With Natural Born Killers, 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.
Near the climax of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, a reporter for the reprehensible tabloid-TV show American Maniacs interviews serial killer Mickey, live from a special cell in his teeming, seething prison. How did it feel to slaughter something like 50 people? the journalist asks. "Murder is pure," Mickey replies, as the inmates watching this interview, aired just after the Super Bowl, begin rioting and butchering their guards as well as one another. "Was an instant of my purity worth a lifetime of your lies?" he asks. The journalist has no answer.
Thanks to Stone, media bashing is no longer just a fashionable stance but now, literally, an art form. Natural Born Killers, in fact, redefines media bashing. The box-office hit (out on video by January) is one of the most savage attacks ever launched in pop culture against the amalgam of information structures we call mass media. Network, the previous contender, looks like Aladdin in comparison. Stone not only holds the press in general, and television in particular, responsible for American violence, but places journalists several moral rungs below its most vicious practitioners.
As Natural Born Killers so dramatically illustrates - and as Oliver Stone understands so well - the American media are entering the third decade of an increasingly bitter cultural civil war. A generation ago, Americans shared common media, more or less. Almost everyone read daily papers, watched the networks, or poured over the newsweeklies.
That universality has been shattered, probably for good. Information now splits along demographic, political, and cultural fault lines. We all look into our separate mirrors now and mostly see only ourselves looking back. What was universal in the post-World War II years has become the media of the middle class, the political and policy structures, the aging and increasingly self-righteous baby boomers.
And the rest of the country? Increasingly, groups divided by such things as gender and age are drawn to media that they believe reflect their own values. Kids play computer games, watch cable, and read niche magazines. African Americans have turned to their own magazines and listen to their own talk shows. For blue-collar and working-class Americans, the media that matter are talk shows and tabloid telecasts. To the outraged protests of the more traditional media, the biggest stories generated by these outlets tend to be driven by those characters the public recognizes on a first-name basis: Amy and Joey, Tonya and Nancy, Lorena and John Wayne, Erik and Lyle, and O.J.
This has not been a peaceful evolution. Stories themselves have become bitterly controversial, one medium pitting itself against another, following its own agenda and deriding the others. Stories about Tonya's attack on Nancy or the fall of O.J. Simpson instantly transcend themselves; they're no longer just yarns but reflections of our moral and civic attention span. It isn't enough to cover or follow these stories; the media and the public spend almost as much energy fighting about whether we should be covering them, their cultural identities partially defined by the sides they choose.
Oliver Stone has long been one of the fiercest warriors in this cultural conflict. He has galled and provoked mainstream journalism more skillfully and provocatively than any other major filmmaker. He's also one of a growing cadre of musicians, filmmakers, writers, and TV producers that's inventing a kind of quasi-journalism that mixes fact and fiction, reenacts history, assaults conventions, and intrudes repeatedly, sometimes brilliantly, on what the press sees as its own sacrosanct turf - Vietnam, Wall Street, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In Natural Born Killers, Stone has defected. He's switched sides, darting across our cultural Checkpoint Charlie to join the coalition of editorial boards, journalism school deans, religious fanatics, smug boomers, Charlton Hestonites and the other blockheads who have long held popular culture - from television, rock, rap, and computer bulletin boards to Beavis and Butthead and, especially, tabloid telecasts - responsible for the decline of America.
Too bad: Stone was far more effective as a renegade.
Whether or not he's a great filmmaker, and whether or not Natural Born Killers is a great film (indeed it has stretches of true brilliance), Stone's premise is profoundly dumb, grossly unfair even to media that generally deserve all the bashing they get and might even benefit from a lot more.
He advances an astonishingly ignorant and demonstrably false argument: that tabloid television, newsmagazines, local newscasts, supermarket tabloids, and even the straight press have created or sustained violence in the US. Despite that there are millions of Americans who are happy to believe it, Stone's premise remains ignorant.
The tabs can no longer be seen simply as trashy exploiters. They have struck at the heart of mainstream journalism's narrow political and social agenda. They have no ideology, but they remind us every day that most of us live in a difficult, violent, divided country whose safety net frays more everyday. Having no historic traditions, the tabs lack any pretense of noble purpose. They don't have to cover "important stories," only good ones.
Sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, programs like Hard Copy, A Current Affair, and Inside Edition have helped transform journalism, both print and electronic. They have siphoned millions of viewers away from the network's evening newscasts. They have spawned a whole generation of derivative, though tamer, TV newsmagazines - among them 48 Hours, PrimeTime Live, and Now. They have taken individuals' recountings of major stories out of the public and journalistic domain and made them valuable properties, introducing to American journalism the radical, troubling notion that people with great stories to tell should be compensated for telling them.
Attacks on such broadcasts have been relentless. The very word tabloid has become a synonym for crude, exploitive, or dangerous. In a New York Times op-ed piece that ran in March, former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite urged that broadcasters be required by law to "state the amount any interviewee is paid for performing."
A critic for the Los Angeles Times agrees. "The differences between The New York Times and Hard Copy," writes Tom Rosenstiel, "although they're there - are diminished." Even publicists are unnerved. "Tabloid journalists, no matter how pleasant, are not your friends," writes Fran Matera, PhD, a journalism professor whose article appeared recently in the Public Relations Journal. "They are often there to trick or trap your client. They are looking for that one killer shot where they catch you or your client stammering and fumbling. That's what sells and earns the reporter accolades." Sweet irony of ironies, Stone has made - minus the gore and cinematic wizardry, of course - the very movie about the media Cronkite would have made if he could. If we could only go back 30 years or so, media time, everything would be OK. The country would be safe again.
Like his colleague Spike Lee, Stone has brilliantly marketed his own rebelliousness, his reputation as a fearless iconoclast. But there is nothing daring about attacking the media these days. Journalism - like law enforcement, the Pentagon, Wall Street, and politics - is a cultural free-fire zone. As irresponsible and repulsive as he works at being, Rush Limbaugh is a lot bolder, the cows he goes after more sacred.
Attacking the press is our easiest, hippest, and most universal cultural stance: we can appear to be outlaws while actually following the pack. It's profitable, too. Natural Born Killers had the largest opening ever for an Oliver Stone film - it took in US$10.6 million at the box office its first weekend and was the No. 1 movie in America, doubling the draw of JFK. By the Labor Day weekend, it had earned $27 million.
But like many of his fellow boomers, Stone is more interested in playing the renegade than being one. Otherwise, he would have made a movie that looked at the real causes of violence: at race and the underclass, at the gun culture, at whether drug control is remotely possible, at whether conventional law enforcement works at all, at the phenomenal percentage of violence perpetrated by males on one another and on women. In choosing to pin violence on cheap scapegoats, Stone isn't taking on the media, he's aping its timidity.
Journalism is happy to focus on police brutality and statistically rare crimes like carjacking or child-snatching but, like Stone, the media are less eager to tackle the more complex and sensitive issues that really underlie violence.
"Let's look at the statistics," Stone told Time magazine in August. "Violent crime has remained flat over the past 20 years. But the perception of crime has changed; now it's the No. 1 enemy. Every night on the news it's back-to-back murder and body bags." Who would have thought that Stone - himself the target of so much righteous ire in the wake of JFK - would embrace the now-famous Beavis and Butthead argument: guns mixed with drugs and poorly educated, unsupervised kids don't kill people; tabloid TV shows do. Or videogames. Or rock and roll. Or rap.
As long as we're looking at the numbers, let's consider these federal statistics from the Gallup Organization: the murder rate for whites - yes, even TV-watching ones - decreased sharply between l968 and l994. However, the murder rate for African Americans during that same period climbed by 65 percent. (Media coverage of the deaths of African Americans did not increase by 65 percent during this period.) Or this one: the Justice Department reports that individuals armed with handguns committed a record number of violent crimes in l992 - 930,700 of them altogether, which reflects a 50 percent increase over the average for the previous five years. No population group was more vulnerable to that trend than young African American males, who were four times as likely as white males to be the victims of handgun crime during the time that they were between the ages of 16 and l9.
Virtually no serious governmental or academic student of violence-related social problems and crime in America has found music or broadcasting to be primary causes of the staggering increases in underclass minority crime. Instead, virtually all cite racism, declines in public education, absence of jobs and vocational training, deteriorating family structures and urban economies, absent fathers, epidemic drug use, the availability of cheap and lethal weaponry, and the flight of the urban middle class from cities.
On August 16, the presumably fearless Stone answered prescreened and almost universally fawning questions in an interview conducted in cyberspace, in the auditorium of America Online. (Yup, it was in the Wired Auditorium.) Typically, Stone the celebrity fielded online questions that were about as hard-hitting as those on morning television interviews.
"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."
His point missed the point. The truth is that Americans think plenty about social and cultural violence, which is precisely why the tabloids cover it so much more than the so-called serious press.
Stone closes Natural Born Killers with video clips of the Menendez brothers, Rodney King, Lorena Bobbitt, and O.J. Simpson.
Presumably, the point is to remind us that media evil is still with us, even as we toss our popcorn cartons into the trash. But Stone's hypocritical movie brings to mind the moral confrontation in Natural Born Killers between killer and reporter. It seems he got it backwards: an instant of tabloid purity is worth a thousand facile self-justifications from Oliver Stone.
