What is the significance about setting and/or place in your chosen American films?

     Through the mise-en-scene, various settings and locations are portrayed within both Natural Born Killers and Badlands to illustrate the surrounding worlds of the characters and how they shape them into crumbling lovers, where America is ultimately the dominating force. 

     Directed by Oliver Stone, Natural Born Killers, for example, toys with the ideology that America has become a place of manufacture where society is constantly drilled into by the media. This is represented within one major disequilibrium of the film, set in the natural home of Native Americans. The way in which the mise-en-scene portrays a switched off television contrasts against the motif of television images throughout the film, including in its opening with a close-up shot of a politician followed by a satanic face, to show the corruption of the media and how we are becoming more demonized by these false idols. However, this juxtaposition, paired with an upside down flag on the wall, illustrates the peaceful nature of this indigenous family, which Mickey disturbs. This shooting caused their downfall to perhaps symbolise how America destroyed the peace of nature and plastered it with man-made carnage, supported by the projected "too much tv" on the lovers' chests when they enter to illustrate this brutal Westernisation of society. After this, nature turns against them and the setting of the drug store blinds the audience with green lighting to represent a sense of sickness, and how this system makes society ill. 

     Terrence Malick's Badlands, although more subtle, partly utilises this theme of The American Dream and its inevitable disillusionment. For instance, within the film's equilibrium, Holly's backyard is shown, cluttered with her Father's painted advertisements. This not only shows how this world of manufacture follows us all and paints us into robotic dreamers, but also shows that these dreams are corrupt and unreachable due to the dirt which coats these incomplete paintings. This loss is shown by a long shot of Kit's hat stolen from a rich man being tossed into a vast open space, as the rich identity he strove for fell into the nature to represent this inevitability. These endlessly dry and natural settings are incorporated throughout Badlands, which contrasts against the mass amount of societal and busy locations in Stone's work. For example, Malick uses a point of view shot from the lovers' car's perspective which shows nothing but the dirt that they drive on. These settings mirror the cold and detached nature of Holly's voice in the film's non-diegetic narration and Spacek and Sheen's acting, and emphasises their emptiness and the hollowness of The American Dream implanted into the brains of a fifties society. Conversely, the saturated mise-en-scene of Natural Born Killers is so hectic and fast-paced due to it being a more modern film in comparison to Malick's work to reflect the tumorous growth of the media and how it dazes and suffocates America. A handheld camera is used within the riot scene set in the prison to add a satirical and warped sense of realism for the audience, whilst a disordered array of blood, fire and violence almost to the extent of an orgy of gore represent hell, and how the media itself is a sin as it glorifies other people's in an endless and morbid cycle.