The beginning of the movie starts the viewer off with an example of the main characters many killing sprees. It seems like they’ve just been sitting in the diner, bored until the main female protagonist fires off from being insulted by a man who starts provocatively dancing at her. In due time she starts beating the man to a pulp and soon her boyfriend joins in by fighting with the man’s friend. They could have stopped there but then they decide to kill everyone in the bar minus one guy whom they chose by ‘eenie meenie miney moe”. It’s interesting to notice how she started the provocative dancing without realizing the consequences of what could happen when dancing in front of a group of men. This scene shows the viewer the severity of how insane the anti-heros are. Mickey and Mallory didn’t have a plan for this killing, neither do they, in most cases, for the rest of the movie. They do as they please without suffering consequences, for a while.
Black and white film is used interchangeably with color. A pattern seems to form of the black and white being used for when they are doing a crime and color being used for the high they get off of their life wasting explorations.
In the beginning credits the cinematography is very wild, as the camera attempts to capture the strange life that Mickey and Mallory live.The lighting has a crazy amount of colors and it’s hard to focus on just one thing. Sometimes animation is used to get across a spiritual feel to how Mickey and Mallory feel for each other.
The movies signals are contradictory. Warning signals go off in my head as certain inappropriate situations come up, inappropriate situations that happened in Mickey’s past, but the movie treats it as if it’s an everyday occurrence and even uses canned laughter as I personally am in horror. It’s very expressional to do this, the brain makes connections and you understand why, but it’s very unusual and almost uncanny.
The idea of making connections through expressive motifs of past media is how it is connected to the graphic style of the era, Post-modernism. Just like in Post-modernism, it embraces effects used in the past (canned laughter) and uses them to their advantage to get across an idea or feeling. For example, canned laughter was used in old 1950s sit-coms to cue laughter from the audience, but in Natural Born Killers it was used to press an idea of how much abuse Mickey was receiving on a daily basis in her home life. Post-modernism took people's knowledge of past references to make people understand and make connections in their head on the tone to the story.
Knowing how the two characters connected through their hardships makes one understand the reason why they adorn violence. Violence is how they took care of Mallory’s molestive father and neglective mother. The tragic past lead the viewer to connect, on some level with the anti-heros. Had Mallory not had as terrible background she would not have committed such despicable crimes in the future. Honestly they’re a very broken couple, trying their best to get thrills from murder to mask the terrible feelings of their past.
This movie reveals the disgusting nature of humans. I find the irony in their quote “tonight’s movie will be Escape From the Planet of the Apes’, during the prison, hilarious as the entire movie makes the entire planet sound like a jungle.
