Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
Quentin Tarantino’s follow-up to Reservoir Dogs is superficially in the same vein, but it expands the scope of Tarantino’s world enormously. Where Dogs was taut and focussed (telling the story of single bank robbery, with few locations and a small core of characters), Pulp Fiction is a wide-ranging journey through the low-life of Los Angeles. Its several interrelated story lines unmistakeably occur in the same world as those of Reservoir Dogs, but the film is in every way – story, messsage, form – more ambitious than Tarntino’s earlier film. It has an air of definitiveness: not just because it is a key film of its genre, but because it is the most focussed and well executed of Tarantino’s films. It enlarges and illuminates his other work.
That the film has such a clear sense of purpose is something of a miracle given the number of stories Tarantino weaves together. The structure is much more complex than in Reservoir Dogs. Where the earlier film had a relatively simple structure that interposed flashbacks within a conventionally linear film “present,” Pulp Fiction never clearly establishes a “now” to flashback from. This gives each of its narrative segments equal weight, and they work like interlocking gears, each one necessary to all the others. There’s the young couple, “Pumpkin” and “Honey Bunny” (Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer), who are living a life of crime and are full of confidence that they that they have the vagaries of this armed robbery business worked out. We meet the hitmen Vince and Jules (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson), and see the complications that arise from a hit. We follow Vince on a disastrous “date” with Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), the wife of his criminal employer. And then there’s Butch (Bruce Willis), the boxer paid to take a fall. Tarantino weaves these threads together with audacious confidence.
The story of Pumpkin and Honey Bunny is little more than a vignette, but it brackets the film and provides the thematic thrust to what we see. Like the protagonists of Reservoir Dogs, these armed robbers are introduced before the titles, chatting over coffee and feeling pretty confident. Their self-assured nature is typical of Tarantino characters: his famous dialogue is not just intended to be funny, it is the means by which the characters construct and indulge in their own coolness. Tarantino’s imitators (such as Guy Ritchie) tend simply to revel in their character’s wit and self-possession, but Tarantino has a dual purpose. Yes, he gets us laughing with the characters and thinking how cool they are, but he also makes the audience step back and examine the reality that underlies the talk. Pumpkin’s opening diatribe in Pulp Fiction is a clever spiel on the easiness of armed robbery aimed at soft targets: Pumpkin is confident he’s too smart and together to need a day jobs. The rest of the film explores whether the life Pumpkin is choosing is really that straightforward.
High on life and misguided confidence, they launch an impulsive and poorly planned robbery, and it is from this pivotal moment that Tarantino launches into his credits, and then his other stories. First up are Vincent and Jules, the hitmen, and again there are echoes of Reservoir Dogs, this time through the reprise of the black-suit-and-tie uniform favoured by the cast of that movie. Vincent and Jules are clearly in the same strata of the criminal world as those men, and again their dialogue (a blend of almost Seinfeld-esque observational comedy and pop-culture riffs) is key to the creation of their image. When these two confront a group of young men (who have stolen from their boss and are clearly out of their depth), Tarantino is once again playing on scenes in movies by directors such as Scorsese and DePalma that feature the violent doings of hardened criminals. Jules’ manner in this scene – which alternates sudden bouts of shouting and violence with moments of calm and joviality – is taken straight from the De Niro handbook of psychotic screen acting. As he did in Reservoir Dogs, however, Tarantino’s approach shows that such a manner is all an act. Before Jules goes into his “Ezekiel 25:17” mode, we have seen his long riff with Jules about fast food and foot massages, and the conscious effort the two men make to “get into character.”
Throughout the film, Tarantino gives us a series of cool characters – laid back Vincent, femme fatale Mia Wallace, tough but sensitive boxer Butch – and then strips away the façade. As Tarantino himself puts it, each of these characters could be the star of their own movie, and they act as if they are (it’s not surprising that Vincent and Butch bristle when they briefly cross paths: it’s as if the leading men from two separate films met in the same narrative). All, to start with, carry the kind of self-possession only movie characters can sustain. It is a trait of the suave movie hero that they will always have the knowledge or skill a scene requires: James Bond, for example, is cool because he always knows what to do. The pop-cultural awareness shown by Tarantino’s characters is an everyday version of the same thing. When offered a choice between “Amos ‘n’ Andy” and “Martin ‘n’ Lewis,” Vincent is cool because he instantly picks up that he is being asked to choose between chocolate and vanilla. This is why Vincent and Mia get along so well in this scene: Vincent is in his element at Jack Rabbit Slims, and he seems smooth because he gets all the references and can do the right dance moves. (Hence his torment after he takes Mia home: he’s had a perfect date, but he can’t afford to capitalise on it).
In real life it’s impossible to maintain such a front. Sooner or later someone will offer us the choice of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” or “Martin ‘n’ Lewis” and we will respond simply with a befuddled “huh?” Pulp Fiction is an extended examination of these self-confident criminals in just such moments: discovering they are not quite as together as they thought they were. Vince, always in the bathroom at the wrong time, is reduced to a nervous wreck by Mia’s overdose, splattered in blood, stripped of his uniform and dressed like a “dork,” embarrassed by the much cooler Winston Wolf, and finally gunned down by Butch. Mia, for all her status and assurance, can’t tell her drugs apart and overdoses, reducing her to the level of a mere junkie. Butch is beaten, bound, gagged, and only narrowly escapes being raped by sadomasochistic urban hillbillies. Minor characters fare even worse. The kids who stole from Marcellus are all killed; Marvin, who presumably thought he’d escape this fate by acting as informant, has his head blown off.
In Tarantino’s universe, crime doesn’t pay, and the characters’ cultivated veneer of cool provides only the illusion of control. The film’s non-chronological structure serves to heighten the impact of the choices made by the protagonists. At the end, a chastened Jules feels he has received a message from God and decides to quit the “life.” Vincent argues with him, and both leave the diner in a mock-victorious moment at film’s close, having regained the suitcase and dealt with the robbery. Yet Tarantino has let us know that Vince won’t survive: he doesn’t heed the warning and is bloodily dispatched by Butch. Butch, like Jules, is a character who has flirted with crime and come close to death, but is now trying to escape. As such, Butch earns the film’s other happy ending, riding off into the sunset on his motorbike. Throughout his first three films, Tarantino privileges the characters trying to get out of the criminal world: those who seek it out almost invariably end up dead.
Pumpkin and Honey Bunny’s bracketing story highlights one couple as they make the wrong choice. The rest of the film shows what’s wrong with their supposedly safe plan for robbing cafes: in Tarantino’s world, hubris is no protection. No matter how tough and cool a Tarantino character is, there’s always somebody else badder, meaner or simply luckier around the corner. Pumpkin is fortunate that in this case it’s Jules, who’s going through a “transitional period.” As Jules points out, small time criminals like Pumpkin are in fact “the weak,” and they will always be vulnerable to bigger fish like Jules: the “tyranny of evil men.”
Tarantino’s imitators may be more purely entertaining: Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch are probably funnier than either Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs. Yet few of those who have followed in Tarantino’s wake have demonstrated the underlying intelligence that is found in Tarantinos’ films.