful that they begin to destroy their unifying love for one another. Lost in the badlands, the pair discover the hut of a Native American shaman and his grandson. The shaman is played by Russell Banks, a leader of AIM, and a figure of great power in his community. Stone's choice of Banks to play the role suggests he considers a shamanist or magickal approach to violence in society both politically and psychologically appropriate. The shaman tells his grandson that the demons whom he had seen in a vision years before havecome to their home. Lest there be any doubt, Stone projects the word "demon" onto Mickey and Mallory. The grandfather states Mallory has the "sad sickness", that she is "lost in a world of ghosts." This is an apt metaphor for the psychic damage that is caused by child abuse. It may also be a reference to one of the six worlds on the Wheel of Samsara in Buddhist symbolism, a world of craving that cannot be satisfied. In Mallory's case the craving is a desire to be loved. The boy asks his grandfather whether he can help them, and in reply the medicine man recounts a story of an old woman who nursed a poisonous snake back to health, only to be bitten by it. When the old woman asks the snake why he did it, he replies she knew he was a snake and he acted only out of his nature. Knowing this, the shaman chooses to help the Knotts, and, lulling them into a trance, performs an act of sorcery that changes Mickey and Mallory at a fundamental level, beginning the process of their healing. Unfortunately, the price for their redemption is not only their capture but his death. Mickey, waking from a nightmare of his childhood, shoots the shaman, an act that he later tells Wayne Gale is the only murder for which he feels remorse. He exclaims to Mallory that he shot the shaman by accident, but Mallory screams "There ain't no accidents", and then, in a critically important statement says "You are death. You killed life." The precarious balance that allowed the Knotts to remain free has ended. The two run from the hut, are bitten by rattlers, and after a shoot out in a drug store, are captured by, in the words of Tom Keogh,"another celebrity wannabe -- an obsessed, sexually-deviant detective named Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore)." Scagnetti is far more than this. As is clarified in a series of flashbacks and actual footage of the Texas Clock Tower massacre, Scagnetti has never been able to resolve his mother's death at the hands of the Texas sniper. His attempt to deal with the fracture in his personality caused by this childhood violenceleads him to become a detective specializing in tracking down serial killers,but this path does not work and Scagnetti becomes that which he hunts, a killerhimself, strangling, in one scene, a prostitute, and in another attempting to strangle Mallory. Scagnetti's abject failure at either resolving his own violence or possessing Mallory underscores the main theme, that overcoming the demons created by child abuse cannot be achieved through more violence. In fact Scagnetti and the Knotts are variations on a theme. Stone suggests appears to suggest that "love is the answer". This retro and superficial argument might seem plausible from a director as obsessed with the sixties and seventies as Stone, and Mickey does tell Wayne Gale that "the only thing that kills a demon is love." However, this statement is in the context of a speech that triggers a riot that eventually leads to Mickey and Mallory's escape, and so it may be viewed with some suspicion. More pertinent is Mickey's response as to whether he feels any remorse for the half a hundred people he has killed. "Was it worth it?", Wayne asks, in a piece of magnificent insincerity for which Robert Downey Jr. should have at least been nominated for an Oscar. Mickey's reply is the pivotal statement of the movie. He responds with a question of his own:"Was an instant of my purity," Mickey asks, "Worth a lifetime of your lies, Wayne?" Purity of intention, purity of action, this concept is at the base of bushido, a Japanese reformulation of Buddhist metaphysics that allowed the development of the samurai class. Sakyamuni Buddha strictly forbids killing, but the samurai considered themselves to be good Buddhists, even though their feudal obligation might require the taking of human life. To understand this is to understand the basis of buddha mind, of yoga, or of the process by which a magickal intention is actualized. Bushido maintains that pure action, freed of consequence (and thus of karma) is possible to one who sees clearly, whose mind has been freed from dualistic thinking, who is no longer in a battle between good and evil, but understands the interdependence of all phenomena. The magickal act that the Native American shaman accomplished was to free Mickey and Mallory from this type of dualistic thinking. Mickey voices this when he talks about his "instant of purity". As the riot breaks out in the prison, Mickey is allowed another "instant of purity". He breaks free from his captors, killing all but two of the guards in the interview room, takes Gale, his cameraman, and two guards hostage, and goes to find Mallory. He discovers her about to be murdered by Scagnetti, who is shortly killed, and the strange entourage of Mallory, Mickey, Wayne Gayle, and the others run through the rioting prison, apparently without a plan of escape. It is at this point that Stone introduces a strange character. A prisoner named Owen, in clean and pressed clothes appears out of the carnage and leads them first to a tiled room that looks like a cross between a bathroom and an abattoir, andthen out of the prison. When Mickey asks him what he wants for helping them, he says he only wants to go with them. Yet, after they leave the prison Owen is neither mentioned nor seen again. Moreover, Owen is not mentioned in the credits at the end of the movie. Owen is, in fact, "deus ex machina". He is Mickey's guardian angel, which until now Mickey has not known. After their escape he is reassimilated, or returns to the realms whence he came. In any event, his purpose is clear. He is there to show that the psychic reintegration of Mickey and Mallory has been achieved, that the magick of the shaman continues, and that redemption requires only purity, the clear mindedness of the arhat, the one pointedness of the magus. Certainly, Mickey and Mallory do kill Wayne Gale, but as Mickey says, it's not personal. He likes Wayne. He kills him because the lies that Wayne propagates are of a piece with the lies that feed the demons of popular culture, the lies that discourage self-analysis, that feed ignorance, that prevent self-knowledge, that sap the realization that the current of magick in the world is continuous and always accessible. Demons continue to infest the world, but the last scene shows Mickey and Mallory years later, with two children and Mallory pregnant with a third, travelling the country in a mobile home. Stone has driven home his point. It is possible to kill the demons created by childhood abuse, but only through an act of divine or unnatural intervention willed by a sorcerer and accepted by the possessed. This act can occur when the magickal intention is pure, and undivided. As Mickey says "A moment of realization is worth a lifetime of prayers." marik comments to [log in to unmask] 000000000000000)))))(((((000000000000000 INDIFFERENCE PRODUCTIONS we are the dreamers of dreams KEYMAN http://www.indifference.demon.co.uk MATT LEE http://www.ukscreen.com/company/mattlee MORRIGAN http://www.indifference.force9.co.uk ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo -----Original Message----- From: Email discussion salon for the journal and portal Film-Philosophy. [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Martin Barker Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 12:03 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Violence as . . . Anne If you are working on reviews as a resource for investigating the nature and criteria for responses to films, then you should definitely look at janet Staiger's book Interpreting Films - but you probably already knew that ... Martin