A film can be anything
#33 - ‘Pulp Fiction’
“C’mon. Let’s get in to character,” says Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules Winnefield.
He is speaking to his partner Vincent Vega, played by John Travolta. The two hitmen are about to burst in to an apartment to recover their boss Marsellus Wallace’s mythical, mysterious briefcase from some baby-faced, would-be business partners who have flown far too close to the sun and are about to pay the price.
Jules and Vincent are dressed in matching black-and-white suits, as if overcompensating for their grisly line of work by at least looking professional. They are well-coiffed, though quite distinctly. Vincent’s hair is long and slicked back. Jules’ is voluminous - an unforgettable Jheri-curl sheen reminiscent of the glare of the mid-winter sun, or, more appropriately, a beach in Southern California.
Ostensibly, Jules is reminding Vincent of the grim business at hand, and the cold, confident facade they will need to adopt to conduct it successfully. He is also, in a way, reminding us of who these two actually are, or at least who they are about to be.
It’s easy to forget, such is the spellbinding power of director and writer Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue. The preceding minutes introduce us to this odd couple as they ride over to the apartment building and take the elevator up to the door.
We can infer that Jules and Vincent have recently been reunited after Vincent spent several years in Europe, but only because we get the distinct pleasure of Vincent explaining what they call a quarter-pounder over there. We can also conclude that Marsellus, their boss, is a dangerous man, the kind who might throw you out a window for giving his wife a massage on the wrong body part. The truth is, we could happily ride around the Los Angeles freeways with Jules and Vince all day long listening to them catch up. Dangerous as he is, Marsellus doesn’t loom over the rest of their conversation.
We could ride around all day, but, of course, they are dressed for something else - and Jules is preparing us for what is to come. This applies to the biblically inspired speech and hail of bullets that will follow immediately, but also for the fluid nature of the entirety of Pulp Fiction.
To experience this film is to float endlessly between hyperreal moments of mundanity and surreal moments of shocking violence, yes, but also, like, dance, among many other things. It is famous for being non-linear, sure, but the way its structure folds back in on itself isn’t so much jumbled as it is infinite. Pulp Fiction could go on forever, and indeed much of its magic is that it plays on forever in your mind, the possibilities going forward and backward long after Jules and Vince walk out of the diner, Marsellus’ briefcase in tow.
If the story is one of limitless possibility - of unending reconfiguration and recombination of characters and of place - then the sensory experience is one of welcome assault.
Tarantino’s manic use of music - from surf rock to soul and everything in between - and his willingness to build up and then strip down the facades carefully constructed by his characters further heightens the sense of absolute malleability on display. In one moment, Mia Wallace, played by Uma Thurman, is a vessel of sexual temptation. In the next, she is face down, covered in blood and spittle. In still the next, a shot of adrenaline is being plunged in to her chest on the dingy floor of a drug dealer’s shabby house. You can practically smell the spoiled milk and bong water underneath Mia as she is being revived. Jules and Vince might start the film in almost literal costume - that menacing black and white - but they end it in ratty gym clothes.
No character is immune from the squalor of the world they inhabit - not even Marsellus or Bruce Willis’ Butch, both quite wealthy, though Butch much more recently than Marsellus and at Marsellus’ expense. At some point, some large percentage of the characters seem to wind up needing help from someone in a faded bathrobe. In other words, the perfectly crafted artifice of being a rough in the Los Angeles underworld is constantly threatened and frequently shattered by reality. Only Harvey Keitel’s Winston Wolfe seems above it all, but that’s probably just because Tarantino had to end the story somewhere.
As long as I’m alive, it’s hard to imagine another film eclipsing the, gulp, disruptive impact of Pulp Fiction. This is interesting, of course, because all of Tarantino’s work, Pulp Fiction included, is largely about paying tribute to the films he loves. It doesn’t seem logical that love letters to obscure genre movies could have so outsized an effect, and I highly doubt that is what Tarantino set out to do, but here we are.
Put another way, Pulp Fiction changed the entire way I - and many others in my generation - thought about the form of filmmaking. Watching it for the first time is unquestionably a before-and-after moment.
Over the course of 154 minutes, you are made to understand that plot needn’t be linear, that it maybe doesn’t even really matter if the characters are good enough. You are made to appreciate that any topic of conversation can be interesting in the right hands, and that dialogue can be interesting and sound natural and still move the plot forward (or backwards or sideways) if you’re paying close enough attention.
When the credits roll the first time, you never quite see films in the same way. You understand, above all else, that, in the right hands, a movie can do vastly more than you thought possible with its characters, music, set pieces, and dialogue and can still be wickedly addictive and entertaining.