Film Diary: True Romance, Steve Albini, Picabia and Picasso
Citation, subversion and "edgelord shit"
True Romance/Tony Scott/1993. Digital. Ecoles Cinema Club
I spend a lot of my life watching films from the past and attempting to meet them where they are, as a reflection of the moment they were made. You would think this would be easier with films made during my sentient lifetime, but not always. But then, True Romance has never really been a part of my life. I guess I saw it once on VHS, in the 90s; I don’t think I ever thought about it again, or thought about watching it again, until it was showing on a night in Paris when I was alone and had nothing else to do. It’s not that there aren’t a few good things in it — on this viewing, Michael Rapaport and Bronson Pinchot seemed like the clear MVPs, and I can be a sucker for the ways in which director Tony Scott chooses aesthetic beauty over narrative clarity — but the gleeful racism and homophobia, present in scene after scene, is difficult to brush aside or justify. (What does Patricia Arquette’s Alabama have against “Persians,” to the extent that she names them as her sole “turn-off”? We truly may never know.) In fact, it’s more difficult for me to make sense of that sort of thing in this film than it is when something ugly or cringeworthy pops up in a movie from the distant past, such as the comic-relief caricature of a South American driver in Now, Voyager, because I do remember being alive in 1993, and living in a culture soaked in casual racism, and honestly not thinking twice about it at age 13.
Maybe it’s best to think of this film the way I tend to think of films from before I was born, which is as a time capsule — one that perhaps has more to say about what the ‘90s were and what they wrought than any film I discussed in Erotic 90s. On the one hand, you can see what was subversive, in the early ‘90s, about Quentin Tarantino writing an outlaw hero protagonist based on himself — or, at least, a romanticization of his kind of nerd, who strikes out with a drunken floozy when he invites her to a kung fu triple feature, who is obsessed with comic books to the extent that he wants to hang out after hours at the comics store where he works, as QT hung out at Video Archives (and then painstakingly recreated it in his home and used its name to brand both his podcast and his microcinema. (He talks about the store extensively in this Rolling Stone profile from 1994 —which, incidentally, has absolutely nothing to say about the racial slurs used by the heroes in his scripts).
But over 30 years later, it doesn’t feel like there’s anything subversive about a guy who’s into Spider-man killing a lot of people. (In another area that is somehow both of the past and also not, Gary Oldman as a white pimp with dreadlocks and patois paved the way for James Franco in Spring Breakers, I guess, but today Oldman’s True Romance performance feels possibly more embarrassing than his Oscar win for The Darkest Hour.)
This is a movie with adolescent ultra-violent fantasy stuffed into its heart-shaped box, which is less a criticism than an acknowledgement of its reason to exist. It was fun to watch this kind of thing in 1993, and there was little cultural pressure to look at it critically. It was even, for some, a needed correction to both what was happening in Hollywood (ie: something like Forrest Gump winning Best Picture at the Oscars over Pulp Fiction the year after True Romance came out) and in the art houses (ie: the dominance of Merchant Ivory-style, literally corseted literary adaptations, which now sometimes feel subversive in their own right, but which were deemed ripe for parody by 1993, and got it later in the decade via the now-forgotten John Hurt/Jason Priestley indie Love and Death on Long Island).
But in the days after sitting in that Paris cinema watching True Romance, surrounded by young French people who seemed to think its homophobia and frequent use of the n-word by white people were hilarious — as many viewers did in the ‘90s, too — I was thinking a lot about Steve Albini, whose death I learned of the day before watching this movie.
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