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Some time later this evening a private jet will touchdown at Heathrow and its single passenger, after granting an audience to a couple of forelock-tugging customs officers, will disembark into a waiting limousine. On his way to his hotel he might well call up a few friends and arrange one of his legendary parties. These are described by one eyewitness as "basically pagan Rome, 26 AD." The following day, suitably refreshed, he will appear at the Oxford Union to lecture a group of undergraduates about the decadence of the modern media.

To describe Oliver Stone as a limousine liberal does not begin to capture the seismic contradictions of his character. Here is Hollywood's foremost critic of the Vietnam war who volunteered to fight in it when most of his peers were frantically dodging the draft. Here is the serious-minded radical who made Salvador and JFK but who also wrote Scarface, Eight Million Ways To Die and Conan The Barbarian. Here is the self-proclaimed Buddhist ascetic who managed to tear the saffron ribbon he wears round his kneck as a symbol of his faith during a recent bout of bedroom gymnastics. Here is the university drop-out whose rambling, incoherent monologues are filled with mallopropisms and inadvertant neologisms yet who is probably the most effective communicator of the late twentieth century.

'Propagandist' might be a better term, except he doesn't have anything like a single, fixed agenda. Listen to him giving an interview to The New Yorker last year: "I think you can tell, more or less, that I'm confronting things I have never really confronted. Who am I? Why am I here? What is my Anger? What is my fear? These things are haunting me." He's the Goebbels of gobbledegook.

His latest film, Natural Born Killers, which opens in London next Friday after a tussle with the censor, is nonsense on stilts-or, rather, roller blades. It flashes past, lurching from camp pastiche to armour-piercing violence, assailing you with dozens of images per second, producing a vertiginous landscape of sensation. But as with all Stone's films, beneath the dazzling technical brilliance there's a 'controversial' idea of mind-numbing simplicity.

The thesis of Natural Born Killers, or NBK as Stone calls it, is that the media is responsible for producing the scandals and freak shows it feeds off. Jeffrey Dahma, The Menendez brothers, O.J. Simpson-Stone blames the media. "I'm making the point," he explains, "that the killers have been so idealised by the media that the media has become worse than the killers."

Perhaps Natural Born Killers is Hollywood's reply to those journalists, like Michael Medved, who blame violent crime on the excesses of the entertainment industry-Hey, it's not our fault. It's yours. More likely it's Stone's revenge on the media for the roasting it gave him over JFK -The Washington Post described it as 'Dallas in Wonderland'.

What makes Natural Born Killers so prepostrous is that, when it comes to the glamourisation of violence, Stone is up there with Mickey Spillane. Natural Born Killers lays the blame squarely at the door of American tabloid newsmagazine shows like A Current Affair, but why draw the line at television? By Stone's own admission, he was able to gain the cooperation of the death squads in El Salvador during the filming of Salvador because they were such huge fans of the Stone-scripted Scarface. How can the man who wrote Conan The Barbarian criticise the media for fostering a cult of violence?

To add tragedy to farce, there have already been ten copycat murders following the release of Natural Born Killers in America and two weeks after it opened in France a Parisian couple closely resembling the film's central characters embarked on a killing spree which left four dead.

Perhaps the most galling thing about Stone's latest target is that he has such a tabloid sensibility himself-he thinks in Sun headlines. All his films have a visceral, pulp sensationalism, a power-driving momentum that browbeats audiences into submission. The reduction of complicated social issues into a diagrammatic conflict between good and evil is precisely what Stone abhors about the tabloid media. But there's no subtlety in his films, no hint of moral complexity, just a straight choice between the good father and the bad father. Salvador is not a sophisticated political parable about American foreign policy. It's Star Wars set in Central America.

Before getting too worked up about the hypocrisy of Natural Born Killers, though, it is worth pausing to ask whether this is exactly how Stone wants the media to respond. All of his most successful films appear to have elementary contradictions built in to them. Wall Street was supposed to be a savage indictment of the greed and opportunism of the Eighties, yet the film is half in love with the brazen immorality of the world it depicts and Gordon Gekko gets all the best lines: "Nice to meet you, hope you're intelligent."

JFK was supposed to deliver the appalling truth about Kennedy's murder, exposing the lone-assassin theory as a lie and the Warren Commission as a cover-up, yet the Grand Universal Conspiracy Theory that the film serves up collapses at the slightest scrutiny. What are we to make of a filmmaker who insisted that the trees in Dealey Plaza be cut back to their original height in 1963 for the sake of historical accuracy, then invented a 'deep throat' from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to corroborate his crackpot theory?

It's just possible that an integral part of the development of an Oliver Stone project is a meeting with the studio's marketing division where the subject under discussion is how to generate the most editorial comment about the film in question. Perhaps Stone deliberately underwrites his women's roles in order to rattle the feminist lobby. Perhaps he intentionally portrays Orientals as sinister so Asian-Americans will picket his films. Who knows, maybe he starts with the op ed piece and works his way up from there. For someone who despises the media, he certainly knows how to use it. If you tune into Radio Four tomorrow morning you can catch him on 'Start The Week'.

He is an expert at protecting his reputation. During the making of JFK, he got wind of a rival project based on 'Libra', Don deLillo's brilliant but unashamedly fictional account of the Kennedy assassination. Knowing his film might compare unfavourably, he used all his Hollywood muscle to stop it being made. Natural Born Killers is based on a script by Quentin Tarantino but Stone, who owns the rights, has refused to allow it to be published so audiences can't see just how far his film departs from it.

This image of the cynical manipulator is a far cry from how Stone presents himself. He's cynical alright, but it's the hard-won cynicism of the battle-weary veteran, a cynicism which lapses into a tearful sentimentalism about the way things used to be after the first drink. In his own eyes, he is a man more sinned against than sinning. Near his desk at Ixtlan, his Santa Monica production complex, there is a cartoon of Albert Einstein accompanied by the quotation: "Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds."

On the strength of his films it's not difficult to guess which category he places himself in. There is a strong autobiographical streak running through all his work, from the Charlie Sheen character in Platoon to the mass murdering outlaw in Natural Born Killers. Perhaps the character closest to his heart was Jim Morrisson in The Doors, whom Stone presents as a tortured soul who risks social exile for the sake of his art. In the course of the film Morrison is compared to Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde and Jesus Christ. Even in Heaven and Earth Stone can't resist identifying with the central character, even though she's a woman. In his most autobiographical film to date, Stone depicts her as a transcendent fusion of Buddha and Christ.

Such rampant egotism is what we've come to expect from Hollywood and, for all his faults, the world would be a poorer place without Oliver Stone. Let him lecture the media about its sensationalism and irresponsibility, let him blame us for slobbering over violent criminals. We should be prepared to forgive him a great deal. After all, he wrote that brilliant scene in Scarface in which Al Pacino, facing a small army with nothing but a huge machine gun, utters the immortal line, "Say hello to my little friend"-and then blows them all to smithereens.

The Sunday Times