The Moment of Realization

“Media is like the weather, only it’s man-made weather. Murder- it’s pure. You’re the one that made it impure; your buying and selling fear.”
Undertones of sublime wisdom and the laconic concepts of the "real", and the "abject" surface throughout Natural Born Killers. These ideas are implicated in the cultural crisis portrayed by this film.
Natural Born Killers is An examination/indictment of the media's power; it reflects a vision of post-post-modern American culture in which symbolic structures have become inverted, fractured and rendered meaningless.
It is a society in which citizens are aware of their imperfect, insignificant humanity and find themselves at the mercy of a sadistic, anonymous authority. It is a modern day Frankenstein, in which the father figure, after creating and maiming his creature, has abandoned it to a society controlled by monsters. We identify with Mickey and Mallory because - as The Absent One is nowhere to be found - his henchmen, themselves, are mass murderers, and they are the true grotesques.
The soundtrack of Natural Born Killers reflects the position of popular music in contemporary American culture.
Like Berio's Sinfonia, and Zorn's Forbidden Fruit, it is a kind of pastiche. Songs like "Leader of the Pack", "Waiting for the Miracle" and "Back in Baby's Arms" get thrown together in a chaotic, meaningless melange. Though the soundtrack does not work to parody or satirize popular music, it evokes the "abject". Different sounds merge into non-sensible chaos to become a kind of gibberish. These songs, many of which are not only familiar but cultural cliches, become Other and eerie.
The self-portrayal of Mickey and Mallory is especially powerful in revealing the frustration and aggression felt by people who fall through the holes in American society; it is an angry reminder of the American nightmare.
Mallory imagines herself in an inverted sitcom Her sense of being outside of normal American culture is captured perfectly by her television fantasy.
The set is an exact replication of a 1970's suburban home. Mallory's disgusting father sports the typical, tight, white stained T-shirt and her mother wears a shapeless house dress. Mallory, dressed in a black, death metal ensemble, physically places herself outside of the conformist, suburban culture.
As Mallory's father verbally and physically abuses his wife and daughter, pre-recorded sitcom laughter follows each "punch line". Because the set and sounds are so familiar, but the language and action so foreign, a nauseating dichotomy reveals the truth behind the "Leave it To Beaver" television fantasy.
This dramatic contradiction in expectation and realization, and the unbearable vulgarity and cruelties of the father makes the flashback one of the most abject scenes in the movie. The exactness of the sounds, from the opening jingle to the ding-dong of the doorbell, greatly enhances the uncomfortable recognition/misrecognition, familiar/foreign binary.

Mickey hears the voices from his childhood. Laughter, screams, horses; a vast array of frightening sounds and images penetrate his mind over shamanistic chanting. This scene signifies his journey into the abject and aurally marks his baptism as a demon.
Mickey surrounds himself with a thick cloud of metaphors and philosophy. He captures the essence of all that is evil with delicate poetry. He seems to radiate with an omniscient awareness.
“The demon,” he says, “ feeds on your hate…. Only love kills the demon.”
This film influences everyone who experiences it. It forces us to open our eyes and realize world we’re living in, a world where murder has become a daily product in our nation’s press. It gives us a sense of a great omnipresent evil that has become our society. The media, with it’s sensationalizing all that was once taboo, has produced a generation of individuals who dare to exploit all that is evil, thus earning themselves an everlasting place in the annals of infamy.
Throughout the film, we hear Gabriel's song "taboo". With soaring cries and singing in tongues, this song suggests the “real” that plastic American culture tries to hide. It is an aural signifier of the bare desert lying at the edge of the neon towns, thickening the atmosphere of the film, creating a mysterious and oppressive charge of affect, glowing with a hallucinatory energy. The concept horrible, but strangely sublime. Perhaps the incomprehensible violence and evil folds over into a kind of glorious transcendence. Nevertheless, we remain powerfully aware of a profound emptiness, a gap we can not fill with all the products from all the supermarkets in America.