ABSTRACT
Natural Born Killers (1994) boasts a body count – twelve and climbing – linking it to more copycat killings than any other film. Two years after its debut, the film was still making headlines via the lawsuit filed by attorney-turned-Hollywood-player John Grisham against Oliver Stone for product liability in connection with the murder of a cotton-gin worker from
Hernando, Mississippi.1 Grisham’s suit is just one component of a larger conservative mobilization against what Presidential candidate Robert Dole has called the “mainstreaming of deviancy” by the Hollywood culture industry. Dole’s May, 1995, address to Los Angeles Republicans and Hollywood bigwigs seemed to recognize the interrelated tensions of violence, mass culture, and the crisis of “family values” – and specifically took aim at two postmodern variants on the familiar theme of young, tragic love in “The Story of
Bonnie and Clyde.”2 On the first leg of a tour whose goal was the congealing of an increasingly fractured Republican constituency, Dole exhorted his audience to retool the culture industry and return to the “Combining-Good-Citizenship-with-Good-PictureMaking” days when the Disney studios daubed their merry little toy-citizens on the noses of B-52’s and Warner Bros, beefed up public confidence in the police. “Ours is not a crusade for censorship,” Dole comforted us, “it is a call for good citizenship.”
