Bibliographic record
Abstract
The “violent” road movie is unique in the panoply of the genre. Under discussion here is Oliver Stone’s controversial Natural Born Killers (1994), a piece that the director has described as a commentary on violence as the American social ill. Using this notion of illness, of organic pathology, as a central thematic node, the article proceeds to examine the violent modes of cultural mobility present in the film’s themes, its narrative arc and finally, in its editing techniques. At the thematic level, Stone’s equation of the cultural and the biological taps into modern currents of reflection on violence proposed by theorists such as Michel Foucault (1975) and Yves Michaud (2002). At the narrative level, Stone’s killers are expelled like diseased bodies, consigned to the highways and back roads configuring the synaptic space between the fixed cultural centre that rejects them and the two emphatically mobile cultures that allow their malignancy to metastasize: an American frontier culture of human cast-offs and native nomads defined by the locomotion of the car, truck, trailer or caravan (Rapping 1999); and an international media culture that disseminates their image to the remotest corners of the globe. Finally, at the levels of cinematography and editing, an ethical question is asked with reference to the work of Baudrillard (1995): could the pathological “locomotion” prevailing in Stone’s narrative be read in tandem with a cinematic “media-motion” that is equally pathological and violent? Does Natural Born Killers draw the spectator into a flux of images and sounds that is artfully constructed to offend, to induce sickness? Can a flux of images and sounds be pathological, violent or criminal?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".