Alan A. Stone
If you take no pleasure in popular culture, with all its manic excesses, then you are likely to be
bewildered, even offended, by Quentin Tarantino's extraordinary film, Pulp Fiction. Tarantino
unapologetically enjoys popular culture at the same time that he satirizes it. Unfortunately, he
also seems to specialize in violence. Still, taken on its own terms, Pulp Fiction is a rare
accomplishment; it opens a new aesthetic horizon in film. Like Van Gogh's sunflowers, the
ordinary suddenly takes on a striking vibrancy; from the dazzling title colors on, it is easy to
recognize the artist, but almost impossible to imagine how one could imitate him. Tarantino, a
one-time video store clerk, now the hottest director in Hollywood, has memory banks packed
with movies and he draws on some of the most ordinary to create something brilliantly original.
This is no experimental film of intellectual pretensions and high-brow obscurantism. Pulp
Fiction is already building a cult following, even as its language and graphic violence offends
others.
Violence in film is a serious matter, and for some people an inexcusable offense. They can see
no justification for the scene in which John Travolta's character accidentally blows a young
man's brains out. Even worse for those concerned about film violence, most of the audience
laughed despite the spatter of blood and brain tissue -- and with spontaneous amusement, not the
nervous hysteria often heard at horror films. The violence of Pulp Fiction is essential to its
aesthetic; though he knew that many would complain, Tarantino meant the audience to laugh.
Travolta plays a laid back, get-along kind of guy who is living a depraved and drug-addicted life
as a paid killer, but has an astonishingly innocent soul, as do most of Tarantino's low-life
characters. This innocence in depravity is Pulp Fiction's central theme. It keeps the film from
being an exercise in sado-masochistic perversity; it is the source of its humor and its creative
energy.
The film title Pulp Fiction harks back to the 30s and 40s when newsstands featured an array of
monthly short story magazines. Among the most popular were those about hard-nosed private
investigators. Written by such authors as Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, and James M.
Cain, these stories were the forerunners of dark, city crime movies that became film noir. Pulp
fiction stories typically began in the front of the magazine, competing for the reader's attention,
and were then continued in the back. Tarantino, though not old enough to remember this genre of
pulp fiction, has put his film together as if he had that structure in mind.
We begin with one short story: a hopped-up British couple (Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth)
deciding to rob the coffee shop where they are having breakfast. Before they do, we turn the
page -- a dark screen -- to the next story of Travolta and Jackson going off to retrieve a
mysterious briefcase and to kill some drug dealers who didn't pay off their boss. Then another
dark screen -- to the childhood of the Bruce Willis character who grows up to be the boxer who
refuses to throw the fight. Unlike the old pulp fiction magazines, the triptych of stories
eventually comes together as the seemingly disparate plots are interwoven by coincidence and by
Tarantino's central theme. Because the film is set in Los Angeles, its anthology structure may of
course owe much more to Robert Altman's Shortcuts or to his brilliant Nashville than to pulp
fiction magazines.
Originally published in the April/May 1995 issue of Boston Review