Credit: Dangerous Minds / Public Domain / Warner Bros.

Is art responsible for what it inspires?

It’s a question that has followed art for as long as there’s been a mass market for it. Way back to the days of William Shakespeare tailoring his plays for whichever royal family was in power at the time, people have looked at art as a heat check of the time. Celebrating them for the ways they prop up the culture of the time and criticising them for the ways they do not. Especially because, so the logic goes, if a piece of art shows bad things happening, an impressionable audience might take the things depicted in that art into the real world.

The rise of mass media in the 1940s and 1950s led to a new upswing in beliefs like this, especially now that the teenager existed. The teenager meant that young people now had their own disposable income and thus could pick and choose what art they consumed. No matter how adult these teenagers believed they were, they were still as impressionable as any ten-year-old, and thus, open to any subversive ideas presented to them in a movie theatre or comic book or rock ‘n’ roll record.

Now, to be clear, most of this is reactionary handwringing. Especially when you consider that teenagers at the time were absolutely not consuming art made by other teenagers. Chuck Berry and Bill Haley were both past 30 by the time their rock ‘n’ roll records started becoming seismic hits, and ‘Rock Around The Clock’ in particular was accused of starting riots when it was featured in the film of the same name. Thus, you’re left with two options. Option one, the messages that these teenagers are connecting with are ones that adults connect with, too.

Or, you get Option two, where the problem lies less with these kids seemingly being “brainwashed” and more with the adults actually doing said brainwashing. However, there are some cases where one really does have to throw their hands up and say, “yeah, that really was someone who was inspired by a piece of art to do something terrible.”

The inspiration in this case coming from one of the most infamous movies of the 1990s.

Why did Natural Born Killers inspire crime sprees?

In 1994, Oliver Stone was coming off something of a directorial purple patch. His 1980s already included hits like Platoon, Wall Street and Scarface. In 1989, he won the Academy Award for ‘Best Director’ with his work on Born on the Fourth of July. In 1991, he had an all-timer of a one-two punch with The Doors and JFK in succession. 1993’s Heaven on Earth was a misfire, but still a prestige drama picture. Four high-minded Oscars swing in a row. Then holy shit.

Natural Born Killers was the opposite of all of that. A nasty, violent little rabbit punch of a crime thriller that was lurid, sexual and still genuinely pretty disturbing to this day. Pretty much any vile thing you can think of is depicted in it, but the most memorable thing about it is the central performances by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis. Unrepentant murderers never looked so hot. Then the news stories started, and suddenly, everyone involved in the picture was in very hot water indeed.

You see, a bunch of kids had seen Natural Born Killers and decided that Mickey and Mallory Knox weren’t just cool fictional characters, they were role models. The first were Sarah Edmondson and her boyfriend, Benjamin Darras, from Muskogee, Oklahoma. On March 5th, 1995, after spending an entire night watching Natural Born Killers on a loop, the couple loaded up their van with blankets and a gun to take to the road. Within two days, Darras had shot a cotton mill manager by the name of William Savage twice in the head, killing him instantly.

Their second victim was Patsy Byers, a convenience store clerk who Edmondson shot a few days later. Byers lived through the attack but was left paraplegic. The couple were arrested a few days afterwards, and Byers’ lawsuit against them was eventually expanded to include Oliver Stone and the Time Warner company, who had released the film, accusing them of directly inspiring the attempt on her life. The case was settled out of court, but Edmondson and Darras weren’t alone.

A disturbing number of young people who’ve perpetrated gun crimes were huge fans of Natural Born Killers, to the point of obsession in some cases. Is this a worrying trend? Possibly, not more worrying than the access troubled kids have to guns, though. As is always the case with news stories like this, blaming violent media for the actions of violent people is a smokescreen for the real issues. The lack of gun control in the United States and the lack of mental health support for people who really need it.