True Romance.

Want to feel like a fool? Go see True Romance. That will do the trick.

For starters, there' s the fictional company you will have to keep. The hero is an Elvis-obsessed, moronic piece of white trash named Clarence Worley who, when he's not clerking in a comic-book store (where he reverently samples the product), doesn't get out of his apartment much, although he always treats himself to a Kung-fu triple feature on his birthday. And, get this, his favorite chop-socky star isn't the dynamic Bruce Lee or the endearing Karate clown, Jackie Chan, but the bestial Sonny Chiba, who tears off the gonads of his opponents and holds them up to the camera for our delectation. Clarence's latest such excursion rewards him with the company of Alabama Whitman, a bubble-headed tan sent to the lad by his employer as a birthday present. Alabama is the sort of girl who thinks that having one's life controlled by a pimp isn't so bad, though, come to think of it, hers did spend some time recently stomping on the stomach of one of the other whores in his stable. A few scenes later, Alabama learns that Clarence, seeking to avenge her honor or, more likely, assuage his own jealousy, has just murdered both her pimp and another gangster. To which she can only gush, "You are so-o-o romantic."

If these characters aren't repulsive enough for you, then be warned that they are played by Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette. Both of them struck me as nonentities when I first saw them (Slater in The Name of the Rose, Arquette in Ethan Frome), but I now see that that was only because they were unfairly burdened with roles requiring intelligence and charm. Here, as violence-loving turnipheads, they attain visibility, Slater by doing a third-rate imitation of Jack Nicholson and Arquette by emulating the naive vivacity of Melanie Griffith. Their performances aren't exactly good but they meet this movie's requirements by being sufficiently animalistic.

Now I'm certainly not suggesting that characters have to be subtle or likable to be compelling. The quite similar protagonists of Terence Malick's Badlands, played by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, were even more psychotic than this current duo. But Malick managed to conduct the viewer into the dreams and aspirations of his delinquents. He made you see their self-images as well as their frightful deed and so you enjoyed bifocal vision: whenever Sheen murdered, you shuddered at the action but you were also gripped by the self-deluding fantasies that propelled him to his crimes.

In True Romance, the strategies of writer Quentin Tarantino and director Tony Scott are the opposite of Malick' s. They don't reveal anything about their main characters that you haven't known from the start. Slater's eyebrow-arching frenzy and Arquette's baby doll gurgling are what you're stuck with for the entirety of the movie. It' s true that Clarence has a couple of daydream colloquies with his idol, Elvis Presley, but in these scenes the ghostly rock star merely urges Clarence on to do what he would do anyway. And isn't Presley an inappropriate choice as pop Mephisto to Clarence? Presley's persona both as singer and actor was that of a good ol' boy, sexually potent but also honest, tender, and even socially responsible (remember "In the Ghetto?"), ready to use his fists in defense of women and children but otherwise nonviolent. Why would the spirit of this redneck Galahad urge his fan on to homicide and drug dealing?

For drug dealing is indeed the mission as Clarence and his inamorata, with a suitcase loaded with cocaine taken from the dead pimp, drive from Detroit to L.A. to sell the dope to Hollywood executives. What they don't know is that the mob is in pursuit and, later, some L.A. cops are conducting a sting. All these mobsters and detectives and Hollywood shysters are portrayed as just so many comic monsters equal to one another in greed and viciousness, and they display Tarantino' s greatest writing talent: his knack for serving up comic-sinister dialogue which is not only funny but which registers the stirrings of violence as a Geiger counter detects the presence of radiation. Tarantino can't write a father-son reconciliation or a truly interesting love scene but he is a whiz at capturing the profane mockery and excitement of detectives listening on headphones to a drug deal. And he is also good at pushing the comicsinister into sheer horror, as when an assassin admits to a victim that he used to be sickened whenever he killed but now does it just to see the expressions on his victims' faces change.

The supporting players, abetted by Tony Scott's galvanizing staging, have such a field day that they easily nudge aside the leads. There are four stand-outs. Gary Oldman astonished me as a white pimp trying with considerable success to look and sound black. The actor charges the air around him with nearly palpable menace. Saul Rubenick (the dime novelist of Unforgiven) is deliciously loathsome as a self-bedazzled movie producer; Christopher Walken, though patently miscast as a Sicilian mafioso, manages once again to use his cobra magnetism to elicit both laughs and chills. But best of all is Bronson Pinchot as a profoundly luckless go-between memorably named Elliot Blitzer. Pinchot endows this craven would-be actor, producer's toady, and police informant with so much humor and (relative) sanity that Blitzer becomes the single truly human presence in this cast of maniacs. Solicitude for one' s own skin may not be the noblest of emotions, but when Pinchot, trapped between the ranks of mafia and police, suggests that everyone hold their fire until he slips out since "all this is really none of my business," he expresses the only emotion in this movie untainted by the malice Tarantino shows for both his characters and his audience.

For an example of that malice, take the scene in which gangsters led by Walken interrogate Clarence's father (Dennis Hopper) in order to learn our hero' s whereabouts. Hopper defies his tormentors and provokes them into killing him before he breaks under torture. All very noble, but note how Tarantino taints this act of heroism. Hopper, learning that Walken is Sicilian, taunts the elegant hoodlum with the fact that Moors raided Sicily centuries ago and impregnated the women. Therefore, concludes this well-read security guard, all you Sicilians are "part nigger." Granted, the speech does have a certain nasty humor and Walken' s bemused reactions to it are hilarious. I also grant Bernard Shaw's insight that people don't have their virtues and vices in neat separate packages but have them all messed together. A brave and loving father can be a bigot too, or at least talk like a bigot in order to inflame his enemies. What bothers me about the speech is that its sole aim is not to reveal character under pressure but merely to shock. No, not even to shock but just to give us yet another dirty little dig in the ribs.

The "true romance" of the title is similarly subverted. In this movie' s world of violence and greed, we are meant to see that the lovers, at least, are pure in their passion. But why is the first sex scene preceded by Clarence reading a violent comic book to his girl? And why is a later sex bout accomplished in a phone booth while Clarence calls a pal who is sitting on the toilet. Whatever Tony Scott and Quentin Tarantino feel about true romance in the abstract, they certainly mock it in their characters.

And consider the treatment of violence. Clarence and Alabama often watch glitzy, ridiculous crime shows on TV before and after launching into some violent encounter of their own. An ironic juxtaposition? Fantasy violence vs. the sting of reality? But though the violence undergone by the lovers is considerably more graphic than what they watch, it is just as unbelievable, just as much without real consequences. Lengthily stomped by the pimp, Clarence dashes through the rest of the movie without so much as a stitch in his side. Alabama, beaten nearly into jello by an assassin, feels fine after Clarence dabs her face with Kleenex. Why these instantaneous recoveries? Comedy? No, for they aren't done with the clean exaggeration of comedy which makes us laugh. Satire? No, for satire has a moral purpose. A sort of Brechtian distancing device? No, for the violence is so lovingly savored by the camera that we can' t be distanced from it a moment later by a bit of unreality.

No, there is some other underlying emotion at the core of this movie, and I'll venture a guess as to what it is.

Under the squeal of brakes and the bursts of firepower, I seemed to hear someone in the theater' s darkness muttering, "It's a joke, see? Everything' s a joke. Movies are a joke, and what people will settle for from the movies is a joke. And you are a joke for watching this movie." I think it was Tarantino himself I was hearing sniggering whenever viewers flinched, sneering whenever they began to be interested in what he had helped to put on the screen.

Nihilistic laughter in the dark.