Comic book artist Rob Liefeld couldn’t draw feet to save his life, so he made sure there was always something in the panel to mask them. If you can only draw two expressions, and one involves gritted teeth? Write stories where every beat requires gritted teeth. Play to your strengths, mask your weaknesses, deliver exactly what your audience came for.
Early Tarantino worked the same way.
Both emerged from early 90s geek culture, both built careers on enthusiasm and borrowed aesthetics, both knew their audience because they were their audience. And in 1993, before Pulp Fiction turned him into THE style to be imitated, Tarantino was still an up-and-comer with one foot firmly planted in the video store.
True Romance is him putting his deepest geek fantasies on screen without detached irony or apology.
Clarence Worley may look and sound like Christian Slater, but he’s really Quentin Tarantino’s fantasy self, a cinephile and comic store clerk whose idea of a perfect birthday is a Sonny Chiba triple feature. Already the audience gets points for knowing who that is… extra credit if you know the Viva Chiba chant. He’s pretty, he’s cool, he’s quirky, and his boss likes him enough to arrange for a call girl to fake-meet-cute him at the movies. All and all, not a bad place to be – even if it’s dressed up in skid row chic.
But the real fantasy is that he’s alone, but not especially lonely. He’s mostly left to his own devices, marginalised by the world. And yet he’s still seen. His boss obviously cares for him enough to arrange the meeting with Alabama, and when she falls for Clarence mid-info-dump about comic art, she falls hard. She gets him. One some level, she’s actually falling for the hidden geek in all of us – she’s the sort of someone we don’t have to mask for.
Tarantino reportedly didn’t want to direct this one himself because it felt too autobiographical. This is him laying his deepest teenage wishes bare: being seen, being strong, being loved for exactly who you are, winning the day. There’s a vulnerability underneath all the gangsta swagga that most action flicks don’t have time for, and it’s there because the writer didn’t think to hide it.
Clarence is Tarantino confessing what he wanted to be, what he hoped love would look like, what he dreamed his life could become if the right person walked into his theater at the right moment.
Tony Scott saw something in the material that Tarantino, at that point in his career, maybe couldn’t see. The original script ends with Clarence dying in Alabama’s arms, which is adolescent posturing dressed as artistic licence. You get mourned. You get the beautiful tragedy. You never have to figure out what happens after the credits roll, whether the relationship survives the mundane, whether the love story holds up outside of crisis. Scott saw that the film had earned a happy ending, that letting them live was the right choice.
Clearly he knew the audience wanted to believe that these two weirdos might actually make it work.
The film also lingers and loiters like a Gen Xer, it treats pop cultural digressions as substantive subtext. Every character who bumps into the plot gets extra time to flesh out their stake, their rhythm, their particular quirks. Tarantino was beta-testing voices here, figuring out how to let characters exist in their own verbal universes, and Scott had the instincts to let those tangents run their course. The vignette style that Tarantino would perfect in Pulp Fiction is already present, if only a little rougher and a little less controlled, but unmistakably the same creative impulse.
Movies in the early 90s were starting to speak fluent Slacker, they discovered that the obsessions of video store clerks were a valid cinematic language. Sundance fever was building, indie darlings were the new hip, and suddenly the people who’d spent their adolescence rewinding the good parts were the ones writing movies about the good parts.
Even if they hid feet and gritted their teeth too often.
True Romance is a video store clerk’s most vulnerable daydream, handed to a studio, then handed to a hit-making rock-and-roll director, and released into a world that had been waiting for someone to speak its language. For a lot of us, it was the first time we heard that particular frequency on screen.
Hollywood took a few chances and stumbled onto the voice of a generation. -Pop
True Romance arrived on Home Video today in 1994, after a September 10th, 1993 theatrical release.