Film Friday: Pulp Fiction (1994)

Pulp Fiction is brilliant. It’s easily one of the greatest films of all time. As proof, I could offer its massive box office totals, its continuing heavy rotation on television seventeen years after its release, or its ability to revive sagging careers. I could point out that its scenes have become iconic, its dialog has entered our lexicon, and no one has been able to mimic the film. Or I could just tell you what makes this movie so special. In a word: manipulation.

** spoiler alert **

Movies are all about manipulation. Filmmakers are in the business of tricking audiences into believing that actors on fake sets are real people in a real world. And that’s just the beginning. Good filmmakers need to make you care about the characters. Great filmmakers go further and manipulate how you interpret what you see to teach you something you didn’t know about yourself. Pulp Fiction does that, only at a level no one else has achieved.

1. Twisted Clichés: What Clichés?

When Quentin Tarantino wrote Pulp Fiction, his intent was to take well-worn pulp fiction ideas and twist them. Hence, you have the hitman who develops a conscience, the underling who must chaperone the boss’s over-sexed wife, the returning POW who tells a boy about his lost father, and the boxer who takes a dive. These are clichés. But we don’t recognize them as clichés in Pulp Fiction because Tarantino manipulates our expectations to turn these into original-seeming stories. In other words, we all know the hitman must kill his boss or die, we never expect him to simply leave the film. We all know the boxer will put up the fight of his life against incredible odds, we never expect him to kill the other boxer with ease. . . and we never expect him to run into someone like Zed as he’s fleeing from the mobster he betrayed. By spinning these clichés off in directions we’ve never considered before, Tarantino gives us a movie based on clichés but which almost no one in the audience will recognize as containing any clichés. That's impressive.

2. Film Chronology: How Does It End Again?

From there, Tarantino further spins our heads by rearranging the film’s chronology. We’ve discussed before that the human brain is perfectly suited to reassembling a series of events that are presented out of order. Thus, you know exactly what is happening when I say: peanut butter, eat, knife, bread, lunch. Storytellers know this and often indulge in minor manipulation by presenting something out of sequence, like giving a glimpse of the ending before the story begins. But no one has tried what Tarantino does here. He takes the film and divides it into seven sequences and then reassembles those out of order. In and of itself, that’s highly creative and worth recognition. But he goes further.

Tarantino exploits our expectation that the ending of a film always reveals how the story actually ends. Thus, when Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) leave the diner together at the end of the film, the audience assumes they rode off into the sunset. But that wasn’t the end, and people forget that Jules quits and Vincent gets killed in Butch’s (Bruce Willis) bathroom. Yet, this manipulation allows Tarantino to deliver a happy ending, even though the film had no happy ending. Moreover, while people assume that the conversation in the diner relates to everything that happened in the film, very little of what we saw had happened at that point. For example, Vincent had yet to take Marsellus Wallace’s wife to dinner and Marsellus (Ving Rhames) hadn’t met with Butch yet. Thus, many of the things we assume they are reflecting upon have yet to happen, and we are left wondering if Vincent’s opinions would change after those events?

3. Nature of the Film: It’s a Character Study?

But manipulating the film’s plot and chronology only scratches the surface of what is really going on. Would it surprise you if I told you Pulp Fiction is actually a character study?

Most people see Pulp Fiction as a crime story. But it’s really not. What few people realize is how little action takes place within the film. Aside from a few moments of shooting, the entire rest of the film is characters talking about things they believe. Indeed, the characters roam the screen telling us about their morality, their views on religion, love and sex, fairness and equity, their hobbies, etc. What’s more, little of the dialog relates to the plot -- it’s all about the characters themselves. This is almost the definition of “character study.”

Yet, we don’t grasp that this is the true nature of Pulp Fiction because it isn’t filmed like an art house movie. For one thing, the characters don't just sit around in all white rooms spouting pretentious lines. Instead, they get guns out of trunks, wait to kick in doors, buy drugs and a whole host of other “gritty” things. Moreover, the dialog isn’t pretentious; it’s been brought down to “street level.” Thus, you get “do you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in France?” rather than “One finds that travel broadens the mind.” And you get “I’m about to get Medieval on his ass,” rather than “I feel violated and must find a way to regain my pride.” Because of this, we never grasp that the characters do nothing but talk philosophy throughout the film because it doesn’t register with us that characters who talk like this and who walk around carrying guns aren’t in an action movie.

4. Depth & Mystery From Nothing

Tarantino also cleverly uses a series of MacGuffins to give the story depth. As we noted last week, a MacGuffin is a film term for the item around which all the action in the film is centered, i.e. it’s what everyone wants to steal. Yet, the exact nature of the item is irrelevant to the film as its sole purpose is to motivate the characters’ actions. Thus, a bar of gold could just as easily be a diamond. The audience knows this instinctively and doesn’t get too wrapped up in what the MacGuffin actually is. But Tarantino turns that on its head.

Rather than tossing out an object like a diamond or “the process” and telling the audience, “don’t worry about what it is,” Tarantino turns the MacGuffin into a genuine mystery by giving us clues as to what it might be. Consider the briefcase Marsellus sends Vincent and Jules to retrieve. This briefcase glows gold when it opens and people stare at its contents in awe. They also ask if it really is what they think it is, thereby implying something highly unusual. Yet, we never get to see it. And that creates a mystery, which gives the film depth even though the nature of the MacGuffin is entirely irrelevant to the film. Indeed, people almost immediately start speculating as to what it could be. (FYI, many speculate the briefcase contains Marsellus’s soul, which was extracted from the back of his neck. . . I kid you not.)

Moreover, Tarantino uses multiple MacGuffins throughout the film. Consider the band-aid on the back of Marsellus’s neck. Film audiences have been taught that everything in a film is present for a reason. Thus, when we see the band-aid shown prominently, we expect it to have some meaning. But we never learn what that could be. So like the briefcase, people leave the theater trying to solve the mystery. I would further argue that the film is crawling with MacGuffins, e.g. the watch, Bonnie, “the gimp,” etc., each of which presents a new mystery to consider.

Thus, by manipulating our expectations regarding dialog, props and the use of MacGuffins, Tarantino gives us a character study steeped in mystery, all the while making us think we are watching a fast-paced crime story.

5. Morality: Exposing What We Really Believe

Finally, we come to the most controversial manipulation: morality. Tarantino skillfully exploits two aspects of human morality. First, he realizes our morality doesn't always kick in right away, such as when we laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel. We know this is wrong, but we laugh nonetheless until we can catch ourselves. Tarantino exploits this throughout the film to get us laughing at things we shouldn't laugh at. For example, if you asked people if they would laugh at seeing a man’s head blown off in the middle of a discussion about the occurrence of a genuine miracle, they would emphatically tell you they would not laugh. Yet, everyone in the theater laughed out loud when Vincent accidentally blew Marvin’s head off in the car. The combination of the shock, the comic timing and the characters’ surprised reactions triggered the instinct within us that laughs at the banana peel incident. Some have decried this moment as immoral or as glorifying violence, but if you think about it, we’re the ones with the immoral reaction, i.e. we're the ones laughing.

The same is true when we laugh at Tarantino asking if Vincent and Jules saw a sign on his house that read, “dead n~gger storage,” when Vincent gets shot on the toilet, when Vincent and Lance (Eric Stoltz) argue over saving Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) from a drug overdose, and when Marsellus “gets Medieval” on Maynard and Zed.

Indeed, this last point is also significant in terms of manipulation. We are told revenge is wrong. We are told capital punishment should apply only in extreme instances where the victim has been killed. And under no circumstances do we tolerate the idea of execution by torture. Yet when we see what happens to Marsellus at the hands of Maynard and Zed, we derive a great deal of joy when Marsellus tells us that he’s about to “get Medieval on their asses.” Thus, we not only condone his decision to kill the two, but we even support his plan to torture them to death. Consequently, Tarantino has exposed hypocrisy within us. We claim to believe certain things, but our reactions show that we may actually believe the opposite. What does this say about us?

Conclusion

This is what sets Pulp Fiction so far apart from other films. This film broke new ground in almost every aspect of its presentation. It sold us clichés without us ever realizing they were clichés. It sold us a character study without us realizing it. It gave us depth and mystery without ever saying a word. And it exposed a flaw within us by showing a gap between what we think we believe and what we really believe.