ohPulp Fiction with its literal two-part definition of “bulb” is a wink and a nod on writer-director Quentin Tarantino's part, the first definition (“a mass of soft, moist, shapeless matter”) being aptly descriptive, funny in retrospect. Brain and skull fragments accidentally strewn across the back of a 1974 Chevy Nova. Maybe Tarantino felt he needed to properly introduce audiences to the kind of low-down trash that always existed outside the mainstream, whether in lurid Timestore paperbacks or cynical grindhouse theaters. It's not going to be a typical contender for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, let alone an actual winner.
There's one more trick Pulp Fiction makes you believe that Tarantino, the real filmmaker, has the future of film in front of him – the Palme d'Or, the screenplay Oscar, turned into a real pop culture phenomenon. The transition from the opening sequence, where two outlaws decide to rob an entire Los Angeles diner over breakfast, to Dick Dale's Misirlo's rendition of surf rock feels like Kurt Cobain playing the riff on Smells Like Teen Spirit . Its electricity is undeniable and surely Tarantino must have known it. The film exudes confidence.
Tarantino is an architect and an alchemist. The same instinct, born of John Carpenter's fear of losing his touch in old age, led him to distill his life into precisely 10 aspects before retiring – informing the clever, chronological structure of pulp fiction. Stories and other visuals to a thematically meaningful whole that is far greater than the substantial sum of its parts. But Tarantino stands out in his mix and match of high and low influences, recommending a VHS hound's diet that includes early Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Melville as raw exploitation films. He has too much love for the latter to act as if he is “elevating” the crime genre, but there is a technique in Pulp Fiction. He somehow managed to invade art galleries and multiplexes simultaneously.
In Tarantino's debut feature, Reservoir Dogs, there's already plenty of evidence that he's adept at building conceit around a monstrous ensemble, and if so, a heist film without the heist, set in a mostly tense (and cost-effective) steam cooker. An empty warehouse. With a bigger budget – still surprisingly modest, just over $8 million – Tarantino opens Pulp Fiction in his Los Angeles, which combines locales like jackrabbit slimes with Hollywood kitsch that has its own unique alchemy. Downstairs LA where real people live, work, eat Big Kahuna burgers for breakfast and occasionally distribute small bags of premium heroin. Maybe he was an anthropologist too.
A key innovation of Pulp Fiction that many of its imitators never quite got right, Tarantino's witty, vivid dialogue diverged even from the stylized language of classic genre films. Aside from gossip, banalities, and everyday conversation – or at least Tarantino's livelier version of everyday conversation – Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winfield (Samuel L. Jackson) emerge at the beginning of the banter between the two murderers occupying the site of the dead. Between jobs. There's talk of hash bars and theaters in Amsterdam, how the metric system is replacing a menu item at McDonald's, and a failed TV pilot starring Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), the wife of their boss Marcellus (Ving Rhames).
There's a pleasant musicality to the language, as well as a reminder that these film genres have a firm footing in the real world – and, speaking of the “tiny differences” of fast food and movie brews in Europe, there can be a lot. It's common for Americans to still be stuck at home when they're abroad. As they discuss the finer points of a foot massage that leads Marcellus to throw a Samoan assistant off a four-story balcony, Tarantino sets the table for Vincent taking Mia out in the first of three vignettes. Anticipated night on the town. An underrated aspect of Pulp Fiction, and Tarantino's work in general, is purposeful, even if his dialogue seems a touch stilted.
Pulp Fiction doesn't get much better than the first hour, a restaurant prologue that introduces Vincent and Jules on a grisly job, then segues into “Vincent Vega and Marcellus Wallace's wife.” The touchstone of Tarantino's career. Much of the film's budget for art direction was spent on the set of Jackrabbit Slims, where Ed Sullivan impersonates the maître d' and the waiter is a disgruntled Buddy Holly (Steve Buscemi). But there's a special magic to Travolta, whose fortunes have long been slipping in Hollywood, redeeming his Saturday Night Fever film with a twist, and a thrill in the gearshift moment when Thurman's cocaine-addicted Mia ups a line. Smack.
Two later stories, The Gold Watch, concern Butch (Bruce Willis), a boxer who must double-cross Marcellus in the ring to collect a family heirloom, and The Pony Situation, a race to clean up a bloody mess. In Nova's hindsight, they each still have memorable moments, but they're significantly less inspiring on their own. Yet their careful placement within the film as a whole gives this set of vignettes an overall power as themes of honor and redemption begin to emerge, along with mechanisms like karma and fate.
In Pulp Fiction the first and last scenes are central to the timeline, which greatly affects Jules' life-changing decision in the final moments, when time has stopped so he can step off the board. (The way the timelines converge at that point is exceptionally neat and adds to the tension.) It's surprising that a hitman has this moment of spiritual epiphany, but Tarantino's skill is as if he staged a Mexican stand-up. Unforgettably Reservoir Dogs puts it in genre. Even when Pulp Fiction reaches deep, it's still got a nasty kick.
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