Pulp Fiction

Dana Polan

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838717667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Dana Polan sets out to unlock the style and technique of 'Pulp Fiction'. He shows how broad Tarantino's points of reference are, and analyzes the narrative accomplishment and complexity. In addition, Polan argues that macho attitudes celebrated in film are much more complex than they seem.

Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction is not so much a film as a phenomenon. Winning major prizes, giving rise to an immense culture of obsessive fandom, generating countless wannabes, promoted by its director as an intensely authored work, Pulp Fiction burns and bursts its way into its historical moment as an inescapable signpost of its age. The significance of Pulp Fiction is not located objectively in the structure of the work itself but in the resonances this work has – both for its admirers and its detractors. For these viewers, the significance and value of Pulp Fiction are generally to be found not in any message the film imparts nor in any political position it explicitly adheres to but in its reaching beyond meaning and moralism to offer up a sheer cinematic spectacle, a fun-house experience of vibrant sights and sounds. Those who like this film do so because it doesn’t seem to have anything to say and renders cinematic experience as pure play. Those who dislike it dislike it for the very same reasons, seeing the deliberate cool superficiality of Pulp Fiction as a symptom of the empty post-modernity of our age. Or they see the film as hiding some real political issues – for example, around masculinity and race – behind a seductive veneer of spectacle that it claims is beyond politics.

‘And they called it puppy love’ (Paul Anka)

The NFT [National Film Theatre] is usually the haunt of bookish, serious-minded cineastes, but this occasion was different. ‘We had 3,000 applications for tickets from members alone,’ said Brian Robinson, a spokesman for the NFT. ‘From early December onward, the phones didn’t stop ringing. Every other call was people asking for Tarantino tickets. The main NFT theatre, capacity 450, was packed, but another 162 people in a smaller adjacent theatre saw the interview and question-and-answer session on video screens.…Tarantino fans started lining up outside the NFT 10 hours before the interview session.¹

There are many markers of the Pulp Fiction phenomenon. Numerous Internet websites, for example, are dedicated to Tarantino and Pulp Fiction – dozens if not hundreds. Thus, a random check using ‘Quentin+Tarantino’ as my keywords produced a list of over ten thousand citings of the name. There’s an intense proliferation of sites overwhelmingly dedicated to the man and this film.

And we can understand this notion of ‘dedicated’ in at least three revealing ways. First, there is the somewhat neutral sense in which the sites pick Tarantino and/or Pulp Fiction as their object of attention, no matter the approach they take or the attitude they adopt or the value judgments they make. In the same way that we can speak of a ‘dedicated’ phone to refer to a telephone or a line that is given over to one function, to one act of communication, irrespective of what that might be, the first significant thing about all the web attention to Tarantino and Pulp Fiction is simply that it is there, that there is so much of it, that so many people have chosen to dedicate so much time to building these websites no matter what they end up saying on them.

To be sure, we can expect in our cyber-age that every subject will have multiple websites devoted to it, but the number of Tarantino and Tarantino-film sites is recognisably excessive.We might pinpoint this by contrasting it with the relative paucity of sites on other worthy subjects. For instance, the wildly popular HBO Mafia series The Sopranos seems to me easily to be one of the best things television has ever done, and a number of its qualities bear similarity to the filmic world of Tarantino: the veering back and forth between humour and violence in ways that keep audiences guessing (‘Should I be laughing? Should I be cringing?’); the portrayal and dissection of myths of masculinity; a post-modern concern with citation and the sense that in a media age one acts according to established entertainment models (the gangsters in The Sopranos are endlessly comparing themselves to The Godfather or to Pacino in Scarface); an obsessive construction of a self-contained world peopled by a few select characters whose interaction generates new story possibilities; a sheer bravado of style and acting and narrative confidence that can make both works stand out from typical cinematic and televisual fare.

But The Sopranos has generated little cyber-adulation; there are few fan sites, and almost none treat the show with the rigour and detail that Tarantino’s works garner. One senses that a primary factor in this fandom is generational. As I’ll suggest, a personality like Quentin Tarantino (who interestingly is himself quite cyber-illiterate) and a film like Pulp Fiction seem perfect for a historical moment populated by cyber-geeks for whom the web comes as a veritable godsend to give them ‘a life’. Indeed, we might note in passing that in going through the list of websites dedicated to Tarantino and his films, one discovers that quite a number of them are no longer active. One senses that for their website authors the Tarantino world fulfilled specific obsessive needs at a biographical moment but then life went on, new concerns (or perhaps obsessions) arose and the Tarantino obsession was put aside. Tarantino is clearly a director of important transitional life-moments for many fans.

Whatever the judgment passed on Tarantino and his films on this or that website, the sheer proliferation of sites suggests that many people find here something to talk about, something to dedicate time to, to expend energy and effort on. For the most part, indeed, a very great deal of the Tarantino web-talk is intensely laudatory. Here, a second sense of ‘dedication’ emerges. In the way that an author might dedicate a book to someone – might imagine it, that is, in honour of someone (for example, a benefactor) – many of the Quentin Tarantino websites seem to be presented as virtual salutations to the director, acts of love offered up on the altar of auteurist admiration. There is in all this web activity a feverish sort of fandom, but one that also blurs into obsessive identification as if many of the web designers don’t simply want to announce their love of Tarantino but want to be like him – indeed, to be him. In passing, we might note that obsessive fandom has its corollary in Tarantino films themselves, where many characters find it necessary to discuss endlessly and in great detail the things they love in their culture (food, celebrities, cult films, and so on).

For a typical example of these labours of love, take a look at the aptly named website ‘www.godamongdirectors.com/tarantino’ (by Kale Morton), which sports a front-page quotation from Tarantino himself: ‘The coolest web [site]’. The site includes (and this is only a very partial list): a big section of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) about Tarantino films; a schedule of upcoming television presentations of his films; transcripts of interviews; something called the ‘Tarantinoverse’ (‘a comparison of QT’s films and compares and contrasts aspects which seem to carry into all of Tarantino’s Films’[sic]); reprints of major articles; scripts for all the films; downloadable sounds from the movies (for example, the Big Mac speech from Pulp Fiction); downloadable clips and trailers and various forms of arcania (for example, a ‘discussion, with examples of trunkshots in Tarantino films’); or a ‘comprehensive’ analysis of an unclear plot development in one of the films – namely, what happened to Reservoir Dogs’ Mr Pink ‘once he left the building with the diamonds’). To be precise, we discover that Tarantino is only one of several ‘godsamongdirectors’ – each of whom gets his own section – but the full list – Robert Rodriguez, Martin Scorsese, John Woo, Kevin Smith – is revealing: these are hip directors of a violent cool but also of a baroque visual messiness, who can tap into the fantasies of a generation and become veritable obsessions.

Tarantino

And here we encounter a third sense of ‘dedication’: by this, I refer to the sheer amount of time that these labours of love seem to have involved. Unlike a book dedication where one quick phrase can announce an author’s gratitude or devotion, the Tarantino websites are literally labours in which vast amounts of energy evidently have been dedicated to create rich cyber-universes filled with complicated graphics and audio samplings, bountiful text given over to detailed analysis, bits of humour, quotations and bibliography, electronic links, and so on. (Interestingly, just as Tarantino films frequently cite from other works, the websites recycle much of their information. For example, the same FAQ list is repeated verbatim on a number of sites.)

Just as the Tarantino films – Pulp Fiction especially – build up self-contained universes in which a few select people interact and generate new narrative possibilities, so too the websites seem caught up in a virtually science-fictional universe-building as they blend image and words in rich patterns of interactivity and in which a limited number of elements combine in ever new permutations to create bountiful worlds of possibility (each click of the mouse will bring the web-surfer ever more Tarantino information as sites embed text within text, bounties of information within their pages).

The effort of these web designers can seem very dedicated indeed. Take, for instance, what must be one of the most striking cases of fan dedication, the Fox Force Five website (‘http://nextdch.mty.itesm.mx/~plopezg/FFF3/FFF.html’). Designed by Patricio Lopez-Guzman, a twenty-something communication major in Mexico, this site is, depending on your point of view, either a fascinating venture in web creativity (it proudly sports an award for ‘Top 5% of all websites’ from the ‘GIST web pick’) or a curious eccentricity that signals the obsessiveness of so many lives lived out in cyberspace.

Fox Force Five, you may remember, is the TV show that Pulp Fiction’s Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) tells Vince Vega (John Travolta) she did a pilot for, only to have the option on the show dropped by the network. In Mia’s words, ‘It was a show about a team of female secret agents called ‘Fox Force Five’. … Fox, as we’re a bunch of foxy chicks. Force, as in we’re a force to be reckoned with. Five, as in there’s one … two … three … four … five of us.’ In the film, Fox Force Five is discussed only in passing but it appears to serve several narrative functions. The pilot is first mentioned (but not by name) by Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson), who is describing Mia to Vince and giving some of her background. Here, the reference helps explain something about Mia (she’s a failed Hollywood wannabe). It also enables us to learn something about Vince: namely, that his relation to popular culture is a bit erratic. Vince, as he himself admits, doesn’t watch much television – potentially a sin in the Tarantino universe where so much of what one is comes from the popular culture one has ingested. Tarantino himself in a 1993 interview made a declaration about popular culture that would itself become dialogue in Pulp Fiction:

‘It was a show about a team of female secret agents called Fox Force Five’

I don’t think it’s the worst thing in the world. That’s what makes America what it is, what gives it its charm, part of its personality. It’s a junk-food culture. … I’d never been to other countries before this year, but I’ve now been to other countries, and I love going into McDonalds. The difference? In the Paris McDonalds, they serve beer. And they don’t call it a Quarter Pounder, because they have the metric system there: Le Royale with Cheese! They don’t know what a fucking quarter pounder is!²

When Mia and Vince d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Pulp Fiction
• Notes
• Credits
• Bibliography
• eCopyright