True Romance

Saw True Romance. It was about a comic-book store employee who falls in love with a delightful and winsome "call-girl." Prompted by the desire to maintain a self-image of bad-assery (as personified by the ghost of Elvis,) he kills her pimp and accidentally steals a lot of cocaine. They then travel to LA to sell to a Hollywood exec, always just out of reach of the mob who he stole from and the cops. At first we're rooting for him, he being a normal nerd with grand ambitions, but later on, though our affection for him stays constant, he himself actually changes. He dispatches mob goons at first by great difficulty and later on with relative ease. The first goon that's killed actually has a monologue about how the first killing is always the hardest but that, by repetition, even murder becomes dull. Indeed, by the end, cops are laughing at what a slick, stone-cold killer this kid is and he's finally become just another gangster. But he's the gangster we're watching and somehow we like him therefore.

Cinematic slight-of-hand is used to keep us liking him. This gradual shift from naif to actual bad ass goes unremarked by the film. Similarly the desire of the protagonist to be as cool as Elvis, despite working in a comic-book shop and having nothing at all, is deeply pathetic but is never portrayed as such by the film. Notice that he delivers a monologue about how awesome Elvis was to a woman in a bar and later, when he's with his girlfriend, we catch the tail-end of the same monologue, probably delivered again, word-for-word, but if this is noticed at all, it more funny than sad. In general, the film does not comment at all on his desire for cool and either wants us to make up our own minds or hopes we forget about it.

Thematically, an obsession with pop-culture and a desire for cool pops up again and again. When the protagonist and girlfriend first meet he asks her about herself but she responds noncommittally to every question until he asks about her favorite band and movie. Then she responds without even thinking. Of course she knows which altar of media she worships at, doesn't everyone? Most tellingly, near the end of the movie, the girlfriend narrates that "three words went through my mind endlessly, repeating themselves like a broken record: you're so cool, you're so cool, you're so cool." Note: not "I love you." I submit that though this film is called True Romance, these two are not in love with each other, they are in love with their adopted personae.