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The 25 Greatest Films of the 1990s, Part 8

© Jason O'Brien

Well, only two weeks are left of this special nine-part series revealing the 25 films I selected as the best of the 1990s decade. Now it's down to the top four ... These four films were all incredibly powerful, singularly unique and it was difficult to choose among them, but here they are:

#4. Natural Born Killers
Directed by Oliver Stone
Starring Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey Jr., Tommy Lee Jones

Oliver Stone's 1994 masterpiece is a film which is still being attacked to this very day. This film is not a film that in any way glorifies violence. Let me try once again to explain what this film is about and why the violence is displayed as it is.

Oliver Stone was certainly not attempting to incite violence with this film. Stone was attempting to make a film that made us experience the true nature of violence, in order to see how absurd it is when the media makes killers heroes.

For example, we have a whole subculture in this country who worship Charles Manson, who somehow think he's cool. But what if these people actually saw an actual film of the murders committed, and actually saw Sharon Tate's pregnant stomach being stabbed repeatedly? I have a feeling they would feel quite differently after Manson. How about those people that thought the O.J. case was some kind of fun diversion to watch day in and day out? If they could actually see the crime scene or autopsy photographs of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, I doubt they would think it such lightweight fare, and that was Stone's point and message in the film.

We have become a society who subsists on the tragedies that come across the airwaves. Even more horribly, we somehow end up making killers some kind of sick mythic heroes, and I believe that's because we never really see the true reality of the horror they perpetrated. That's why Stone first made us witness the violence and be shocked by it, which is a rare thing to accomplish nowadays when we tend to be so desensitized to violence.

Once we saw these truly horrific crimes and saw how sick these two people were, then we could appreciate the absurdity of Robert Downey Jr.'s character, a media person who revels in their crimes, and hopes to make himself successful on their popularity. We see how the public responds to this media glorification, and the film is meant to show how wrong and sick it is to make killers our heroes, and also to shed light on the real influences that make people kill, the influences in childhood. We see Mickey's abuse by his father, and ultimately his father's suicide. We see the sexual abuse by Mallory's father, albeit in absurdist circumstances (again to make a point), and realize that those are the influences that warped Mickey and Mallory, and we get an even stronger message.