How sexy am I now, huh? Flirty boy? How sexy am I now?
At the start of their crime spree, Mickey and Mallory are eating dinner at a diner when a group of rednecks come in and start flirting with Mallory in a very overly sexual way. She initially pretends to egg them on but turns on the prime offender quickly and beats him up. She is angry that he has flirted with her in the first place because all men who make any sexual advances to her, apart from Mickey, remind her of her father. She wants to know if he still sees her as the pretty little potential sex partner now that she has shown him a different side of herself. This is also very similar to the way in which she taunts and questions Scagnetti after slashing his throat.
Wayne Gale: Wait, don't Mickey and Mallory always leave one person alive to tell the tale?
Mallory : We are...
Micky : Your camera
Gale has developed something similar to Stockholm syndrome; although not a hostage in the traditional sense of the word, he is a hostage to his overweening desire to be in some way part of the story of Mickey and Mallory Knox. He is beginning to align himself with them and has also believed that he is safe because their signature is leaving someone behind at each murder scene. He attempts to bargain for his life when it becomes apparent that they are going to kill him, but finds in the process that he is not as indispensable as he thought; his camera is more useful to them than he is as it tells their story in real time, exactly as it happened. By giving the Knoxes access to the public via his camera he has also given them permission to kill him by making himself superfluous to requirements. Wayne had begun to see himself as important to their crime spree, rather than recognizing it was actually his camera that they needed and not him.
Mickey : I love you , Mal.
Mallory : I know you do baby, and I've loved you since the day we met.
The relationship between Mickey and Mallory is one of the great paradoxes of the movie; how can two people capable of such extreme acts of violence, and who seem to feel no remorse for taking a life, also feel such incredibly deep love for another person? The two sides to their personalities do not seem to go together; they are ultimately unfeeling, brutal, sociopathic - and yet, they have felt extreme love, extreme emotion and incredible warmth for each other since the first time that they met.
Perhaps this is actually the key to their crime spree; they only need each other and so do not place value on the lives of anyone else because they do not need anyone else; they are a two-person army, and as long as they are able to be together they really do not care what else happens to them.
