Roger Avary and Quentin Tarantino, 1994
#25 of 28 in the 20th century series

What to say about Pulp Fiction?  Where do you even start?  It occurred to me that maybe I should start by seeing what I’d already said over the years.  Here’s a mention from my article last year about The Nice Guys:

I watched a lot of movies like this back in the ’90s⁠—movies like Pulp Fiction […] that piled audacious incident on top of audacious incident and gave you two solid hours of shocked laughter for your $4 matinee ticket.

That’s the main reason I saw this multiple times in the theaters back in the autumn of 1994.  While it was cool to experience all those surprises for myself on opening day⁠—my journal entry for 1994.1014 says that I got to the theater at 12:10 for the 12:20 p.m. first show and the line was already eye-popping⁠—even more fun was to know when the surprises were coming and hear the other viewers lose their minds when the bombs dropped.  And as the excerpt above suggests, it wasn’t long before theaters were full of other movies engineered to make audiences burst into chor­uses of OMGs and WTFs, from Boogie Nights and its firecrackers to The Big Lebowski and its marmot.  Here’s an excerpt from an article I wrote in 2009 about another one of these movies, called Go:

With its tripartite structure, interlocking timelines, and nonstop pop culture refs, Go was naturally compared to Pulp Fiction.  In fact, most critics saw it as little more than Pulp Fiction watered down and warmed over.  Mike D’Angelo was a rare dissenting voice, giving it a rave review and saying he might have made it his #1 of the year “had it even managed to create the illusion of being about something.”  Actually, it is about something: the resilience of youth.  It’s a celebration of a (perhaps mythical) time in one’s life when one can make some extremely poor life decisions and come away with no consequences worse than a slight limp and a lesson learned.  It’s also, I had to conclude upon this, my fourth or fifth view­ing⁠—but my first in about ten years⁠—little more than Pulp Fiction watered down and warmed over.

Apparently some movies went beyond even Go when it came to ripping Tarantino off wholesale.  I read an account of the end-of-term screenings at Britain’s National Film School circa 1995 in which “Out of the five student movies I watched, four incorpor­ated violent shoot-outs over a soundtrack of iconoclastic Seven­ties pop hits, two climaxed with all the main characters shooting each other at once, and one had two hit-men discussing the idio­syncrasies of The Brady Bunch before ‘offing’ their victim”.  But to what extent is this like a mid-’60s band copying the Beatles’ music and to what extent is it like copying their haircuts?  Why did Pulp Fiction with its $8 million budget make over $200 mil­lion and become widely considered the definitive ’90s movie while Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead barely cracked $500,000?  What’s the key ingredient?

It can’t just be the violence.  Violent gorefests had been around for decades.

It can’t just be the pop culture conversations.  Certainly they struck a chord: while the Baby Boomers may have been the first generation to grow up with television, Generation X was raised by it, and as I have discussed a number of times over the years, talking about bad TV, and top 40 hits (as seen on MTV), and blockbuster movies (as seen on VCRs), was a pretty reliable way for Xers to bond (e.g., during the first few weeks in the dorms).  The Scooby-Doo conversation is the one I keep coming back to, but absolutely, the same boxes get checked when Quentin Taran­tino has characters (often played by him) theorize about how “Like a Virgin” is about a guy with a big dick, or how Top Gun is about the Tom Cruise character’s dilemma about his sexual preference, or how the Smurfs were created to prepare the world for the arrival of the Hindu gods.  Except that last one isn’t Tar­antino: it’s from Slacker, which predates Pulp Fiction by four years and Reservoir Dogs by two.  Which is to say that Gen X pop culture conversations had begun to trickle into the media before Tarantino and we would likely have still seen this notorious beer commercial without him.

Now, of course, we can’t discount style: that commercial lacks the distinctive patter of Mr. Brown in Reservoir Dogs, and Taran­tino’s talent with dialogue extends well beyond the small handful of disquisitions on pop culture with which he was initially asso­ciated.  An example from Pulp Fiction: Butch, a boxer who has taken money from crime boss Marsellus Wallace to throw a fight, has instead bet on himself, won the fight, and gone on the lam.  Marsellus instructs his lieutenant to stop at nothing to track him down: “If Butch goes to Indochina,” he says, he wants a man “hiding in a bowl of rice ready to pop a cap in his ass.”  Note the flourishes crammed into just this one line: “Indochina” is a geo­graphical term that has been deprecated since the 1950s, and the volume of an average bowl of rice is about one percent of the vol­ume of the body of an adult human, making it somewhat difficult for the latter to hide within the former.  A more conventional screenwriter might have come up with something like “If Butch goes to Vietnam, I want someone hiding in a rice paddy ready to pop a cap in his ass.”  But Tarantino’s line is immeasurably bet­ter.  For another example, here’s some dialogue from near the end of the film, when two hitmen, Jules and Vincent, are in Jules’s friend’s bathroom, trying to clean themselves up after a bloody mishap.  Jules notices that Vincent’s hand towel is stained a deep red.

JULES

What the fuck you just do to his towel, man?!

VINCENT

I was dryin’ my hands!

JULES

Well you’re supposed to wash ’em first!

VINCENT

Well you watched me wash ’em!

JULES

I watched you get ’em wet!

VINCENT

I was washin’ ’em! This shit’s hard to get off! Maybe if he had Lava I coulda done a better job!

JULES

I used the same fuckin’ soap you did and when I finished the towel didn’t look like no goddamn maxipad!

This type of dialogue⁠—wordy, hung up on minutiae, more than a little edgelordy, full of the sort of flourishes mentioned above⁠—spawned an industry.  But again, not a very successful one.  Some writers just didn’t have Tarantino’s way with a phrase.  Others did, but weren’t fortunate enough to have Samuel L. Jackson speaking their lines⁠—because so much of the success of Taran­tino’s dialogue is in the delivery.  But let me finally get to what I think is another key element.  For most of the 21st century the flagship creator at Marvel Comics was Brian Bendis, who has spent his entire career cramming his spin on Tarantino dialogue into speech balloons.  Yet Bendis shows why so many of these attempts to mimic the formula fail.  He’s among the best at composing Tarantino-style dialogue, but as I have detailed in earlier articles, he’s awful at deploying it.  A typical Bendis story looks like this:

Now look at what Tarantino does with his “Royale With Cheese” bit in Pulp Fiction.  He also introduces it during downtime, as Vincent and Jules, whom we are just meeting, drive to an as yet unknown destination and chat about “the little differences” between the U.S. and Europe⁠—such as that in France, McDonald’s doesn’t offer a “Quarter Pounder” due to the metric system.  They reach their destination and we learn that they are hitmen in the employ of Marsellus Wallace, whose methods, we learn, are unduly harsh even for these seasoned killers.  They enter the apartment of their target this morning: a young preppie guy who’s absconded with some of Marsellus’s property.  Jules does nearly all the talking, and surprisingly, he’s actually very genial⁠—yet the situation remains tense, as the preppie guy quivers with fear.  The tension builds as Jules⁠—still quite genially⁠—asks the preppie guy for a bite of the burger he’s having for breakfast, then for a sip of his Sprite⁠—chatting amiably all the while, but still, crossing boundaries, invading his space (and drinking all the Sprite while fixing him with a stare).  It’s friendly intimida­tion, and the paradox adds to the already intense pressure: is this guy going to get a scolding or a bullet in the face?  And then Jules asks the preppie whether he knows what they call a Quar­ter Pounder in France.  Now, Quentin Tarantino hardly invented the notion that suspense can heighten the impact of a conver­sation.  Long before he was even born, it was already an old chestnut that you can have a bomb go off for a few seconds of surprise, or you can show some­one setting a bomb to go off and hiding it under a table, and thereby have viewers hanging on every word of the idle chitchat at that table for minute after agonizing minute.  Two problems with that chestnut: one, it isn’t true.  Viewers are less likely to hang on the words than to take them as just so much blah-blah-blah, as they squirm waiting for the bomb to go off.  Two, usually the words are just so much blah-blah-blah.  I remember that the Skandie winner for 2007, a movie called 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, had a scene like this: something horrific is happening in the life of the protagonist, but she has to quickly run off to put in some face time at her boy­friend’s mother’s birthday party.  We are meant to be struck by the contrast between the banal blah-blah-blah at the party and the horrific events that are continuing to transpire across town.  What Tarantino does with the “Royale With Cheese” bit is show us what his brand of banter looks like during downtime, and then what it looks like when you use the same brand of banter during a tense scene.  That’s the combination that made his career.  Even as his later movies devolved into amygdalar revenge fantasies, he remained a master at cranking up suspense through conflict dis­guised as pleasant conversation consisting of gonzo banter.  His imitators generally get either the banter or the suspense, but rarely both.

That’s technique, though, and before I wrap up I should probably say something about content.  A moment ago I said that Taran­tino’s films had devolved, and many years ago I used Pulp Fiction as an example of what they had devolved from.  To wit:

There is a famous sequence in Pulp Fiction in which a fight between an underworld kingpin and a boxer who crossed him spills into exactly the wrong pawn shop.  The proprietor gets the drop on both men and then he and a buddy of his start ass-raping the crime boss in the basement… but the boxer manages a surreptitious escape, finds a sword, and rescues his erstwhile enemy.  At which point the crime boss blasts his surviving assailant in the crotch with a shotgun.  “I ain’t through with you by a damn sight,” he promises.  “I’m gonna get medieval on your ass.”  Now imagine that the sub­sequent hour of the movie were footage of the crime boss and his underlings torturing the rapist to death and you basically have every movie Tarantino has made in the [2000s].

That is to say, those 2000s films are about someone being grotesquely wronged, thus giving us permission to revel in the lengthy ultraviolent retribution that follows.  Pulp Fiction is different.  What’s it about?  Many have argued that it’s not about anything; much has been written about how Pulp Fiction in particular and Tarantino’s oeuvre in general reflect the world as seen through the eyes of someone who has never set foot outside a video rental store.  It has no reference to the real world, but only to other movies: it’s a hodgepodge of Scorsese, Kubrick, blaxploitation, kung fu films, the French New Wave, and Hong Kong shoot-’em-ups.  And then, yeah, throw some music and TV in there too.  Tarantino himself has said that the idea behind the movie was to take some well-worn tropes⁠—the lieutenant and the boss’s wife, the boxer asked to throw the fight, the mess to clean up before Mom gets home⁠—and take them to some demented places⁠—i.e., to comment on other texts.  To the post­modernists, who held that commenting on other texts was the only thing any text could do, this was no problem, but for those of us who have encountered a story or two that had something thoughtful to say about the real world, it might seem kind of shallow.  But wait!  Reservoir Dogs had some thematic depth, right?  Wasn’t it ultimately a sort of meditation on whether there are values like loyalty and honor that are more important than mere self-preservation?  And doesn’t the middle section of Pulp Fiction ultimately cover a lot of the same themes?  Butch the boxer could have gotten away, just like Mr. Orange in Reservoir Dogs, but when it came down to it… oh, and then that third section, with Jules insisting that his view of the world has been transformed by having witnessed a miracle, and delivering a long speech offering up a series of interpretations of Ezekiel 25:17⁠—there are some deep religious themes there, right?

Well, no.  The passage Jules recites is not the real Ezekiel 25:17; it’s from a 1973 Japanese martial arts movie called Bodyguard Kiba.  And all that stuff about loyalty and honor and whatnot⁠—I find it hard to believe that Quentin Tarantino has actual opinions about any of it.  He built his stories around these themes because the movies he’s paying homage to built their stories around these themes.  But Tarantino does succeed in clearing the bar that Mike D’Angelo set for Go: he creates the illusion that Pulp Fiction is about something.  And for a story focused on form rather than theme, maybe that’s enough.

“Jump Start This Heart” (the Dollyrots, 2017)

One reason that Pulp Fiction became such a sensation was that it was a comeback vehicle for John Travolta, who had been one of the biggest movie stars of the late ’70s before his career fell off a cliff in the 1980s.  There was particular buzz about the fact that Tarantino put in a big dance scene, hearkening back to Saturday Night Fever⁠—which, until this month, I had never seen.  I’d seen clips and parodies, but apparently I had even less of a sense of what it was all about than a lot of other folks who saw the movie for the first time in the 21st century, because their reviews all tended to say, “Wow, I expected a lighthearted dance movie and instead it’s really dark!”  I didn’t know well enough to have any such preconceptions.  But yeah, it turns out that this is one of those movies about kids from the wrong side of the tracks and their wretched lives: abuse at home, dead-end jobs for little pay, pointless fights, reckless stunts, promiscuity that shades into rape, drinking and drugs… and, of course, in any movie about troubled youth, a key role will be played by music.  But be­cause this movie was made during a particularly weird cultural moment, this cohort’s music isn’t the threatening sound that usually gets paired with delinquency.  It’s not punk or metal or gangsta rap⁠—it’s disco!  Bippety-boppety beats!  Syrupy strings!  Flutes!  Preposterous falsettos!  It makes for an interesting con­trast.  By the time I was old enough to have any awareness of pop culture, disco had become a joke⁠—and I mean that quite literally.  Like, I remember my eleventh-grade history teacher asking one of my classmates what his favorite type of music was, and the kid said “disco”, and the whole class roared with laughter.  Then I found a copy of a two-LP set called Bee Gees Greatest stashed in a dusty corner of the living room and brought it to school, and got lots of snickers showing off the interior artwork with balding guys in polyester shirts open to the navel, medallions nesting in their chest hair.  So even though Quentin Tarantino did a lot to push the notion that “1970s = ironically cool, not contemptible self-parody”, as a child of the ’80s it took some effort to resist my imprinting and take Saturday Night Fever somewhat seriously.  But… I was a toddler of the 1970s, and so I also carry with me an earlier imprinting, for disco was the soundtrack of those years and it therefore evokes in me the dreamtime unreality of early childhood.  On that level, this worked for me better than virtually any dance music from my fully conscious existence would have.

“You Should Be Dancing” (the Dee Gees, 2021)

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