SO I JUST WATCHED TRUE ROMANCE FOR THE FIRST TIME AND THIS CULT CLASSIC IS ANYTHING BUT WHAT IT APPEARS TO BE
True Romance, True Romance, True Romance. As with many other hyped things in life, one always hears people raving about True Romance. And who can blame them? A script written by Tarantino. Directed by the late Tony Scott of Top Gun fame. And that ridiculous cast.
I have always had to answer that No, I have not seen it. So, I finally cracked. I won’t deny that it is a stylised movie with snappy dialogue and plenty of thrills and spills, which is by turns anarchic and sweet-natured. I suspect that most people consume it literally as a story about a guy and a gal who fall in love and are on the run from some gangsters. As I sat down to watch it for the first time, I was struck by the fact that it is anything but what it appears to be.
It is a deliberate pastiche of Americana packed with stock characters and clichéd concepts. It opens in ‘Motor City’ Detroit and ends in Hollywood of course. Christian Slater is the dreamy lead Clarence going nowhere fast, who drives a purple convertible Cadillac and always drives it with absolutely no regard for other road users. Patricia Arquette is the call girl love interest Alabama. Hopper is his estranged, down at heel father, who is a retired cop living in a trailer by the railroad heading out of wintry, grim Detroit. Detroit is encapsulated in shots of vagrants warming themselves up with street fires and smoke billowing from an industrial cityscape. As Clarence later puts it, he hates airports because he grew up living next to one and it symbolised what he could not do — escaping this dreary existence. But where there is a will, there is a way.
Gary Oldman is the slimeball, dreadlocked pimp controlling Alabama. Christopher Walken is the slick, Sicilian mafiosi. Brad Pitt is the pothead hippy. And there is even an LA sub plot involving a wannabe actor, a big-shot, cokehead, Porsche-driving movie producer and his inept, pathetic punchbag of an assistant. Tarantino’s jaundiced cynicism means that his characters inevitably meet sticky ends.
There are of course the tropes of Hollywoodland — the shotgun wedding, the road trip on the run from gangsters with stolen drugs, even Val Kilmer’s Elvis as a bizarre voice in Slater’s head. The kind of motifs that Tarantino has such fun with in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. It is a semiotics wet dream for any postmodernist.
Christian Slater basically plays a version of the young Tarantino bumming around working in a comic book store. He spends his time down at the local cinema watching triple bills of kung-fu movies — undoubtedly a harbinger of later work such as the Kill Bill double. The lenient store owner/father figure even pays for him to unknowingly get laid with a gorgeous call girl. Arquette plays the hooker Alabama with a heart of gold straight out of Pretty Woman and a hundred other dime novels. And I say hooker because the language of this movie belongs to a very un-PC era. The dialogue is freely peppered with ‘whores’ and the N-word. As anyone will know who has seen the central scene between Walken and Hopper, which does not end well for Hopper.
Although for a moment you do wonder whether Hopper might talk his way out of this sticky situation. Because one of the themes in the movie is that even if you are a nerd à la Tarantino; provided you have some grey matter, some cajónes, you can talk a good game and walk the walk then you can make it big. It is basically tapping into some modern twist of the American dream. The movie belongs to the analogue world of the early 90s but the digital world of Silicon Valley just round the corner would prove Tarantino right — the geeks shall inherit the earth.
Tarantino as we all know spent his youth working in a video store consuming exploitation flicks and B movies. This goes a long way to explaining why he went on to direct modern classics with titles like PULP FICTION. His work is that of an artist whose life was mediated not through experience but through celluloid. Or what the Romantic poet and self-styled Casanova Lord Byron called ‘mental masturbation’ when derogatorily referring to John Keats. I imagine that getting laid might be tricky for such a high-functioning personality on the spectrum and I can only wonder if he mined his own experiences or whether the call girl storyline is just another stock, romanticised idea.
Slater is well cast in spite of his winsome good looks. He pulls off the role of a down and out, shy youngster capable of heroic deeds. Falling in love gives him the opportunity to prove his mettle. In reality, such undercooked notions usually end up with a one-way ticket to the prison or the cemetery. At the start of the movie, he tries his chat up lines unsuccessfully in a bar before recycling them on Alabama.
True Romance is testament to the cruelty of time. Here, in a world before time that is before Thelma and Louise, Seven, Fight Club, Ocean’s Eleven etc, Slater is the leading man and Brad Pitt is the nobody extra. Their careers would go on to crossover as Pitt stratospherically ascended into the A-list. However, one can easily imagine a parallel arguably better universe in which Slater became the bona fide A-lister and Pitt remained as a two-bit extra.
Because let’s face it, throw a frisbee on any beach in California and you will find ten other blond beefcakes with chiselled looks, who can be cast in the next studio vehicle. Whilst Pitt has relied on preternaturally good looks, he has never been exactly convincing as a top-notch actor. As evidenced by spending his career eating junk food or fiddling whilst delivering his lines. I mean even his brief appearance here as a pothead barely passes muster. Someone really is smiling down on Pitt. Or maybe I am just embittered. Who knows?
As for the casting of Gary Oldman as the pimp Drexl. Forget the 2024 lens. Even with a 1993 lens, this is a very strange bit of casting allowing for the chameleon abilities of Oldman — an astonishing actor who has played everyone from Lee Harvey Oswald to an incredible impersonation of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour for which he won an Oscar and which is nothing less than catching lightning in a bottle. After all, Churchill is an almost unplayable historical role as with John F. Kennedy. You only have to see the other Churchill movie made that year to realise how wrong such a performance can go. I won’t say anymore to spare the blushes of Brian Cox, whom I do admire.
Tarantino is essentially the quintessential postmodern director. Our pop culture may exist in the emissions of postmodernism in which everything is archly knowing/ironic or a parody/pastiche/collage. The Simpsons if of course the best example with its relentless referentiality. But Tarantino world is on another level. Nothing is real. Everything is unreal because it is basically a construct derived from the detritus of a life vicariously filtered through movies and pop culture. This is not to say he is not an extremely talented, iconic artist. However, his work populated by ultra-violence and femme fatales is not just guns and girls (as the Jean Luc Godard maxim goes). It is anything but what it appears to be.
Originally published at https://youssefelgingihy.substack.com.