Full disclosure: I am very much a child of the 90’s, which means a few things. Disney animated moves were a staple of our youth growing up. With little realization that we were witnesses to the last days of the art that is hand-drawn animation. Steve Spielberg made a new Jaws for my generation in the form of Jurassic Park. And at the end of the 21st century, we would be treated to some of the most influential, ambitious, and groundbreaking films and filmmakers of its decade.
Yet, it’s here, in 1994, where the ground beneath the film world would shake. And in its wake, emerge with arguably its most influential movie, and one of cinema’s most daring, unique and electrifying storytellers.
We flashback to the Cannes Film Festival, 1994. The mood in France to the choices the jury had in front of them were… okay. Sure, Joel and Ethan Coen with The Hudsucker Proxy wasn’t their best work. And Zhang Yimou’s To Live and Kiesowski’s capper to the Three Colors’ Trilogy in Red were met with near-universal acclaim. But there wasn’t a universal consensus about this year’s choices.
Filmotomy Podcast 54: Rewind to Oscars 1994
Where was the film to knock the jury off their feet, to get them jazzed about movies in the first place? On the final night, a storm had knocked Cannes off their feet. A young writer-director from America by the name of Quentin Tarantino had come to showcase his crime thriller set in Los Angeles. Richard Corliss of Time Magazine sums up the reaction nicely:
“The picture threw the international critics into a tizzy. They weren’t sure they should approve of work of popular art so enjoyably and cleverly crafted; after a week studying the snail trails of European anomie and Third World angst, watching ‘Pulp Fiction’ felt like snaking out of a final exam to go on a bender.”
But Tarantino’s black comedy eventually won over the panel of judges that year in France, and left with the ’94 Palme d’Or – and the rest, as they say, is history. Pulp Fiction opened in October of that year, and it had a similar effect on audiences in North American as it did overseas.
A visual kick to the senses that woke you up and left you coming back to watch it again. But why? How does a film like this – complete with samurai swords, a gimp, divine intervention, a twist contest and Bible-references – connect with audiences and inspire a generation of filmmakers and film fans?
Filmotomy Podcast 73: The Trouble With Quentin Tarantino
QT’s tale of hard-boiled men, traditional femme fatales and how their fates intertwine takes place over the course of two eventful days in LA’s criminal underworld. Yet, the characters themselves feel like they’re punching in, getting ready to pull a nine-to-five shift at work. And, like any other job, there’s banter to, and from the occupation of snuffing out a life. So what are the conversations and musings like for a couple of low-rent hitmen?
In the case of Jules Winfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega (John Travolta), it’s European fast food. According to Vincent, they don’t know what a Quarter Ponder is over in Amsterdam, so they call it a Royale with Cheese. And instead of ketchup, they drown their French fries in mayonnaise.
And when they’re not musing about the differences between fast food joints across continents, they’re discussing the unfortunate fate of one of one of Marsellus Wallace’s henchmen, who got thrown off a four-story balcony. Jules doesn’t buy that he was nearly killed because he was rubbing the feet of the boss’s wife. Vincent thinks the act of a foot rub in of itself, is sensual, coupled with how protective he is of his wife.
Yet, when Jules asks Vincent for the time, the former tells the latter to hang back for a minute, setting up the atmosphere of what’s about to go down. Tarantino is toying with us. We’re expecting the pair to go in, guns blazing, mowing down Brett, a former associate of Wallace whom he screwed over.
1994 in Film: Ed Wood
Instead, we’re treated to more talk of fast food, a mysterious, glowing briefcase and Jules spouting passages from the Book of Ezekiel, before the pair cap his ass. Tarantino is toying with the audience; he feels confident enough in the audience to let his characters go off some more.
Before the conclusion of that arc, we’re taken hours after the encounter with Brett. Vincent is asked by the boss to take his wife out on a date, in what could be described as both the best and worst first date in the history of first dates. Which begins at a “wax museum with a pulse” in the form of Jack Rabbit Slims. And ends at a drug dealer’s pad, a needle full of adrenaline and the most tense sequence within the whole film.
Yet, everything in between contains some of the film’s strongest bouts of dialogue between two characters.
“Don’t you hate that?” Mia asks Vincent, as she’s sucking gently on a cherry. “Uncomfortable silences… That’s when you know you’ve found someone special: Two people who can shut the fuck up, and comfortably share a silence.”
The push-and-pull simmering between Mia and Vincent is exemplified by the pair in a twist contest. Where Mia dances somewhat seductively, and Vincent is trying hard in his motions to avoid her sensual advantages, lest he faces a similar fate as Tony Rocky Horror did… allegedly.
1994 in Film: Muriel and the arrival of Toni Collette
And yet, there’s another story after the conclusion with Mia’s date. Earlier in the day, veteran boxer Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) is asked to throw a fight at the request of Marcellus, of which his reward is a big pay day. But his conscious gets the better of him when he recalls Captain Koon’s story of his father’s gold watch, passed down through two wars and one three-year long hiding place where the sun don’t shine.
However, you don’t fuck over a mob boss and expect to get away Scott free. As Butch quickly learns when his beautiful, naïve foreign girlfriend leaves the watch in his apartment, and his to brave getting capped to get it back. That journey for his family’s surviving heirloom spirals into the strangest, most perverse and darkly hilarious moments in the movie. Including an officer, a pawn shop owner named Zed, a gimp and a samurai sword.
Now, if we follow the storyline of Tarantino’s take on the crime thriller and film noir, we would reach the end of this perverse, twisted tale. But there’s still key pieces that are missing. What happened to Jules and Vincent’s black suit and tie getup? How did they end up in clothes that make them look like beach bums? And what’s up with the couple in the diner that were about to case the joint at the film’s prologue?
The last piece of the puzzle starts just at the moment where Jules and Vincent kill Brett. Where an associate of the late criminal busts out of the room, a .357 magnum in hand, and attempts to blow them both away. Key word: attempts.
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They are miraculously unharmed as the assailant is shot to death. Yet both men have different perspectives on what just happened. Vincent thinks that sometimes, shit just happens like this. Jules takes it as a sign to get out of the game and get his priorities in order.
The argument over divine intervention abruptly ends as Vincent accidentally blows one of the surviving associates in the face, right in broad daylight! This whole chain of bizarre events leads them to Jules’ contact in Inglewood: Quentin Taraninto himself – er, I mean, Jimmy. Who is none too pleased he brought a dead man to his home.
“Don’t you realize, that if Bonnie comes home and finds a dead body in my house, I’m gonna get divorced?” Jimmy berates the pair, but relents and reluctantly lets Jules use a phone to get help. Enter Winston Wolf (Tarantino regular Harvey Keitel) who solves problems, and has little time for bullshit.
“Pretty please, with sugar on top, clean the fucking car!” the Wolf says matter-of-factly. Jules & Vincent follow Winston’s directions to the letter and leave Jimmy’s pad, new clothes in hand and a car that no longer looks like they killed a dude inside it.
1994 in Film: Shallow Grave
Which now leads up back to the prologue of the film: the couple known as “Pumpkin” (Tim Roth, another QT regular) and “Honey Bunny” (Amanda Plummer) about to rob a breakfast diner. The goal isn’t just to go for the cash in the drawer, but also for the wallets of every paying customer in the joint. The very same joint that two hitmen, who have had a long, eventful, transformative day, just happen to be.
Like last time, Jules quotes Ezekiel 25:17 word for word, but this time, instead of a mess of gunfire, he tells “Honey Bunny” that he’s been contemplating what exactly that passage is supposed to mean. “You’re the weak, and I am the tyranny of evil men,” he says, realizing how much evil he’s brought unto the world, acting as Marcellus’s hired thug. “But I’m trying real hard to be the Sheppard.”
In an instant, the point of Pulp Fiction is realized. Quentin Tarantino, though gangsters, hit men, femme fatales and hard-boiled boxers, has shown us a reflection of our own existence.
A job that feels boring and routine, even when that profession is murder. The gossip about events that may or may not be true, but have now become urban legend around the proverbial campfire. Questions of honor and fight or flight when the mob boss you screwed over is being sodomized by two rednecks in the basement of a records store. Or of loyalty when feelings of temptation become difficult to ignore, in the form of a married woman. And questioning the nature of one’s own contribution to the world – whether you’re the Sheppard guiding the weak through the valley of darkness, or the tyranny of evil men.
1994 in Film: The Double Couleurs of Krzysztof Kieślowski with ‘White’ and ‘Red’
It’s a look on life that’s just this side of normal, yet the trappings and existential crises feel all too familiar to our own, with a very cool collection of songs. Going even further, Pulp Fiction is Tarantino subverting and criticizing, not only a genre he clearly loves and admires, but films in general.
He subverts common tropes: the Romanization of life in the mob is shown as if it’s a 9-to-5, clock in, punch out profession, complete with water cooler banter and the frustration of the person’s unprofessionalism you’re working with. The scene where Jules and Vincent are about to kill Brett? Tarantino has his characters pull back for a moment to finish their discussion about what really happened to a part associate of Marcellus. And even then, the writer-director refuses to go for the jugular until enough suspense as been built up.
Even the structure of Pulp Fiction is fragmented and arranged in various different points in time. And this is the brilliance of the picture, and also why it’s as beloved as it is. It dares to criticize other pictures for being formulaic, for being lazy, for forgetting what, I believe, is the unforgivable sin of making movies in the eyes of Tarantino: they’re called “moving pictures” for a reason.
The film is dialogue-heavy, but there’s movement in QT’s writing. There’s a sense of rhythm and pacing hearing these characters talk and converse with each other. We become reminiscent about how screenwriters like a David Mamet and an Aaron Sorkin write in a similar fashion.
1994 in Film: Video of the Best 50 Movies as Voted for by You
And the end result is watching these characters and the actors playing them walk on a tightrope without the safety net. Making the experience of watching Pulp Fiction utterly engrossing, as if we’re watching the dawn of a new era in filmmaking. Where directors don’t have to be restrained by arbitrary, overstuffed and familiar techniques of story and narrative.
By the end of the decade, we were treated to films that followed in the footsteps of this black comedy. 1997’s Boogie Nights took its cues from Tarantino in how writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson punched up his screenplay and gave his characters a similar rhythm and pacing when it came to dialogue. David Fincher’s controversial Fight Club made us question the reliability of an unnamed Narrator, while he was questioning his social, economic and cultural landscape at the dawn of the 21st century, and later, his own sanity. And The Matrix, written and directed by two now trans women, made a sci-fi blockbuster that bent the laws of physics, honored martial arts flicks, and included philosophical, spiritual and a coming out of the closet subtext that was just as much talked about as the bullet-time action scenes.
I’m not so sure these films would exist if Pulp Fiction hadn’t blasted its way through the doors of Cannes on the last night of the festival in May of 1994. But it’s a great thing that it did – and it set the tone for what films can, and should, look like going forward.
