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Oliver Stone, generally known as a director who takes his cues from the realm of History, has cut himself loose to bask in the liberated land of Fiction. What new forms and subjects has he found there? Power, Corruption, and Lies. Unusual, eh? Natural Born Killers, original script by Quentin Tarantino--revised so extensively that the author has requested "story by" rather than co-screenplay credit--is Stone's contribution to this summer's multiscreen barrage. As a story, there's not much to it: blind love equals blood bath and media exploitation in rural America. This will no doubt prove vexing to some. Morality must somehow be embedded in or questioned by the entertainment, else the entertainment is gratuitous or, worse, suspect. But then, for Stone, suspicion comes with the territory: he plays with it as subject matter and is subject to it as filmmaker. This culprit--victim vantage puts him in optimum position for dealing with the cornerstone of all symbiotic relationships: The Conspiracy. If all goes well, he could leave his own as a legacy.

From the opening sequence--which in the script reads as simple diner banter--the film lurches into visual overdrive, a hyperextension of berserk camera movement, canted angles, grotesque caricature, and a delirious mixture of media usually associated with music video and experimental film. Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) are making a roadside pit-stop and introducing the diner denizens--and the audience--to their particular brand of wide-awake hallucination/nightmare. Mickey's deciding on a pie ("Let's give Key Lime a day in court!") and Mallory, working the jukebox, has regressed into music-induced psychosexual dervishdom. (Lewis's performance will constantly undulate and sing in sync with a Pop music life force pounding audibly on the film's soundtrack as well as silently through her bloodstream.) Add a trio of well-baked rednecks and you have the establishing scene of the year. Visceral elements tumble by so fast that the inclusion of an over-the-shoulder--POV shot of a thrown buck knife as it passes through a plate-glass window feels, well, natural.

Under the cliche cause-and-effect dictates of genre--not to mention reality --violence is justified as the consequence of violence, and, in good Freudian fashion, Mickey and Mallory's excuse for mayhem is derived from the sins of the Father. Mickey doesn't want to talk about his (we glimpse subliminal flashback horrors); the film accesses Mallory's by metamorphosing into her own TV show, I Love Mallory. In a startling cameo, Rodney Dangerfield returns from media oblivion to haunt the sitcom memory of Mallory's formative years, sadistic laughtrack included. The familial hegemony of he Texas Chainsaw Massacre comes to mind--imagine it as a pilot--with Dangerfield's television personality as every mother's worst nightmare.

Although Freudian narrative prompts the content, television is the form, its ubiquitous power its very message. This theme runs throughout NBK, reaching critical mass with the antics of Wane Gayle (Robert Downey Jr.), a reporter who stages a live prison interview with Mickey for his "American Maniacs" show. Stone has expressed his admiration of A Clockwork Orange, and NBK is a variation on the theme: criminal mind exposed to media as treatment here becomes criminal mind exposed to media criminal. Gayle personifies that new breed of reportage the Spanish have so beautifully nicknamed telebasura (telegarbage). Exploitation, sensationalism, Geraldoism are all subsumed by Gayle's media machine and everyone is willing to play into it. Mickey compares his Nielsen ratings with Manson's ("It's hard to beat the King") while Gayle presumes kinship with Mickey: "Today they wipe clean your mind because they feel your actions are dangerous; tomorrow they wipe clean my mind--or dump me in syndication--because they feel what I say is dangerous. Where does it all end?" For those who went to either film or journalism school, Gayle may seem familiar.

Humor, in NBK, is unnerving. We can laugh uneasily at Mickey and Mallory as their blood-riddled fantasy unfolds; or we can watch them laugh where the narrative allows them the space to do so. NBK is continuously pierced by slices of dark humor and slivers of dangerous laughter. It keeps us off balance as satire unfolds within satire like a hall of mirrors. You can be tried for the same crime twice; illegitimate activity that escaped scrutiny under the immunity of satire is dragged back into court by the film's continual revision of the genre's borders.

During a sequence of impending prison chaos, the atmosphere is galvanized by Dr. Dre's "The Day the Niggaz Took Over" on the soundtrack. The song, a hypnotic call to insurrection, is a prime example of the gangsta rap genre and the controversy it embraces: Symptom or Cause? NBK gleefully acknowledges its complicity in this standoff: and that's what ultimately brings Stone out of fiction and back into history the history of the present. Shot in a maximum-security lockup with actual prisoners as extras, the sequence is the last word in character acting. NBK co-producer Jane Hamsher: "When I looked down and saw 450 rioting prisoners between me, the only woman in the building, and the door, I had my doubts." An architecture designed for retribution, reflection, and rehabilitation that achieves nothing of the sort, this prison serves as the perfect habitat for Mickey and Mallory's narrative needs.

GAYLE: "Every reek as part of our look at current America, we profile a different serial killer."

MICKEY (shrugs): "Technically, mass murderer."

GAYLE: "Whatever."

Guilt, as opposed to actual wrong doing, is sometimes just a state of mind. Since Mickey and Mallory operate without remorse, the guilt of NBK is displaced, beyond the parameters of the movie screen, onto the audience. Heightening this sensory dissonance, Scone shoots with multiple takes in multiple formats. Cutting to black and white from color is common film language for signifying tense shifts. When you continuously intercut different stocks and formats within the same sequence--not to mention incorporating found footage, slides, rear-screen and front projection, matte windows, dimmers, strategic over-and double exposure, color negative printed as color negative, step-printing, morphing, and plain old animation (by Mike Smith)--the results are something else. Rather than using a special effect to emphasize certain information, NBK's strategy has an overall destabilizing affect mimicking a schizoid hallucination experience that violates the filmic norms of how to view the world. No domain of imagery attains primacy--everything becomes suspect--as all plummet in missing-foundation freefall.

Cinematographer Bob Richardson was so involved with capturing a psychosis of movement within the image that at one point he broke his hand operating a POV shot of Mallory's head crashing into a door. As camera operation blurs the distinction separating it from its own subject matter--Wayne Gayle eventually wielding his own camera Rambo fashion--NBK joins The Man with the Movie Camera, Peeping Tom, Blow-Up, Medium Cool, and Videodrome in a microgenre preoccupied with the ethics of the technology that makes film itself possible. NBK is pushed out of is ancestral envelope by its editing. Under the knife of Brian Berden and Hank Corwin, NBK becomes the ultimate music video, the point in that medium's development. where everything it has stolen from film history is returned in a renaissance regurgitation in extremis.

Music visual literacy permeates the film on a variety of levels, some invisible. According to Hamsher, Stone made extensive use of music playback while shooting, experimenting with different recordings to heighten and provoke atmospheric mood and animate various choreographies on the set. In some cases, final soundtrack choices were made this way. Leonard Cohen, hose song "The Future" is basically NBK's title song and spiritual anthem--"Get ready for The Future: it is Murder"--has expressed interest in using the endcredit montage, stripped of the titles, as his own readymade rock video, a twist that could feed the material back into the neverending food chain of television style, influence, and exploitation.

GAYLE: "Where does it all end?"

Chris Chang is working on special projects for the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Presentation League of New York State.