The MTV Influence on Editing I

What I have called the MTV influence on editing is principally associated with that phenomenon of the past 20 years, the music video. Initially viewed as a vehicle to sell records, those 3–30 minute videos have captured a young audience looking for quick, evocative visual stimuli presented as a background for the aural presentation of a single song or series of songs.

Although this style of film was further popularized by films such as Flashdance (1983), the form has its roots in more experimental filmmaking and certainly in the success of the short form, the television commercial. The MTV style is today principally associated with television although its influence has superseded television. By sidestepping the traditional set of narrative goals which include a linear narrative and a focus on plot and character, the MTV style has instead replaced it with a multilayered approach. There may be a story. There may be a single character. But the likelihood is that place, feeling, or mood will be the primary layer of the music video. It is also likely that the traditional sense of time and place with the conventions that are used to reference film time to real time will be replaced by a far less direct correlation. In fact, many music videos attempt to establish their own reference points between reality and film time. This may mean great leaps in time and place and it is the vividness of the resulting imagery that provides the new correlation. In the world of the music video, real place is far less important. In fact, they are not as important as references to other media and other forms, to the landscapes of science fiction, and to the horror film. And with regards to time, time in the music video is any time. With time and place obliterated, the film and video makers are free to roam in the world of their imagined media meditation. And their audience, young and rebellious, is free to feel the simulation of their freedom and to celebrate their rejection of tradition, from our perspective, the rejection of the tradition of narrative.

Because the MTV style sidesteps traditional narrative, it is of interest to us. How does the form coalesce to capture its audience? By focussing on the most aggressive stylist of our day, Oliver Stone, we will try to understand how the MTV style can be used and why it has such a powerful grip on the public imagination.

   ORIGINS

Although Luis Buñuel's early antinarrative experiments in Un Chien d'Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930) bear certain similarities to the contemporary music video, the more critical shaping device is music that has a narrative as well as emotional character. This means that we have to look to the two early Beatles’ films, A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965) for a starting point in the mid-60s. Very quickly, the Lester films were joined by John Boorman's film with The Dave Clark Five, Having a Wild Weekend (1965). Later, Lester's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) and the non-musical series of Monty Python films that followed in the 70s (And Now for Something Completely Different, [1972], Monty Python and the Holy Grail, [1975], and Life of Brian, [1979]) added stylistic elements to the new genre.

How these films differed from traditional narratives and musicals needs to be articulated. Traditional musicals generally presented a narrative together with interspersed musical or dance numbers. Films such as The Pirate (1948), An American in Paris (1951), and Invitation to the Dance (1957) were exceptions. The best of the musicals, such as Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Funny Face (1957), and West Side Story (1961) found a visual style to match the energy and emotion of the narratives.

Turning to the Lester films, A Hard Day's Night and Help!, on one level they are musicals for the main characters are performers. The music is integral to our understanding of the film narratives. But whereas there is a narrative that is elaborate and character-driven in the traditional musical, we must accept the fact that the narratives in A Hard Day's Night and Help! have far more modest goals. In fact, we are hard-pressed to find common sense as well as feeling arising out of the narratives of these films. In essence the narratives were an excuse for the musical numbers, which themselves were used to highlight what the Beatles represented—inventiveness, anarchy, energy. These feeling states were far more important to Richard Lester the director than a narrative about a concert or about the disappearance of a ritual ring from India and the efforts by a cult to retrieve it.

Here there are the first stylistic elements of the music video. The shaping device is the music. Narrative is less important; a feeling state is more important. From an editing standpoint, this translates as making the jump cut more important than the match cut. It also implies a centrality for pace. Given the low involvement quotient of the narrative, it is to pace that the role of interpretation falls. Consequently, pace becomes the source of energy and new juxtapositions that suggest anarchy and inventiveness.

When we move to the Monty Python films, we add a literary base for reference and a self-reflexing acknowledgement that the characters can step in and out of character and speak to the audience directly. This process results in the acknowledgement of media, of manipulation, and the more subtle notion that in spite of self-reflexivity, the form can be even more manipulative as you let your audience in on it—it's a joke, it's funny, and you, the audience, have been let in on the construction of the joke. Which in turn privileges the viewer and involves the viewer in a more conscious manner. These elements, the literary metaphor and the self-reflexive, fill out the repertoire of the music video. But over time the referent points move beyond literature and film to other media: television, journalism, the world of comic books, and now the world of computer games.

   THE SHORT FILM

The short film and its relationship to the short story, as well as to the world of the visual arts, has yielded many explorations of form, the creations of particular styles. The work of Luis Buñuel, Maya Daren, and the more recent work of Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol are marked by a number of characteristics we now find in the MTV style. So too video art. The antinarrative position of Buñuel, and the stream of consciousness visual style of Maya Daren have far more in common with the MTV style than they do with mainstream filmmaking. Filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage are interested in layering images—not to create a special effect but rather in a self-reflexive way to suggest this media experience, his film, is both a manipulation and reflection upon the tolls of that manipulation. And few filmmakers take a stylistic position as minimalist as Andy Warhol. Indeed, the position is so clearly about style as opposed to content, that the experience of his films becomes a comment on the medium more than any other interpretation (i.e., society, the art world).

All of these filmmakers also create a distinctive style and once their audience is in tune with their intentions, they create as powerful an identification of the audience with their work as did Richard Lester in his Beatles films. The only difference between these filmmakers and the MTV style is the role of sound, particularly music, as a shaping device. From a visual point, however, the MTV style has a great deal in common with the short film, particularly the experimental film.

   WHERE WE ARE NOW—THE STATE OF THE MTV STYLE

Because of the volume of music videos produced to promote records and because TV stations and international networks welcome programming that appeals to the 15- 25-year-old audience, MTV is not only here to stay, it is a powerful force in broadcasting. Its interrelationship with advertising underpins its influence.

Consequently, we must view the MTV style as a new form of visual storytelling. Part narrative, part atmosphere, sound intensive, and image rich, the form has a remarkable appeal to the new generation of film and video makers whose media viewing experience is preponderantly television.

Although the MTV style has not made a broad entry into the feature film, it has characterized much of the style of those directors who began in commercials—Adrian Lyne (Flashdance, 1983), Tony Scott (Top Gun, 1986), and Ridley Scott (Thelma & Louise, 1991). It has also accounted for the success of at least one new director, Ben Stiller, in his debut film, Reality Bites (1994). New directors such as Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, 1993), and older directors such as Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, 1990) are attracted to the ideology and style of MTV. But few filmmakers have leaped as headlong into the MTV style as Oliver Stone in his film Natural Born Killers (1994). We will look at Natural Born Killers in some detail later in the chapter, but before we do, it's necessary to highlight the key characteristics of the MTV style.

   THE IMPORTANCE OF FEELING STATES

One of the central features of the MTV style is the importance of creating a definite feeling state. This is not an issue of the need to challenge the primacy of plot. Rather it begins with the close relationship of the MTV style with music.

Music—particularly without lyrics—synthesizes human emotion. The brain processes sound. It was Bergman who faster than images stated the goal of the film experience—it should be like music. This equation of music with heightened emotional experience was applied by Bergman to the overall experience of film. The sound of music in this sense is even more concentrated than the film experience itself. And the music of a single short song can be viewed as an even greater concentration of emotion.

When we add the lyrics of a song, which tend to the poetic, we are given a direction for the emotion of the music. If there is a sense of narrative, it yields from those poetic lyrics. But to repeat, the purpose of music and lyrics is to give a defined emotional state to the feeling state that is created.

A feeling state can be sharp and deep or it can be developmental and dreamlike. In either case, the state creates a disjunctive, disconnected sense to a narrative. Because of the depth of feeling of a single sequence associated with a single piece of music, it is difficult to create a continuum of narrative. Rather we have in the longer MTV-style film a series of disjunctive sequences, memorable in and of themselves, but hardly organized on an effectively rising arc of action characteristic of the narrative film. This is why there are moments one remembers in films like Flashdance or Top Gun, but one is left without a powerful sense of the characters or the story. This does not diminish the overall film but it does make it a different kind of experience than the conventional film.

Feeling states can also appeal as dream fragments—pleasurable, but not entirely real, in the way the experience of a traditional narrative tends to be. Clearly a film that concentrates on feeling states will only appeal to an audience accustomed to it—that young audience that views and enjoys a series of visualized music videos one after the other, with no narrative connection but where each provides a distinct sensation or feeling. This audience does not mind the fragmentation nor the pace nor the brevity of the experience. For this audience, the feeling state is a desirable visual-audio experience.

   THE DOWNGRADING OF THE PLOT

It's not that this new audience is disinterested in plot. The success of films such as Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995) and Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995) with a young audience is proof that the narrative drive and energy in both of these love stories appeals to that audience. Ironically, both are based upon the novels of Jane Austen. But these films, although popular, are not “icons” to this young audience. Those filmic icons are Reality Bites, Natural Born Killers, and Slacker (1991). These icons are notable for their put-down of plot, of the elevation of adolescent rage and anarchy over the continuum of the happy ending in Clueless and Sense and Sensibility.

When plot is less important, incident, or scene, takes on a different meaning, and character becomes everything. When the logic of plot progression is less pressing, set-pieces can stand more readily. Mood, alternating shifts of mood, fantasy, play, nightmare, all can be juxtaposed more readily because their contribution to the plot progression is unnecessary.

Add to that a character who stands against the prevailing values of the society, and for the destruction of those values, and you have the hero/main character of the MTV-style film: Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites, Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers, Anne Parillaud in La Femme Nikita. It's as if the Brando character in The Wild One (1954) has returned and again answered the 50s question, “What are you rebelling against?” The answer: “What have you got?!”

In a standard plotted narrative, such a main character would seem reactive and immature, rootless and without a goal. In the fragmented narrative of the MTV-style film, the character is a hero in a fragmented world, a hero who can recite poetry and kill in the same breath, a hero who can't be held accountable It's his world that has made him so.

Having degraded (or downgraded) plot simulates the world of these heroes. Their audience recognizes that world with ease. It's the world they live in, the TV world, the video game world. They see it as a game to cope with the incomprehensibility of that world. For them, the MTV style is a tool, a stimuli, and a philosophy. Less plot facilitates the audience entry into the MTV world view.

   DISJUNCTIVE EDITING—THE OBLITERATION OF TIME AND SPACE

In order to create feeling states and to downgrade plot and its importance, the filmmaker must also undermine the gestalt impulse—to make sense of what we see. To put in another way, the viewer will organize a pattern of sounds and images into a progression of thought, an applied linearity, even if one is not available on the surface.

To counteract the impulse to organize those images and sounds into the narrative that may not be present, the filmmaker must challenge the impulse more deeply. She must undermine the sense of time and space in the MTVstyle film or video.

To understand how this is done, we must back up to some issues raised in Chapters 8, 9, and 10. In the work of Kurosawa, we saw him visually play with the idea that the truth was relative, that it was influenced by whoever was telling the story (Rashomon, 1951). In Resnais's work memory, the past and its intervention posed the question about time and its continuum. If a character is gripped by events of the past, what does this mean for their current conduct and perception (Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 1960)? Fellini went even further to suggest not simply the past, but the character's fantasy/fantasies about the past overshadowed the present (8½, 1963). In the case of Antonioni, place and the environment overwhelms character and perception. Place obliterates the time gestalt of thinking and replaces it with the objective power of place. Will, an expression of character's goals, is replaced by will not, cannot; place replacing time in importance (L'Eclisse, 1962).

Peter Brook poses questions about reality through his exploration of performance, and his understanding of history (Marat/Sade, 1966). Again, time and place are reconfigured. They become relative and less important. Herzog and Wenders both challenge the notions of personal history and objective reality (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1974; Paris, Texas, 1984).

Together these filmmakers and numerous others have challenged conventional notions of time and place in their work. Their artistic advances in turn opened up options for those working with the MTV style. Central to that style is the obliteration of a conventional sense of time and place. Even though Tony Scott's Top Gun has a location for the story (the Southwest) and a time (the 80s, the last phase of the Cold War), its actual dream state—the marine pilot as invincible hero and lover—actually bears little resemblance to training, to the history of the 80s; rather it resembles a cartoon, a piece of advertising. To succeed, Scott has to pay lip service to time and place but little more.

By focusing on the feeling state, by mixing dream and fear, by obliterating history, and replacing it with a new mythology, Scott uses style to move us into a less narrative experience, a more sensation experience. And he succeeds because of the work of Fellini, Antonioni, Kurosawa, and Brook in their challenges to our sense of time and place.

What we haven't focussed on yet, but now turn to, is the mechanical editing choices that help the filmmaker obliterate time and place. The first choice is to use many more close-ups than long shots. This choice withdraws the context that, when present, lends credibility to the sequence. The second choice is to emphasize foreground over background in the frame. Whether this is done by using telephoto shots rather than side angle or through the crowding of the character into the front of the frame, which can, with a wideangle shot, distort the character, both choices yield the same result—withdrawal of visual context. Add the art direction—lighting choices that move away from realism—the sepia of Top Gun, the gauzed images of Flashdance, the hot reds alternating with the cool blues in Tony Scott's Crimson Tide (1995), all when combined with the oversize of the close-up and of the foreground image, undermine context. Add the use where possible of the jump cut and the overuse of pace and we have the mechanical editing repertoire of the obliteration of time and place.

   THE SELF-REFLEXIVE DREAM STATE

To create a dream state is to imply that the viewer temporarily loses oneself in that state. The self-reflexive dream state suggests that on another level, viewers watch or reflect upon themselves dreaming, or to put it another way, to be simultaneously very involved and not involved at all.

Turning back to the Monty Python films, as well as the Beatles films, there is in both the acknowledgement by the characters that they are performing as well as participating. Almost ironic in tone, these performances veer wildly from viewing the characters as innocents and then as having enough mastery over the situation, that they step out of the role and address us, the audience, directly.

Whether the technique is Brechtian or closer to Beckett, the device allows for a range of genres—adventure to satire—that helps the MTV-style film transcend what could easily become marginalized to pictures for the music. It reinforces an attitude in its audience—the will to reconfigure their world via their dreams, all the while acknowledging, “Just playing, folks!”

But the self-reflexivity plays another, more serious, role in the MTV style. Because self-reflexivity acknowledges that it is a film being watched (as opposed to reality), this creates a tolerance for ranging more widely. It pulls the film closer to theatre, where the suspension of belief is far higher than in film (which looks real). This freedom allows for shifts in feeling, narrative, fantasy, etc., without needing to make those shifts plausible. It is after all only a film you are watching. “Go with it,” is the message to its audience, and knowing that it is a media event (unlike a real dream), the audience is tolerant of those shifts in tone, time, place, etc., that are undertaken.

   THE MEDIA LOOKS AT ITSELF

Just as the character stands apart and comments on himself within the film, so too does the media. The MTV style embraces a self-reflexivity of the particular form, film or video, upon itself, its power, and its manipulative techniques. The MTV style also embraces a referential base to comment upon as well as to include other media.

Top Gun deploys and celebrates the techniques of the TV commercial; the recent music videos of Madonna reference the paintings of Frida Kahlo; and Michael Jackson's music video, Thriller, is a mix of West Side Story meets The Wiz (1978), which in turn is based on The Wizard of Oz (1939). Flashdance is itself a long series of music videos.

One can imagine music videos referencing key journalistic events (an election, a revolution), famous TV situation comedies, and various other media renderings of historical events: the deaths of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Mahatma Gandhi, for example, as well as media interpretations of serious social issues (AIDS, racism, spousal abuse). The MTV style will mimic and comment upon the other media's presentation of such a key events or issues.

By doing so, a reductive view can be confirmed and transcended. It says to its audience, “Everything can be criticized and by using this style, even the critics can be criticized.” Rather than providing the audience with the restorative power of the classic narrative, the MTV style plays to paranoia and to narcissism. By criticizing the media itself, the MTV style criticizes the power of the media and confirms in its audience the suspicion that there is no trust out there and the last element of the society that is trustworthy is the media itself.

Having looked at the elements of the MTV style, we're ready to turn our attention to a detailed look at Oliver Stone, who represents the most artistic use of the style to date.

   OLIVER STONE'S CAREER

After leaving the film program at New York University, Oliver Stone made his way as a screenwriter. His credits include Midnight Express (1978), Scarface (1983), and Year of the Dragon (1985).

As a writer-director, Stone is responsible for Salvador (1986), Platoon (1986), Wall Street (1987), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), JFK (1991), Natural Born Killers (1994), and Nixon (1995).

He has made at least three films about the Vietnam war (including Heaven and Earth, 1993), two films about American presidents and at least two other films about the media and violence (Salvador and Natural Born Killers). Aside from the seriousness of the subject matter and a good deal of narrative bravado, Stone has a very distinctive style—lots of camera motion and pace. He has often been criticized for manipulating—whether it is in JFK or Nixon, he is quite willing to use editing, juxtaposition, and pace to make whatever point he wishes. Although powerfully fascinated by the forceful nature of the medium, Stone is not beyond criticizing those forceful tools he himself uses. This is the source of the great controversy in JFK. He uses simulated footage of real life events, re-photographs them and then proceeds to declare that he is using those same tools to reveal “the truth.” In this sense, he is the ideal self-reflexive filmmaker.

But to be fair to Stone, he is also part of a tradition from Eisenstein to Peckinpah of directors who see editing as the real art of directing. In Natural Born Killers, Stone uses this self-reflexivity to create a multilayered film experience. Using the MTV style, Stone creates an explosive, creative commentary on family, violence, and the media in America.

   NATURAL BORN KILLERS

Natural Born Killers, from a story by Quentin Tarantino, tells the story of two mass murderers, Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis). The film begins with a killing spree, moves back to their meeting and their three-week sweep through the Southwest. In those three weeks, they kill 52 people. They are captured, after being snakebitten, while looking for snakebite serum in a drugstore. Their captor, Detective Jack Scagnetti, seems as pathological as the two young killers. The story flashes forward a year to the maximum-security prison where they are held.

It seems that a television journalist, Wayne Gale (Robert Downey, Jr.) has a television show, “American Maniacs,” where he profiles serial killers. The public is quite fascinated by Mickey and Mallory, and Wayne has fed the fascination. He proposes to Mickey and to the warden (Tommy Lee Jones) that he, Wayne, interview Mickey live on Super Bowl Sunday. Both parties are agreeable but the warden wants Mickey and Mallory put away for good. They have incited trouble in the prison; the other prisoners idealize them. He invites Jack Scagnetti to take both out of prison and dispose of them right after the interview.

This doesn't happen because the interview is so inflammatory. Mickey celebrates that he does what he does so well because he was born to it—he's a natural born killer. Upon hearing this, the prison erupts, the convicts go on a rampage. In the confusion, Mickey disarms a guard and begins to kill again. He takes hostages, including Wayne Gale, and they free Mallory and kill Jack Scagnetti; while the majority of hostages are killed by police fire. Using a guard and Wayne Gale as human shields, while Gales’ TV camera records it all, Mickey and Mallory make good their escape.

In the woods, on live TV, they kill Wayne Gale, who they claim is worse than a killer, a parasite, and they go on, it seems, to live happily ever after. Mallory speaks of it being time to have a family.

This narrative description can't give more than an outline of Natural Born Killers. The film is actually organized in a series of set-pieces—the pre-credit introduction to Mickey and Mallory in a roadside diner; they kill all but one of the customers. A television situation comedy show follows. It introduces Mickey and Mallory, her abusive father, the impotent mother, and the young brother. This show is complete with laugh track. The show is called “I Love Mallory.” The next sequence introduces Australian-American reporter Wayne Gale and his television show, “American Maniacs.” On the show, they do a dramatic reenactment of two Mickey and Mallory killings. London, Tokyo—the media spreads the fame of these killers around the world.

A set-piece of Mickey and Mallory in a motel room follows. They have a spat and he amuses himself with a female hostage; she amuses herself with a gas station attendant. When he recognizes her, she kills him. A sequence with an Indian who handles rattlesnakes follows. The Indian seems to be the first person Mickey respects. Accidentally, Mickey kills the Indian. As the lovers run away, both are snakebitten. A set-piece in a drug mart follows. Both are ill. In this sequence the lovers are captured by the police. A year later in jail, Wayne Gale requests an interview with Mickey. Mickey agrees. In this sequence the hero worship of Mickey and Mallory by young people is highlighted. The interview is the next set-piece. Jack Scagnetti's parallel encounter with Mallory is the next. The strong sexual current of this sequence is juxtaposed with the romantic dimension of the first part of the live interview with Mickey—the theme is love can tame the demon. The prison riot is the next set-piece, followed by Mickey's escape. Shortly thereafter follows a final sequence in Mallory's cell. The next sequence captures their escape from prison. In the woods, the last taping of Wayne Gale's show ends with his murder on camera. The title sequence that follows is a merging of past and future images. They imply that Mickey and Mallory survive and have a family.

Looking at the sequences in a general way, one notices how much each resembles a music video. Music is the overall shaping device. The first sequence begins with Leonard Cohen's “Waiting for a Miracle.” The last sequence is shaped by Cohen's “The Future.” Thirty songs are used in between.

Each sequence has within itself remarkable latitude to use images of the characters, images of animals, theatrical images of monsters, dragons, headless bodies, presented in a highly stylized manner: black and white, natural color, filtered color (usually blood red), TV images of the Menendez brothers and O. J. Simpson trials, TV images from the 50s, filmic images from The Wild Bunch, for example, and animated cartoon-like drawings. Add to this distortions from morphing, highlight shifting to low light, and you have a range of images that runs the gamut from natural to non-natural. Often these images will be thrown together in the same sequence.

The capacity to reflect on the media itself is ever-present. Beyond the references to other films, much is made in the film of the role of television in American life. The introduction of Mickey and Mallory's meeting is presented in the form of a situation comedy. Three of their clashes with the law are presented in the form of a Saturday morning cartoon. And the actuality television style of Wayne Gale's television show, “American Maniacs,” to sketch their career and to demonstrate its power on the young as well as the convicts in prison, is a frightening condemnation of the role of television in the promotion of violence.

Finally each sequence uses black-and-white and color images intertwined to pose the question: Which is imagined and which is real? The crossover doesn't make the answer any clearer. Sometimes the black-and-white images seem to be remembrances of Mickey's childhood. At other times they reference in a journalistic way the faces and feelings of the other convicts in maximum-security prison. In terms of color, it ranges from the unreal use of green as a motif in the diner sequence that opens the film. The green is the key lime pie Mickey eats, and it is the cartoon color of the diner. That green can alternate with black-and-white or with blood red. In each case the sharp shifts in color create a sense of stylization that affirms this is a media event and manipulation you are watching. Enjoy! The newsreel black-andwhite interspliced goes with the confusion between reality and dream this film plays with.

These are the general elements of the MTV style in Natural Born Killers. More specifically, we can look at any sequence and see how Oliver Stone pushes the feeling state over the narrative linearity of plot. In the opening sequence, for example, one is aware of the extreme close-ups intercut with long shots. It is the dead eye of a deer in close-up cutting to a distorted wideangle shot of the truck in front of the diner, complete with dead deer on its roof. Mickey is eating his pie in color and remembering his past in black and white. The camera studies him in close. The back of his head crowds the front of the camera. Mallory on the other hand is presented in long shot dancing alone initially to the music of the juke box. The camera undulates side to side, unstable as she is unstable. When she is joined by one of the men from the truck, she is seductive and suggestive and soon lethal. Here Stone jump cuts her attack on the male, details its and makes it more violent through the use of the jump cuts.

The pace increases as the killing begins, only to be slowed down when Mickey throws a knife at the man outside. The camera tracks the trajectory of the knife, emphasizing the unreality of the killing. Only the man's death brings back the sense of realism via sound. The next death, the stylized death of the waitress, is presented in almost farcical terms. The camera sways with the choosing of the last victim between the waitress and the last male. When the choice is made, Mickey shoots her but his bullet hits the pan she is holding. The impact of the pan kills her. It seems a comic moment in its presentation. She is the fourth victim of Mickey and Mallory in the diner.

The movement of the camera, the extreme close-ups, the foreground crowding of character in the frame alternating with extreme wide angle shots of action and character in the background, gives the sequence a tension that Stone uses to make the sequence function on a stylized as well as narrative level. The color shifts increase the stylization. And the occasional images of nature—tarantulas, rabbits—contextualize the events with the natural world. Whether Stone is implying the similarities or differences becomes clearer later in the Indian sequence when he uses both perspectives in nature and man's behavior. Mickey also refers to the natural order of things in his live interview with Wayne Gale.

This pattern of viewing each sequence as a music video unto itself yields when put together on a two-hour narrative frame the sense that Stone has put together a narrative that is a music video and that comments on the ethics of the music video. His style as well as the unappealing actions and goals of the main characters, gives us little choice but to consider Natural Born Killers as Oliver Stone's meditation on violence, and the media, in American society.

Stone has always been a vigorous filmmaker interested in ideas, society, history, but nothing before has prepared us for the artfulness of the challenge he meets and transcends in Natural Born Killers. As much as we don't like to acknowledge it, Stone has created in Natural Born Killers a meditation on what he does—manipulate, and he both celebrates and condemns the power of the media. The MTV style, its qualities and its goals, have never been used in so creative a way.