High Tension

In the Globe review, High Tension's psychoanalyic argument is summarily dismissed: "What happens in the final minutes is narratively dumb -- and psychosexually ridiculous". Either regretting the film's homophobia or rejecting its illogic, most reviewers are entirely unsatisfied.

I disagree. What makes the film and its final twist interesting is that the victim has a non-standard relationship to the perpetrator. In fact, it is never clear whether both Marie and Alex are victims of a third, or whether Marie is Alex's worst nightmare. This is incredibly intelligent and has a lot of traction. Like the dream narratives horror films embrace, this one enjoys a premise of narratological uncertainty and finds no resolution. In fact, the entire film is inscribed within Marie's dream while napping in the car, so any attempt to fasten realistic windows to this frame should be seen as irrelevant.

Without overstepping the bounds of plausibility, I believe Alex is the more compelling philosophical and psychoanalytic subject here--Marie is boring since she slaps film critics in the face with a sexual origin for sociopathology. That reading follows predictable lines: Marie represses her lesbian love for Alex and would sooner kill her than permit a male to come between them. Unfortunately, this facile case is aided by the distracting sexual perversion of the male killer, Marie's final tragic mantra, as well as a collection of Marie's obsessive responses to Alex. This is a misreading of the film, for I see these weak gestures at a typical forensic--sexual repression as the only possible explanation for homicidal mania--as the very object of this film's disgust.

Keeping Alex at the center does the trick. Since she would react to the insanity of her best friend in the same way as she would to that of a stranger, she is the only character for whom the film's narrative coheres (albeit in incoherence). She doesn't need to account for the time lost as Nahon thuds about and Marie tries to escape or hide or strike back. To her, the horror doesn't make sense. It is as if the film asks for her, alongside her mother, why this is happening to her. Her confusion over the role Marie plays is as much oneiric as it is a result of the trauma she experiences all night long.

The point is thus not to wonder where Marie got the truck if she's the real culprit or what exactly happened to the dude if he never existed. The point is to remember that our unconscious is a benevolent enemy, a horrible place where love of another conflicts with self love and our friends try to kill us.

High Tension

True Romance

When texts seem like parody one rarely stops to wonder if there ever was or will be an era in which they could seem sincere. When they seem sincere, the temptation to recast them as parody is often irresistible. True Romance is a film which furnishes this temptation elegantly, not merely because Tarantino's later work so explicitly plays against genre, but largely because on its own terms it showcases exaggeration. This showcase, no matter how theatrical, is quite pleasurable.

When a parodic reading feels like a misreading, it can only add to a text's case for earnestness. True Romance is admittedly a gushing romance. Its sarcastic title clues us into the entire ordeal, for while the textual romance is indeed true, the plot is un-true because romantic plots, in cinema or life, are not supposed to contain gory, mafia/cop utopian criminality. One entirely untenable reaction is that cinematic and real-life romance is un-true since both follow the narrative prescribed by cheap and sincere sentiments from Austen or soap opera. This is the only place romance can be found, the film seems to say, purged of complex psychology, cleansed of dissonant emotions, this couple marries on a whim, dreams together, escapes together, and after flirting with an amusing series of treacherous obstacles to the beachside frolic with a happy child, no problem, they make it in the end.

This reaction is illadvised because it requires that aspects of the film be realistic. My reaction is that far from supporting a renovation of genre film, this film is its arsenic. The romance it depicts is not true, it is not faithful to the genre nor to real life, and it thus provides for its own validity. You don't even have to enjoy it, but if you so much as watch it, it works. And the possibility for self-justified art is splendid.

Sure the metanarrative abounds, from the aspiring actors to the producers, to the bizarre and dogged inclusion of other cinematic texts on screen and television, to the startling denouement that takes practically between a film projector and a projection screen. But these moments aren't what justifies the film; rather it is the trademark tarantino plot trajectory inside a romance that reminds you not to take romance seriously.

Why was the infantile kid-at-xylophone score allowed? Who placed it at key dramatic instances when it was thoroughly inappropriate? When Slater cries at his father and recounts the man's sins, the pebbles drop optimistically and the sanguine score sucks all the legitimacy from the scene. Aside from the score, there should also, as always, have been more Christopher Walken. What deity confined him to the cameo?

True Romance