Mickey and Mallory Essay Example

the background. The color goes back in forth from black and white to color.

This is where Mallory first meets Mickey he is a meat delivery boy from the butcher shop. The mother gets upset at the father, not because of how he has just been abusing their daughter, but because he has ordered the steaks and the doctor told him to eat less meat. Next thing you know Mallory and Mickey are gone, they stole the family car. The dad calls the law and Mickey winds up in jail. Mallory goes to visit him and tells him that her father is moving them away. Mickey tells her not to worry he will find her when he gets out because it is fate they shall be together.

Next they go to the diner. Mallory is suggestively dancing along with the jukebox when two locals walk in. One sits down by Mickey who is eating and starts making derogatory comments about Mallory’s dancing. The other starts dancing provocatively with Mallory. Then she gets pissed by his sexually explicit dance moves and starts to beat the shit out of him. It slows down on film almost comically while they start to kill all the people in the diner to the opera music that’s now playing in the background.

They make sure to leave one last man alive and even play Eeny Meeny Miny Moe with him and another lady to decide whom they will leave alive to tell their tale. Then starts the tale of Wayne Gayle played by Robert Downey Junior whom is the star of the show American Maniacs and they attain a occult following. It is pretty

sick and twisted really; random people are shown talking of how they love Mallory and Mickey and how they would like to have sex with them. There was even one group of people that had a sign requesting to be their next victims.

I think this is Stone’s way of showing how the media sensationalize criminals; in fact I think he was before his time on this. Mickey and Mallory continue on their killing spree. They end up killing fifty two people total. They seem like psychopaths, like the killings are exciting them. The influences of the media and their lack of participation in society seem to be the reason they have turned bad. They both were abused and neglected as children, as is shown in the nightmarish flashbacks that Mickey seems to have before all the killings.

They really seem to love each other in some twisted way. Mickey and Mallory get bitten by a rattlesnake, and they go in search of anti-venom at the local Drugstore. The pharmacist sees them and calls the police who come and make a violent arrest. All this time they continue to show their love for each other and as luck would have it they are put into the same prison. Mickey writes Mallory notes she will never see. And Mallory seems withdrawn and sad. Wayne Gayle is granted an interview with Mickey.

As Gayle interviews Mickey he refers to murder being pure and refers to himself as a natural born killer. And while this is going on a riot breaks out in the prison. This leads to a grizzly escape scene. Meanwhile Gayle is filming the whole time as they

go bust Mallory out of her cell. On the wall above her door is this quote by Shakespeare. “Come lets away to prison; we two alone will sing like birds in the cage”. It seems like the point he was trying to make by adding this almost invisible quote was to ask the questions, (Are they happy in their cage? Do they deserve to be there?

The movie ends with Gayle doing his last interview with Mickey and Mallory in the woods outside the prison. Gayle now has formed a kinship with them he has even shot people as he helped them to break out of prison. Gayle believes they will let him get away because he is the last one to tell the tale. But that is not true because they have the camera, so they violently gun him down as well. Then it cuts to the credits and while they are rolling it shows Mallory clearly pregnant and Mickey driving the camper down the road with a couple kids as happy and in love as ever.

I think it ends this way because we feel sorry for them and maybe even think of them as not guilty, because of the abuse they have suffered and all the hype they received from the media. I was even happy they were getting away. Siskel and Ebert gave this film two thumbs up and rated it four out of five stars. And also said “In 1994 it was visually stimulating, the first time I saw it I was really shocked, and didn’t really understand how awesome it was until I watched it again recently”.

Keith Allen of Movierapture. om

2004 said “It was wildly exaggerated, intoxicating, disorienting, and horrendous. Natural Born Killers is a savage, potent spectacle”. It seems that the media has desensitized society by glorifying events made by these criminals, making them almost like celebrities; which in the end takes away from the enormity of the crimes”. There have even been many possible copycat killings. So in my opinion I think a little of everything goes into the mix when making a serial killer. A little abuse and neglect, as well as chemical imbalances and mental illness go together to create the natural born killer.