The “young lovers on the run” story has become such a cliché in modern cinema that one rarely considers its provenance, let alone its psychological or environmental basis. However, these two fundamentals of such films take us on a straight line through three of the most powerful and poignant of such films, beginning with arguably the first, Fritz Lang and writers Gene Towne and C. Graham Baker’s You Only Live Once, through to its direct antecedent, writer-director Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night, adaptation of the Edward Anderson novel Thieves Like Us, and on to Quentin Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers, rewritten and directed by Oliver Stone, with only stepping stones of style in between.
In considering the environment, one must ask: is it the tacit oppressiveness of the circumstances of lower middle class American society that leads these young men to crime and these young women to fall in love with them, thereby leading the women to become at least accomplices? Arguably, they are each stories of ordinary people forced into extraordinary circumstances, and are in no small way specifically relevant to the mores of their respective times. The relative banality of each female character’s life before meeting her paramour highlights both the confinement and boredom that many might consider inherent within modern American society. These women have little choice but to live the lives they are given due to lack of education and lack of support. For these women, having no feasible belief in better social circumstances, the prospect of love, no matter how ill advised or tragic, understandably seems something of a panacea. It is thus perhaps not irrelevant that in each of the three movies at hand, the couples begin legally single but treat marriage as an imperative. Coincidentally or not, the marriage marks the end of the first act in each film.
Joan in You Only Live Once is trapped in her role as a secretary because it was one of the few jobs that an independent woman in her time could find. An independent, uneducated woman would have no choice but to take some similar type of job simply to support herself. Her prospects, to her own eyes, might seem nothing better than to find a stable (read: boring) man whose hausfrau she should consider herself lucky to be. It is therefore little surprise that Joan finds herself madly in love with the beautiful, tormented ex-criminal Eddie Taylor. He provides a light of interest in her life that she has never seen before. In They Live by Night, Keechie finds herself in a similar position, except that she is quite simply trapped by her circumstances: she lives in a small town in the middle of nowhere and is forced into domestic slavery by her criminal family. It is only when provided the opportunity of love by repentant murderer Bowie that she begins to see that there could be more to her existence. In a sense, these women are just along for the ride: their love for their respective boyfriends/husbands is necessary for the story, but the female character is honest until forced into dishonesty by external circumstances. Neither Joan nor Keechie ever becomes more than an accomplice to the terrible acts of their worse halves.
Mallory in Natural Born Killers provides a radical difference. Abused in the home and subject to some of the most realistically disgusting treatment a name actress (Juliette Lewis) has ever endured on screen, it is no surprise that she bolts as soon as she meets the first charming man to come into her life. However, Mickey begins the film as flirtatious yet passive , only potentially criminal. It is Mallory, and more importantly his love of Mallory, that provides the catalyst that turns him into a cold-blooded killer. Furthermore, while the two entities have a separate personality at the beginning—as in each of the films discussed herein—it is Mickey who plays the sanguine, level headed role and Mallory who portrays the loose cannon. It is she who murders the first two victims (her parents) and kicks off the cross-country crime spree. This is, notably, a reversal from Tarantino's version, where Mickey begins as the murderous psychopath and Mallory is more or less just along for the ride, but Mickey is the principal character in Tarantino's version, whereas the couple itself plays this role in Stone's version.
If anything, Natural Born Killers is the most distilled example among the three films. In the case of this film, it is love itself—albeit an “unfortunate” or “misguided” love--that provides the obsessive quality leading its participants to a mutually solipsistic (to coin an oxymoron...) state so removed from societal norms that they show no compunction about indiscriminant killing. It may not reach this extreme in the other two films, but the fundamental point is the same: why should it matter, as long as the only two people who matter remain together?
Thus one can argue that it is love itself that in each case provides the unusual situation for all of the characters. The men would be happy enough to live their criminal lives were it not for the influence of women who provide them the fallacious belief that domestication is possible. It is this belief that a “normal life” is just around the corner, or the possibility that with the influence of that one right person, that provides the grain of sand around which the pearl of obsession develops. To put a cynical spin on it, one might consider James Ellroy’s claim that “…obsession is a self-referential madness commonly known as love. It liberates in the short run and finally destroys .” In Ellroy’s canon, this more often than not refers to frustrated love, but as the frustration is the key, there is no reason that the same principle cannot cross-apply to an achieved relationship with any manner of external frustration. It is this unyielding, unsatisfied need that drives the person experiencing it to commit heinous acts without fundamentally registering that these acts are unspeakable.
In fact, it would seem that there is a certain fallacy of psychological projection here. For example, in Natural Born Killers, the psychologist Emil Rheingold says, “Mickey and Mallory know the difference between right and wrong. They just don’t give a damn .” It is quite obvious that Eddie Thomas and Bowie know the difference between right and wrong, but that does not prevent them from committing heinous acts when it becomes necessary. However, the term “necessary” is very much relative, and dependent on a sense of false justification or rationalization. It would seem that this ability to rationalize an act contrary to any and all societal norm(s) is, in and of itself, a sign of a fundamental break with the psychology of the “normal.”
Furthermore, it only leads to alienation from normal society by virtue of the couple psychologically secluding itself from the “normal world,” which is often painted as venal and certainly less sympathetic than our doomed lovers . It is Mickey and Mallory who again take this idea to its extreme: by psychologically distancing themselves from anyone other than each other, they are able to justify their twisted, violent actions. That is, according to a Rheingold line from Tarantino's original work, “They have created a world where only two exist and anybody who inadvertently enters that world is murdered .” If not to fiercely protect their existence à deux, these heinous actions serve to build the Legend of Mickey and Mallory: a testament to their love.
The be-all end-all of these people’s situations is simply to further their love, and they behave in ways that seem (to them) logically lead to this goal. However, as the audience, our rational sides should sit there cringing or biting our nails at the poor decision-making, as we would were we to know such people in real life. Nevertheless, we find ourselves taken along for the ride because through the medium of film, we are provided newfound insight regarding the thinking of people in such a situation (after all, few would argue that the brilliance of Lolita lies at least partly in Nabokov's ability to make us sympathize with a pedophile). Alexander Mackendrick knew this full well when he said, “…the most thoroughly deranged people are those who act in an utterly logical way, except that this logic is based on one insane premise. The madman behaves in a way that would be totally acceptable if he really were Napoleon .” It is this restructuring of our understanding--and thereby our sympathies--that became a hallmark of noir film.
Interestingly, and uniquely among the three films discussed, in You Only Live Once, Towne and Baker make a rather heavy-handed social claim that “you never really escape from prison.” We see Eddie attempting to make good on his promise to go straight, but frustrated at every step by the inherent societal prejudice against convicts. Nevertheless, in an interesting scene, we see that Eddie is fired from his first respectable job because he “cannot maintain his schedule” as a truck driver. The reasons that he cannot keep the schedule are rather unclear: Eddie could be irresponsible by standing around chatting to people when he should be driving, or perhaps his schedule planned too tightly for him to succeed. His boss knows that he is a convict, and it is possible that the boss is looking for a clear excuse to rid himself of Eddie. It is equally possible that the boss is simply extremely uptight and hard-nosed. Fundamentally, it is probably a terrible collage of all these circumstances, but Eddie, as the emotionally sensitive tend to do, it is easy to focus on the one closest to one’s deepest insecurities: he was fired because he was a convict, and therefore there is no room in this world to go straight.
Furthermore, the plot mechanism that puts Eddie on death row is interestingly not dependent in the slightest on whether Eddie actually committed the robbery/murder. It is surprising at first that he didn’t do it, but this quickly subsides in a touching moment with Joan where he swears his innocence. Eddie has no reason to hide criminal behavior from her (after all, she waited for him while he was in prison), and the frankness that he is allowed by the intimate nature of their intense love for one another here allows him the chance to prove himself innocent in the eyes of the audience as well as Joan.
Such a claim is interesting inasmuch as it is ultimately irrelevant to the use of love in the story. That is, it functions as something of an explanatory mechanism for the reluctant viewer: Eddie tried, but found himself stymied. Therefore, it is easier for the audience to stomach supporting a criminal. Arguably, Nicholas Ray took a wider dramatic leap by making Bowie not only a prison escapee but also a murderer. Ray’s later films, especially those he scripted personally, such as Rebel Without a Cause, show a more complex eye for the social causation of deviant behavior, but this early attempt has a simpler structure and allows such concerns to fall by the wayside.
It would seem that Ray trusted the audience to see the love between Bowie and Keechie as the fundamental point of the film; that is, that one can respect this universal quality even among those whose lifestyle wholly in opposition to mainstream, “straight” society. Bowie might speak of wanting to repent, but he never actually makes any sort of bold move in this direction (excluding his halfhearted attempts to run from his gang), very much in contrast to Eddie Thomas. It is this dramatic restructuring that paved the way for the glamorization of mayhem in later films such as The Getaway and Bonnie and Clyde.
However, it is only with Natural Born Killers that we see this obsessive love taken to its extreme. We see Mickey and Mallory shamelessly murder, pillage, and wreak havoc from the first scenes of the film. We develop a certain degree of sympathy when we see Mallory’s backstory, but this sympathy is lost almost as soon as it arrives when we watch her brutally murder her parents on screen. Yet it would be heartless not to appreciate the intensity of Mickey and Mallory’s devotion to each other. They each do stupid, irresponsible things (e.g., the killing of the gas station attendant and the old Native American) and their mutual interactions are fraught with tension, but it is the fierce devotion to one another that shows most plainly in the best and worst of situations (the marriage and their capture due to Mallory’s snakebite, respectively) that shows us exactly the depth of their mutual care. That is, either is ready and willing to die for the other because it is in such extreme situations that their love is most clear. Stone’s avowed intention may have been to suggest that media influence ultimately allows Mickey and Mallory to survive the end of the film, which has its merits but is rather too cynical and on-the-nose. It is not inconceivable that their love subsists primarily on dangerous situations, which feeds back into their mutual solipsism. That is, their relationship is such that it at once conjures Mickey and Mallory’s vicious whirlwind of destruction while also protecting them from the fallout.
Perhaps there is something to the fact that each of the female leads shares a certain animalistic quality : none of the three are conventionally beautiful, yet each exhibits a fierceness and strength of reserve that likens her to a savage creature threatened with death. It is some relationship between the desperation and the vitality with which this endows the characters that makes them undeniably sexually appealing. This desperation is, of course, quickly established to give us an understanding of the lengths to which these women will go in order to preserve not their lives, as would an animal, but their love and all the structure built around this conceit. Their actions become desperate, last-ditch behavior all too soon, as they are willing to throw away their (relatively speaking) domestic existences for the newfound structure of the love they share with these men. Ultimately, however, it is the love--and obsessive insistence upon it--that is the key to their downfall.
An interesting point is the thesis that Ray certainly held that Bowie and Keechie are innocent simply by virtue of being truly in love. He is certainly sympathetic to their social plight, as is Lang in You Only Live Once, but it is strange that either feels it necessary to “justify” the bad behavior of the lovers when the love itself should be sufficient to push the story forward. This is where The Getaway and Bonnie and Clyde fail: Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw’s real-life romance was more interesting than their characters’, and Warren Beatty just isn’t a good enough actor to credibly portray a man driven by love for such an archetypal ice queen as Faye Dunaway.
However, Tarantino returned us to form with Natural Born Killers, which at heart (even in the extremely deadpan original screenplay) was a media satire: Tarantino suggests that the media creates people like Mickey and Mallory, but they were certainly not “forced” into their behavior through circumstance. An appropriate analogy might be Tarantino's True Romance screenplay, where Clarence and Alabama put themselves into a terrible position through nothing more than greed and stupidity, but it is their love that redeems them . In the end, is this great and terrifying love—certainly few would argue that it is a “good” or “healthy” love--that appeals to us and draws us into the plight of these characters. Perhaps Ellroy is right and it is not love at all, but where is the romance in that?
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