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Dir. Quentin Tarantino
It's bizarre to actually watch Pulp Fiction. It's not a pop culture
UFO everyone references and says is the best film ever made, let along made in
the nineties, that people have only seen many years ago. You're not just saying
"Royale with cheese" to yourself and imaging the film you watched in
your adolescence years ago, a century almost for me now in how I've changes in
my art tastes in only less than six or so years. You're actually watching it
with near decades having passed, and with how Quentin Tarantino is now as a director, trying to reappraise it. It's
amazing now that such a legendary film that, for better and unfortunately for
worse in areas, drastically changed cinema culture and style was such a little
film. Its effectively a slice of life indie movie...that just happens to use
characters and plotlines from crime fiction and expand everything they do to
pass the time into further importance at points. Rewatching this evoked the
likes of Wayne Wang's Smoke (1995) and Jim Jarmusch as much as it did classic film noir and Reservoir Dogs (1992). Despite its
length, the manipulation of time, and its cast, its far more concerned with
imagining two hit man going to a drive-thru burger joint, even though this
example doesn't happen in the film, and debating whether to get a cheese or
Hawaiian burger between them. A former video store clerk who, in making Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, had completely sacrificed part of his memory bank
entirely to cinema - flights of fantasy, sleaze, glamorous crime, which are
purely fiction - but was as obsessed with how he and his friends would be
sitting around shooting the shit eating Captain
Crunch. The paradox still exists in his main auteurist flourishes now even
though he's expanded the material to much more epic proportions now in his last
two films.
My relationship with Tarantino as a director has been a
complicated one. Like everyone, when I got into cinema as an adolescent, I was immediately
drawn to Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. Then came the disappointment
of Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004), and my
sole viewing of Death Proof (2007)
was a painful experience to view its entire length, having such an effect that Inglourious Basterds (2009) would be a
make-and-break on whether I would follow his films anymore. It was good but
flawed back then, and Django Unchained
(2012) was divisive for me back at the cinemas in January this year.
Unfortunately the cult of personality that surrounding him, one that once
encouraged people to find obscure genre and cult films, has become a plague on
cinema in general, which would dampen your view of him unless you separate them
from the filmmaker himself. By himself, Tarantino
is becoming for me one of the few American directors whose actually an auteur,
has the talent and makes films that are unconventional yet I can actually see in a multiplex because of how Britain
embraced him from the beginning. Rewatching Jackie Brown (1997), I found an incredible film, and Inglourious Basterds has became ingenious
in its ideas in its head on the rewatch. Pulp
Fiction in comparison, is a minor work frankly, the transition from the
lean Reservoir Dogs to the style
that would be last to now, with failures, with stuff not as good as his later
work, but a lot to love nonetheless. Despite potential issues with his style,
his perceived glibness, he was touching on tics that were clever and underrated
that he would expand on later.
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What immediately becomes the key
to seeing a lot of what Pulp Fiction
is about is the Jack Rabbit Slim restaurant hitman Vincent (John Travolta) and Mai Wallace (Uma Thurman) go to. It's a place that's
too cool to ever exist in real life - fifties b-movie posters on the walls, $5
dollar milkshakes that are actually worth the money - but it also comes off as
a metaphor of having to reassess the culture of the 20th century, and even
further back in history, and what individuals are faced with in connecting it
back into something relevant. Directors have been heavy in their referencing of
other materials long before Tarantino,
especially with Jean-Luc Godard, but Tarantino has drastically changed the
notion of doing this. However, even if he was to get a nosebleed and an
erection just being in the proximity of a long unmanufactured brand of
breakfast cereal, he was still able to step back and question whether there was
any real meaning or point to how people assessed this kind of material in its
littlest details. It's about the "little details" as Vincent
describes being in Europe to his co-hitman Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), and in many ways their own existences, along
with the others characters, is changed and affected by Tarantino by the little details he adds to them onscreen. It's cool
for Tarantino to reference this
stuff, but where is its place nearing the Millennium and onward? When everyone
knows who Marilyn Monroe is but with
context of her of an image, not as an actress let alone a human being. When no
one has no idea who Mamie Van Doren
is, more ironic when I've only discovered who she is within this year and have
yet to see any of her films, except Vincent. That he also still says that the restaurant
is a waxwork museum with a pulse despite digging it. The entire film, begun
with a definition of what "pulp" is, is effectively trying to assess
the place of these pulp characters - hitmen, gangsters, a bribed boxer, femme
fatales, a pair of romantically together robbers - in a world where there's
more concern about the meaning of giving another man's wife a foot message
while a hit taking place is a per usual nine-to-five job. Its befitting in that
definition of pulp he also includes the other use of it as a word to represent
churned matter, as particularly in the nineties, an entire century's worth of
pop culture seemed to collapsed in on itself in a concentrated mass, which
asked the question of how one would use it from then on. It's not surprising Tarantino became the person to define
this aspect in how he tried to work with it. Everything that he is obsessed
with is reassessed in the context of what his day-to-day life outside of the
cinema probably was like, and in doing so the concept of being connected to pop
culture material was given to the characters within said material through his
take on it.
And it is this that gives the
film the best virtues, while the aspects that made Pulp Fiction iconic are, while good, of lesser interest or are even
major flaws. The plot of hitmen Jules and Vincent is good, but suffers from Jackson feeling a minor character in his
own pieces and a trite spiritual turn for his character later on. Yes, the
Marvin (Phil LaMarr) sequence is
something to remember, but the two characters have the best moments separate
from each other. Jules with a word based standoff with Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer
as lover robbers Pumpkin and Honey Bunny. Vincent with Mia Wallace. It's not
the Ezekiel 25:17 speech which is the best dialogue for Jackson in that scene, it's that the use of language as a weapon,
amplified the most as a concept for Tarantino
in Inglourious Basterds, existed
back then in the director-writer's work with Jules and the Big Kahuna Burger. It's
not Thurman and Travolta dancing which is the best part of their plot, but their
cute and awkward bonding. The dialogue is great from Tarantino, but for a man dismissed as not knowing when to stop
talking, a lot of this film gets incredibly quiet and stand out immensely, especially
one between Travolta and Thurman which leads to her talking about
those "awkward silences". It's not the main plot about boxer Butch (Bruce Willis) on the run from mob boss Marsellus
Wallace (Ving Rhames) that's the best
parts of his story, but two quiet scenes with Willis and two actresses. With a taxi driver (Angela Jones) discussing what it was like to kill a man in the
ring, and with Butch's girlfriend Fabienne (Maria
de Medeiros) whose brief passage on how she wants a potbelly fills her out
as a fully formed character in a single dialogue chunk and, for a director
probably more obsessed at this time with Sonny
Chiba films than romance, showed he could yet write emotional and
passionate exchanges between characters. Even the music, which is a key aspect
of Tarantino as well as his casting
choices, is not the "trendy" music for casual tastes, but deep cut
pop music for those who want to relax with something different. The rush of Dick Dale's take on Miserlou - quick, urgent, very short instrumental around what is
effectively a quick, fast fingered guitar solo as a whole song - over the opening credits is pitch perfect to
get you quickly into the film. But the rest of the music, even with the iconic Urge Overkill take on Girl You'll Be A Woman Soon, is calm
and lethargic. It's not aggressively cool music, but surf rock to ride waves
on, bubblegum pop or very unconventional song choices that are great music, especially
something like Flowers On The Wall
by The Statler Brothers, but young
adolescent fans of Tarantino would
never give the chance to listening to. How he uses the music is completely
against the image of cool soundtrack music, with characters just turning a
radio or music player on to unwind, like Butch singing along to Flowers On The Wall while driving
despite what has happened a few moments ago with him.
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The main issue within Pulp Fiction, even if it wasn't the one
Tarantino intended in writing the
stories contained in it, is what exactly to do with these fictional pulp
characters he's watched countless times in films to keep them alive for the
next few decades. By seeing what they'd be doing in their off-time. Literally
what burger a mob enforcer would eat, and how'd he describe it, and far from a
pointless discretion it forces you to actually think about these archetypes
more thoroughly - in the plots, the dialogue, the switching of tones and all
the pop references. Far from someone who just glorified violence, the violence
is actually even more sickening because of being within the context shown
onscreen, where even if you laugh at some aspects, the incident at the end of
the Vincent and Mia Wallace segment is gristly. Far from shown as a blackly
humorous as I thought it was, the rape scene in this is actually discomforting.
It's just that Tarantino, in probably
the only time he's ever had something legitimately weird in one of his films,
still glorifies a samurai blade and makes the appearance of a leather gimp humorous
around it. The film as a whole is flawed trying to be a pulpy genre film, because
transitioning from Reservoir Dogs,
he wasn't able to make it as interesting as in later films. But the important
digressions from the plots is the virtue of the film, and when the two sides
can co-exist fully, like Jules and the Ezekiel speech in the hotel, or Vincent
and Mia Wallace's whole plot together, its seamless and vivid in character
depth despite being archetypes.
The only real issue with this
film, barring the flaws Tarantino
would hammer out in his newly evolving writing and structural style from Jackie Brown onwards, is the issue of him
using racial epilates in his dialogue that has been in criticism of his work
for years. Immediately, the fact that I'm a white male means that I could be
making excuses to defend something he should be taken to task for. But for me it's
a lot more complicated than this. Both Reservoir
Dogs and this film have very course language at times, but not only is it
usually spoken from characters who exist within crime organisations and the
underground, who would not be soft spoken and politically correct in reality or
fiction, but it feels more like Tarantino
was a very young guy too enamoured with edgy dialogue which he would transition
away from. Django Unchained made me
uncomfortable in its use of racial language, and its content in general, but
that's a film intentionally making you uncomfortable and tackling American
slavery head-on, meaning that Tarantino
is at least now addressing these issues fully even while riffling on gory
exploitation cinema. The only time he seems to step too far in Pulp Fiction by accident is the
infamous "dead nigger storage" speech, which is made more unfortunate
by the fact he's playing the character saying it, who suddenly from this
aggression at Vincent and Jules tags along behind Harvey Keitel like a shadow for the rest of his screen time. The
issue for me, and I understand I may be violently disagreed with in this issue,
is that a white male is using terms like "nigger" in his scripts'
dialogue but not in the context of a Oscar nominated film about racism. But with characters using it in its various
contexts as well as alongside edgy, pulp characters. I've encountered examples
of this that I find far more controversial to me honestly - the novel L.A.
Confidential (1990) by James Ellroy
is far and away more of a issue to digest, even for its virtues, because its
the omniscient third person narration that is riddled with coarse language full
of obscenities upfront. Here, Tarantino
feels like a white man who listened to a lot of hip-hop and rap music, but may
have stumbled badly in moments of Pulp
Fiction over the context of certain words with loaded and complicated
histories to them. But he improved drastically in this area immensely, where
you can have Inglourious Basterds
make an exploitation film surrounding the issue of the Holocaust, but not trivialise
it and also make the film an issue about the nature of propaganda that
ruminates on it. There are so aspects about the context that need to be thought
about too. That Samuel L. Jackson and
Ving Rhames are the kind of people
who would not only flat-out refuse to act in a film they found offensive, but
would have kicked said director's skull in. That Jackie Brown exists and Tarantino,
adapting a novel, changed a white protagonist to Pam Grier. That more questionable material is allowed to be
celebrated with a muted backlash to them - particularly in cinema where The Birth of a Nation (1915) is still
seen as the beginning of modern American cinema. It's a debate that needs a
whole term devoted entirely to itself. It needs writers and commentators of
African descent to have the first words. I need to read up on it. But for me, Tarantino was a juvenile person writing Pulp Fiction, who would drastically
grown up internally in Jackie Brown
despite still wanting to make films like Kill
Bill.
In its entirety, Pulp Fiction is a good film, great to
return to. But it's a minor film. It doesn't make sense for this to be the best
film in existence or even in the director's filmography. It's an experiment, a
starting point for the directorial and writing style he has made his idiosyncrasy.
Jim Jarmusch made better films than
this. Tarantino's made better films.
And unfortunately I have to wonder if an infantilism is involved here - a film
you would encounter and dig as an adolescent, but you're unwilling to move on
in your favourites of his in case it decimated your found memories of it. If
someone has this as their favourite? I won't argue, good for them. For me, it's
good, but its either Reservoir Dogs
or a later film that makes him worth existing. This is a masterpiece only for
the fact of its great individual moments, and that's taking into consideration
I may become fonder and more appreciative of it on more rewatches. That he
became who he is thanks to its success. Because this film is why I can see the
director's peculiar and unconventional take of filmmaking in a multiplex for
his last two films so far, at least giving me something different when
everything else is not really interesting for me that week at the pictures.
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