True Romance (1993)

True Romance arrives from 1993, which is to say from a period when a screenplay could still concern a comic book clerk and a call girl driving a stolen suitcase of cocaine across the country without anyone feeling obliged to append a thesis to it. Tony Scott directs Quentin Tarantino's script with his customary lacquered sheen, all slow motion and sunset orange, and the result treats amorality as a decorative finish. Clarence and Alabama are newlyweds. They are also felons. The movie never apologizes for the second fact and never congratulates itself for the first.

Alabama is the nearest thing here to a figure of empowerment. She stabs an enforcer with a corkscrew, sets his face alight with hairspray, and finishes him with his own shotgun. The camera, however, is Clarence's camera, and the film regards her through the soft focus of romantic possession, which places her squarely within the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold lineage instead of any argument about her independence. Elsewhere the picture is cheerfully indifferent to matters of identity. Samuel L. Jackson appears briefly as a hood and vanishes. The cast is white, the sensibility is white, and nobody involved seems to have treated this as a problem requiring a solution. The Sicilian monologue between Hopper and Walken deploys racial invective as a suicide tactic, which is inflammatory, not instructive.

The film's politics, such as they exist, amount to a leer and a shrug. Hollywood producers and pimps are targets of violence, not of critique. There is no environmental sermon, no advocacy of any kind, no lesson attached. It is a love story with a body count, propelled by needle drops and pop trivia. Weighed against the contemporary appetite for instruction, its refusal to teach anything reads as almost antique.