LATE IN THE MEDIA-CRAZED murder spree that is "Natural Born Killers," Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) point their guns at Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), the unctuous Australian star of a tabloid television show. That series, "American Maniacs," has helped make Mickey and Mallory pop-star murderers. Now Mickey turns on the reporter and speaks the truest lines in Oliver Stone's film. He says: "Killing you and what you represent is a statement. I'm not exactly 100 percent sure of what it's saying." But it's a statement, all right.
It wouldn't be fair to reveal whether Mickey pulls the trigger on Wayne, but his confusion about what the trash-TV reporter represents is a perfect reflection of the film's own problems. "Natural Born Killers" seems to say something about the insidious influence of the media -- tabloids and celebrity journalism in print as well as on television. Yet under its entertaining flash-and-dazzle surface, the film's statement is "TV can be a bad influence." No kidding.
"Natural Born Killers" is the first and the least thought-provoking of several films this season that grapple with the love/hate relationship of audiences to the media. Mr. Stone's sensory assault of a movie was followed by Robert Redford's elegant, profound "Quiz Show," which opened on Wednesday. And coming to the New York Film Festival on Oct. 6 is "The Troubles We've Seen," Marcel Ophuls's playfully serious documentary about reporting from Bosnia. When works as different and ambitious as these share a common subject -- that television can turn mass murder, the American dream or even war into entertainment -- the attention to television comes to resemble an obsession.
It's too easy to suggest, though, as "Natural Born Killers" does, that television is the Devil. (A kindhearted American Indian, about to be murdered, sees the words "demon" and "too much TV" superimposed on Mickey.) A sophisticated depiction of television must portray the attraction as well as the repulsion it evokes. Television wouldn't be an overwhelming influence, after all, if people didn't love to watch it.
"Quiz Show" understands television's allure and more; the film's grip on the audience echoes the intense connection between Americans and their favorite shows. The story of how the patrician Charles Van Doren disillusioned the nation when it learned that his game-show victories were rigged goes beyond a simple attack on television. In "Quiz Show" the telegenic Charles Van Doren takes the even grander shape of the movie-star-handsome Ralph Fiennes. This subtle actor's golden-boy manner suggests much about the heroic images -- deeply rooted in American history and dreams of upward mobility -- that television captured and enhanced in the 1950's.
When Herb Stempel (John Turturro), the belligerent loser from Queens, tries to blow the whistle on the deception he has also taken part in, no one -- especially the Harvard-educated Government investigator Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow) -- wants to believe that this pathetic creature could be morally superior to the glittering, born-for-stardom Van Doren. The film chooses not to believe it, either. Think of how much less palatable, less mainstream the picture would have been if the central character were Stempel, that hard-to-love, charmless man.
"I have deceived my friends, and I have millions of them," Van Doren tells a Congressional committee in the film. No one stops to question the dizzying truth of that remark. In a way that is both real and absurd, television created bonds of friendship and loyalty between the star and his viewers. Struggling with his conscience, Van Doren goes from hero to fallen hero and remains the All-American no one wants to think badly of.
The strength of Paul Attanasio's script is that it depicts the way immense social issues were played out on the television screen in the days when television was still young. "Quiz Show" is the story of social problems that hadn't yet shattered the calm surface of the Eisenhower years: Protestants vs. Jews, money vs. intelligence, entertainment vs. learning, upper class vs. working class. The brilliance of Mr. Redford's direction is that he captures all this just the way television itself did -- smoothly, the calm surface belying epic battles beneath.
The opening and closing scenes suggest a perilous mass-media journey through history. At the start, crowds rush home to watch the quiz show "Twenty-One," and the NBC network proudly announces that the show is carried "coast to coast." Mr. Redford doesn't lean on the fact that we're witnessing the birth of the global village. He simply places us there.
As the final credits appear, faces of audience members laugh in eerie slow motion, magnified and horrendous. We are looking at ourselves as a hapless audience, appalled at our former naivete. "Quiz Show" stays with you, resonating long after you've left the theater, while the kinetic dazzle of "Natural Born Killers" is gone in a flash.
Yet Mr. Stone, too, has made the movie his subject demanded. "Quiz Show" depicts Van Doren on the cover of Time; "Natural Born Killers" depicts Mickey and Mallory on Newsweek. Not much else has stayed the same. Historically, Mr. Stone's story picks up long after "Quiz Show" ends. Television has turned into a forum for instant, disgusting celebrity, in which Charles Manson is a ratings king.
What the film misses is a sense of why television is alluring, of how a mass-murderer can become a star. The more Mr. Stone strains to say something important, the more the intended satire and substance elude him. He seems to have confused a big idea with a broad, simplistic one.
Critics who have been wringing their hands about the film's violence and shallowness dismiss it too easily, though. "Natural Born Killers" is a hit, its box-office appeal creepily echoing the popularity of shows like "American Maniacs." Surely Mr. Stone intended this mirroring effect, but reflecting the appeal doesn't come close to explaining it.
The perverse appeal of "Natural Born Killers" seems to be that it creates the illusion of making a provocative statement. Yet it never challenges the audience's conventional assumptions about television. The film plays into viewers' fascination with tabloid TV as well as their sneaking suspicion that it's bad for them; "Natural Born Killers" presents itself as a guilty pleasure that audiences don't have to feel guilty about.
And the seductive style provides an edge the film doesn't earn. Mr. Downey is so smarmy, funny and convincing that he makes us forget what a cheap, easy target his character is. The ultra-quick cuts, the cartoonlike inserts, the backdrops of newsreels that connect Mickey and Mallory to World War II are portentous, yet anyone who analyzes the film's lame satire won't be surprised by any of it.
THE BANALITY OF THE film's influence is creepier than anything in the movie. Five days after the film opened and became the No. 1 movie in the country, The New York Daily News ran a front-page story about an accused murderer, under the headline "Natural Born Killer." Two days later, after a man who was convinced that television was poisoning his mind killed an NBC stagehand, the New York Post's page 1 headline read "TV Networks Zapped My Brain" and New York Newsday's front-page headline was "TV Drove Me Crazy." No one can blame Oliver Stone for the way his film is used, but the movie's shallowness encourages a simple-minded view that TV is bad.
The subject of television's influence demands a more complex treatment. Marcel Ophuls, whose previous films have been authoritative historical documents about World War II ("The Sorrow and the Pity" and "Hotel Terminus"), has thrown himself into the subject, too.
"The Troubles We've Seen" is more than a series of interviews with television and newspaper reporters covering Bosnia. Mr. Ophuls interweaves these scenes with newsreels and clips of mainstream movies: Bing Crosby sings "White Christmas" in "Holiday Inn," and the Marx Brothers romp through "Duck Soup." "The Troubles We've Seen" creates the sense of trying to grab history as it swirls around us. Demonstrating that history is created through a mix of movies and reportage, Mr. Ophuls uses the documentary form to consider the difficulty of establishing anything like documentary truth.
If the sense that history is fluid seems obvious, consider the remark of a star anchor on French television. He justifies reality-based programs by telling Mr. Ophuls, "Show me a reality show that reconstructs a reality that didn't exist." The producers of "Twenty-One" and Wayne Gale himself couldn't have said it better.
Source: New York Times
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