Is True Romance the ultimate male movie fantasy? | Little White Lies

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Is True Romance the ulti­mate male movie fantasy?

19 Jul 2021

Words by Anton Bitel

Two people standing in a desert building window, with vegetation and a barren landscape visible outside.
Two people standing in a desert building window, with vegetation and a barren landscape visible outside.
With its movie nerd hero, dot­ing blonde hero­ine and shock­ing vio­lence, this ear­ly 90s cult clas­sic is peak Tarantino.

Every romance has its meet-cute. In the case of Clarence Wor­ley (Chris­t­ian Slater) and Alaba­ma Whit­man (Patri­cia Arquette), this takes place in a Detroit movie the­atre, announc­ing to the view­er that Tony Scott’s True Romance is to be a hall of mirrors.

This movie house, show­ing a decid­ed­ly unro­man­tic triple fea­ture of Shin’ichi Son­ny’ Chi­ba karate films from 1974 (The Street Fight­er, Return of the Street Fight­er, Sis­ter Street Fight­er), is not just a meet­ing-place of soul­mates but a melt­ing pot of gen­res in a film which fea­tures romance as adver­tised but blurs it with gun-tot­ing action, mafia machi­na­tions, Hol­ly­wood satire, ston­er com­e­dy and police procedural.

Com­ic book store work­er Clarence is a rock­a­bil­ly freak and movie geek, who in the absence of his estranged father Clif­ford (Den­nis Hop­per), looks to men from the movies instead as his men­tors and role mod­els. True Romance opens with Clarence singing the prais­es of Elvis in Richard Thorpe’s Jail­house Rock and every so often the ghost of Elvis (Val Kilmer) shows up to give Clarence guid­ance. Chi­ba too is idolised for being the bad moth­er­fuck­er” that Clarence would like to be him­self. Clarence is a lost boy in search of iden­ti­ty, and meet­ing Alaba­ma sets him on a course to live out the movie sce­nar­ios of which he has always fantasised.

Make no mis­take, True Romance is not just a self-con­scious movie fan­ta­sy, but a very male one. Here Alaba­ma is reduced to the role of whore with a heart of gold, or dot­ing wife who lives to serve Clarence’s every whim, or side­line cheer­leader about how cool’ Clarence is. In fact, she belongs to a cho­rus of sim­i­lar side­line cheer­lead­ers, in a film where every­body seems to love Clarence (“I like this guy”, keep say­ing Chris Penn and Tom Sizemore’s cops, who have Clarence under surveillance).

When Clarence decides to go all Taxi Dri­ver, even wear­ing a jack­et sim­i­lar to Travis Bickle’s as he guns down Alabama’s pimp Drexl Spivey (Gary Old­man), Alaba­ma improb­a­bly sees this psy­chot­ic act (insti­gat­ed by the Elvis in Clarence’s head) as a roman­tic ges­ture. Dis­cov­er­ing that the suit­case Clarence picked up from Drexl’s place was filled with bags of cocaine rather than Alabama’s belong­ings, the two go on the run togeth­er. It is a reprise of Ter­rence Malick’s Bad­lands, direct­ly evoked by Alabama’s dreamy voiceover and Hans Zimmer’s xylo­phone score.

Inevitably this couple’s imi­ta­tions of cin­e­ma will lead them to Hol­ly­wood, where they hang out with Clarence’s old friend – and aspir­ing actor – Dick Ritchie (Michael Rapa­port) and his reefer-mad roomie Floyd (Brad Pitt), look­ing to sell on the nar­cotics. Here, in the City of Dreams, a num­ber of dif­fer­ent sub­plots con­verge into an explo­sive finale, as Clarence and Alaba­ma find them­selves in a Cal­i­for­nia suite deal­ing with real cops, real gang­land killers (includ­ing James Gan­dolfi­ni as a mur­der­ous thug with a melan­cholic side) and a film pro­duc­er (Saul Rubinek) who spe­cialis­es in on-screen violence.

This is the realm of meta-cin­e­ma, where those who make movies, those who long to be in them and those who mod­el their behav­iour on them all come togeth­er to con­trive between them a clas­sic movie cli­max: a shoot-out in which incon­gru­ous par­ties aggres­sive­ly face off to see who is left stand­ing in the end.

Three men standing in a room, while a person in a blue hooded jumper sits on a sofa, with a glass and a bowl on a table in front of them.

Entire­ly unsur­pris­ing­ly, True Romance was script­ed by Quentin Taran­ti­no. It is part of his juve­nil­ia, drawn in part from his ama­teur debut fea­ture My Best Friend’s Birth­day released in 1987, and in part from the much larg­er screen­play The Open Road which Taran­ti­no co-wrote with his friend Roger Avary in 1988, even­tu­al­ly split­ting into two sep­a­rate titles: Nat­ur­al Born Killers and True Romance.

Yet for a film com­ing right from the very begin­ning of his career, this is still unmis­tak­ably a Taran­ti­no joint, show­ing many of the hall­marks from his future work: a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with B‑movie tropes from cinema’s pop­u­lar mar­gins; an obses­sion with junk food and take­away; and a self-aware focus on cin­e­ma as a medi­um for wish ful­fil­ment, where roman­tic ideals trump any truth.

At its cen­tre, Clarence is per­haps the char­ac­ter who most close­ly embod­ies Tarantino’s own iden­ti­ty and aspi­ra­tion. He’s a fast-talk­ing movie nerd who ris­es from a job in pop-cul­ture retail to the heights of Hol­ly­wood, while real­is­ing the cin­e­mat­ic dream of get­ting the girl, beat­ing the bad guys, tak­ing the mon­ey and liv­ing the dream in paradise.

You might also see some­thing of Taran­ti­no in the per­son of Drexl, a dread­lock-sport­ing, scarred white man who imag­ines him­self to be black, grotesque­ly car­i­ca­tur­ing African-Amer­i­can speech pat­terns and pos­tures (which is some­thing that, noto­ri­ous­ly, Tarantino’s screen­plays also do). It’s up to the view­er to deter­mine whether such eth­nic imper­son­ation is sim­ply beyond, so to speak, the pale, or whether there is some­thing more sophis­ti­cat­ed and self-con­scious­ly reflex­ive going on with this provoca­tive mate­r­i­al, in a film where every­one is inau­then­tic and role plays in accor­dance with the par­a­digms of cinema’s pulp fictions.

In any case, as a pro­cur­er, thief and cold-blood­ed killer, Drexl is guilty of far worse than mere cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion. Issues of race are also com­pli­cat­ed in what is per­haps the film’s best scene, where Clif­ford goads Sicil­ian mob con­sigliere Vin­cen­zo Coc­cot­ti (Christo­pher Walken) into killing him before he can reveal Clarence’s where­abouts. Clif­ford achieves this by telling Vin­cen­zo an extreme­ly racist sto­ry about the his­tor­i­cal mis­ce­gena­tion of Ital­ian Sicil­ians and Moors. The anec­dote is offen­sive, but it is also designed pre­cise­ly to offend, and once Clifford’s motives are tak­en into account this story’s very racism is what enno­bles its self-sac­ri­fic­ing teller.

Orig­i­nal­ly, B‑maestro William Lustig was attached to direct True Romance, but even­tu­al­ly Scott took over, pack­ag­ing the film’s vio­lent grind­house motifs into a very slick pack­age. One year lat­er, cameo­ing in Rory Kelly’s Sleep With Me, Taran­ti­no paid homage to Scott with a mem­o­rable speech (which he wrote) that zeroes in on the homoso­cial ele­ments of Scott’s Top Gun, rein­ter­pret­ing the sup­pos­ed­ly jin­go­is­tic film as a sub­ver­sion of Amer­i­can heteronormativity.

Tarantino’s next fea­ture, Pulp Fic­tion, won the Palme d’Or, turn­ing the writer/​director into a super­star and influ­enc­ing a decade of inde­pen­dent cin­e­ma with its criss-cross­ing nar­ra­tives and post­mod­ern style. Pulp Fic­tion is cer­tain­ly the rich­er, more com­plex film, but True Romance nonethe­less has much in com­mon with it, and feels like a dry run, right down to the genre-fix­ing title. Tarantino’s spe­cial brand of cinephil­ia may even­tu­al­ly have grown and matured, but True Romance is where the sparks first flew.

True Romance is avail­able on UHD and Blu-ray via Arrow from 19 July.

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