Few films have spurred such heated debate about film violence as Oliver Stone's 1994 film Natural Born Killers. The film, claimed by Stone to be a satire on how the media glorifies violence, has been named as an influential factor in at least five separate murder cases. Novelist John Grisham, who knew one of the victims of these copycat crimes, wrote a scathing article about the film in his Oxford American magazine, urging people to bring about "product liability" lawsuits against Warner Brothers, considering the film to be a product that caused injury to innocent people. Patsy Beyers, a victim of one of the copycat crimes who was paralyzed by a bullet, took up Grisham on this suggestion and added Stone and Warner Brothers to her suit against her attacker Sarah Edmondson. Though Beyers was ultimately unsuccessful in having the filmmakers held legally accountable for the attack that resulted in her paralysis, debate about Stone's culpability has not disappeared completely.

My purpose here is not to decide if, legally, Stone was responsible for any role his film may have played in murders that followed its release. The courts have already ruled on this matter. What I am interested in is whether or not Stone actually makes the argument with his film that he thinks he does and whether or not he was responsible with his rhetoric. Take, for example, the tagline on the poster at the left: "A bold new film that takes a look at a country seduced by fame, obsessed by crime, and consumed by the media." If Natural Born Killers is very obviously a condmenation of the media and American culture, not a celebration of violence, then Stone and the filmmakers are clearly not responsible for misinterpretations of his film, even if those misenterpretations led to murder. However, what seems to be the case with this film is that, if the viewer is watching the film attentively and analytically, Stone's summary of his argument is somewhat accurate, but the average viewer, watching neither attentively nor analytically, takes from the film a different message than Stone intended. Whether or not this makes Stone and the other filmmakers responsible for the copycat murders is ambiguous, but they certainly had available to them ways to keep this misunderstanding from occuring in the first place.