Pulp Fiction (film)
Encyclopedia
Pulp Fiction is a 1994 American crime film
directed by Quentin Tarantino
, who co-wrote its screenplay with Roger Avary
. The film is known for its rich, eclectic dialogue, ironic mix of humor and violence, nonlinear storyline, and host of cinematic allusions and pop culture references. The film was nominated for seven Oscars
, including Best Picture
; Tarantino and Avary won for Best Original Screenplay. It was also awarded the Palme d'Or
at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival
. A major critical and commercial success, it revitalized the career of its leading man, John Travolta
, who received an Academy Award nomination
, as did costars Samuel L. Jackson
and Uma Thurman
.
Directed in a highly stylized manner, Pulp Fiction joins the intersecting storylines of Los Angeles mobsters, fringe players, small-time criminals, and a mysterious briefcase. Considerable screen time is devoted to conversations and monologues that reveal the characters' senses of humor and perspectives on life. The film's title refers to the pulp magazine
s and hardboiled
crime novels popular during the mid-20th century, known for their graphic violence and punchy dialogue. Pulp Fiction is self-referential
from its opening moments, beginning with a title card
that gives two dictionary definitions of "pulp". The plot, as in many of Tarantino's other works, is presented out of chronological sequence.
The picture's self-reflexivity, unconventional structure, and extensive use of homage
and pastiche
have led critics to describe it as a prime example of postmodern film
. Considered by some critics a black comedy
, the film is also frequently labeled a "neo-noir". Critic Geoffrey O'Brien
argues otherwise: "The old-time noir
passions, the brooding melancholy and operatic death scenes, would be altogether out of place in the crisp and brightly lit wonderland that Tarantino conjures up. [It is] neither neo-noir nor a parody of noir". Similarly, Nicholas Christopher
calls it "more gangland camp
than neo-noir", and Foster Hirsch
suggests that its "trippy fantasy landscape" characterizes it more definitively than any genre label. Pulp Fiction is viewed as the inspiration for many later movies that adopted various elements of its style. The nature of its development, marketing, and distribution and its consequent profitability had a sweeping effect on the field of independent cinema
(although it is not an independent film itself). Considered a cultural watershed, Pulp Fictions influence has been felt in several other media.
If the seven sequences were ordered chronologically, they would run: 4a, 2, 6, 1, 7, 3, 4b, 5. Sequences 1 and 7 partially overlap and are presented from different points of view; the same is true of sequences 2 and 6. In Philip Parker's description, the structural form is "an episodic narrative with circular events adding a beginning and end and allowing references to elements of each separate episode to be made throughout the narrative." Other analysts describe the structure simply as a "circular narrative".
"Pumpkin" (Tim Roth
) and "Honey Bunny" (Amanda Plummer) are having breakfast in a diner. They decide to rob it after realizing they could make money off the customers as well as the business, as they did during their previous heist. Moments after they initiate the hold-up, the scene breaks off and the title credits roll.
Prelude to "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife"
As Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson
) drives, Vincent Vega (John Travolta
) talks about his experiences in Europe, from where he has just returned: the hash bars in Amsterdam, the French McDonald's
and its "Royale with Cheese
". The pair—both wearing dress suits—are on their way to retrieve a briefcase from Brett (Frank Whaley
), who has transgressed against their boss, gangster Marsellus Wallace. Jules tells Vincent that Marsellus had someone thrown off a fourth-floor balcony for giving his wife a foot massage. Vincent says that Marsellus has asked him to escort his wife while Marsellus is out of town. They conclude their banter and "get into character", which soon involves executing Brett in dramatic fashion after Jules recites a baleful "biblical" pronouncement.
) accepts a large sum of money from Marsellus (Ving Rhames
), agreeing to take a dive
in his upcoming match. Vincent and Jules—now inexplicably dressed in T-shirts and shorts—arrive to deliver the briefcase, and Butch and Vincent briefly cross paths. The next day, Vincent drops by the house of Lance (Eric Stoltz
) and Jody (Rosanna Arquette
) to score some high-grade heroin. He shoots up before driving over to meet Mrs. Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman
) and take her out. They head to Jack Rabbit Slim's, a 1950s-themed restaurant
staffed by lookalikes of the decade's pop icons. Mia recounts her experience acting in a failed television pilot
, "Fox Force Five".
After participating in a twist
contest, they return to the Wallace house with the trophy. While Vincent is in the bathroom, Mia finds his stash of heroin in his coat pocket. Mistaking it for cocaine, she snorts it and overdoses. Vincent rushes her to Lance's house for help. Together, they administer an adrenaline shot to Mia's heart, reviving her. Before parting ways, Mia and Vincent agree not to tell Marsellus of the incident.
Prelude to "The Gold Watch"
Television time for young Butch (Chandler Lindauer
) is interrupted by the arrival of Vietnam veteran Captain Koons (Christopher Walken
). Koons explains that he has brought a gold watch, passed down through generations of Coolidge men since World War I. Butch's father died of dysentery while in a POW camp, and at his dying request Koons hid the watch in his rectum for two years in order to deliver it to Butch. A bell rings, startling the adult Butch out of this reverie. He is in his boxing colors—it is time for the fight he has been paid to throw.
), that he killed the opposing fighter. Butch has double-crossed Marsellus, betting his payoff on himself at very favorable odds. The next morning, at the motel where he and his girlfriend, Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros
), are lying low, Butch discovers that she has forgotten to pack the irreplaceable watch. He returns to his apartment to retrieve it, although Marsellus's men are almost certainly looking for him. Butch finds the watch quickly, but thinking he is alone, pauses for a snack. Only then does he notice a submachine gun
on the kitchen counter. Hearing the toilet flush, Butch readies the gun in time to kill a startled Vincent Vega exiting the bathroom.
Butch drives away but while waiting at a traffic light, Marsellus walks by and recognizes him. Butch rams Marsellus with the car, then another automobile collides with his. After a foot chase the two men land in a pawnshop. The shopowner, Maynard (Duane Whitaker
), captures them at gunpoint and ties them up in a half-basement area. Maynard is joined by Zed (Peter Greene
); they take Marsellus to another room to rape him, leaving a silent masked figure referred to as "the gimp" to watch a tied-up Butch. Butch breaks loose and knocks out the gimp. He is about to flee when he decides to save Marsellus. As Zed is sodomizing
Marsellus on a pommel horse
, Butch kills Maynard with a katana
. Marsellus retrieves Maynard's shotgun and shoots Zed in the groin. Marsellus informs Butch that they are even with respect to the botched fight fix, so long as he never tells anyone about the rape and departs Los Angeles forever. Butch agrees and returns to pick up Fabienne on Zed's chopper
.
) bursts out of the bathroom and shoots wildly at them, missing every time before an astonished Jules and Vincent return fire. Jules decides this is a miracle and a sign from God for him to retire as a hitman. They drive off with one of Brett's associates, Marvin (Phil LaMarr
), their informant. Vincent asks Marvin for his opinion about the "miracle", and accidentally shoots him in the face.
Forced to remove their bloodied car from the road, Jules calls upon the house of his friend Jimmie (Quentin Tarantino
). Jimmie's wife, Bonnie, is due back from work soon and he is very anxious that she not encounter the scene. At Jules's request, Marsellus arranges for the help of Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel
). "The Wolf" takes charge of the situation, ordering Jules and Vincent to clean the car, hide the body in the trunk, dispose of their own bloody clothes, and change into T-shirts and shorts provided by Jimmie. They drive the car to a junkyard, from where Wolf and the owner's daughter, Raquel (Julia Sweeney
), head off to breakfast and Jules and Vincent decide to do the same.
Epilogue
As Jules and Vincent eat breakfast in a coffee shop the discussion returns to Jules's decision to retire. In a brief cutaway, we see "Pumpkin" and "Honey Bunny" shortly before they initiate the hold-up from the movie's first scene. While Vincent is in the bathroom, the hold-up commences. "Pumpkin" demands all of the patrons' valuables, including Jules's mysterious case. Jules surprises "Pumpkin" (whom he calls "Ringo"), holding him at gunpoint. "Honey Bunny", hysterical, trains her gun on Jules. Vincent emerges from the restroom with his gun trained on her, creating a Mexican standoff
. Reprising his pseudo-biblical passage, Jules expresses his ambivalence about his life of crime. As his first act of redemption, he allows the two robbers to take the cash they have stolen and leave, pondering how they were spared and leaving the briefcase to be returned to Marsellus, finishing the hitman's final job for his boss.
in the fall of 1990:
The initial inspiration was the three-part horror anthology film
Black Sabbath
(1963), by Italian filmmaker Mario Bava
. The Tarantino–Avary project was provisionally titled "Black Mask", after the seminal hardboiled
crime fiction magazine. Tarantino's script was produced as Reservoir Dogs
, his directorial debut; Avary's, titled "Pandemonium Reigns", would form the basis for the "Gold Watch" storyline of Pulp Fiction.
With work on Reservoir Dogs completed, Tarantino returned to the notion of a trilogy film: "I got the idea of doing something that novelists get a chance to do but filmmakers don't: telling three separate stories, having characters float in and out with different weights depending on the story." Tarantino explains that the idea "was basically to take like the oldest chestnuts that you've ever seen when it comes to crime stories—the oldest stories in the book.... You know, 'Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife'—the oldest story about...the guy's gotta go out with the big man's wife and don't touch her. You know, you've seen the story a zillion times." "I'm using old forms of storytelling and then purposely having them run awry", he says. "Part of the trick is to take these movie characters, these genre characters and these genre situations and actually apply them to some of real life's rules and see how they unravel." In at least one case, boxer Butch Coolidge, Tarantino had in mind a specific character from a classic Hollywood crime story: "I wanted him to be basically like Ralph Meeker
as Mike Hammer
in Aldrich
's Kiss Me Deadly
[1955]. I wanted him to be a bully and a jerk".
Tarantino went to work on the script for Pulp Fiction in Amsterdam in March 1992. He was joined there by Avary, who contributed "Pandemonium Reigns" to the project and participated in its rewriting as well as the development of the new storylines that would link up with it. Two scenes originally written by Avary for the True Romance
screenplay, exclusively credited to Tarantino, were incorporated into the opening of "The Bonnie Situation": the "miraculous" missed shots by the hidden gunman and the rear seat automobile killing. The notion of the crimeworld "cleaner" that became the heart of the episode was inspired by a short, Curdled
, that Tarantino saw at a film festival. He cast the lead actress, Angela Jones
, in Pulp Fiction and later backed the filmmakers' production of a feature-length version of Curdled. The script included a couple of made-up commercial brands that would feature often in later Tarantino films: Big Kahuna burgers (a Big Kahuna soda cup appears in Reservoir Dogs) and Red Apple cigarettes. As he worked on the script, Tarantino also accompanied Reservoir Dogs around the European film festivals. Released in the U.S. in October 1992, the picture was a critical and commercial success. In January 1993, the Pulp Fiction script was complete.
, brought the script to Jersey Films, the production company run by Danny DeVito
, Michael Shamberg
, and Stacey Sher
. Before even seeing Reservoir Dogs, Jersey had attempted to sign Tarantino for his next project. Ultimately a development deal worth around $1 million had been struck—the deal gave A Band Apart
, Bender and Tarantino's newly formed production company, initial financing and office facilities; Jersey got a share of the project and the right to shop the script to a studio. Jersey had a distribution and "first look" deal with Columbia TriStar, which paid Tarantino for the right to consider exercising its option. In February, Pulp Fiction appeared on a Variety
list of films in preproduction at TriStar. In June, however, the studio put the script into turnaround. According to a studio executive, TriStar chief Mike Medavoy
found it "too demented". There were suggestions that TriStar was resistant to backing a film featuring a heroin user; there were also indications that the studio simply saw the project as too low-budget for its desired star-driven image. Avary—who was about to start shooting his own directorial debut, Killing Zoe
—has said that TriStar's objections were comprehensive, encompassing the script's fundamental structure. He characterizes the studio's position: "'This is the worst thing ever written. It makes no sense. Someone's dead and then they're alive. It's too long, violent, and unfilmable.'... So I thought, 'That's that!'"
Bender brought the script to Miramax, the formerly independent studio that had recently been acquired by Disney. Harvey Weinstein
—co-chairman of Miramax, along with his brother, Bob
—was instantly enthralled by the script and the company picked it up. Pulp Fiction, the first Miramax project to get a green light
after the Disney acquisition, was budgeted at $8.5 million. It became the first movie that Miramax completely financed. Helping hold costs down was the plan Bender executed to pay all the main actors the same amount per week, regardless of their industry status. The biggest star to sign on to the project was Bruce Willis
. Though he had recently appeared in several big-budget flops, he was still a major overseas draw. On the strength of his name, Miramax garnered $11 million for the film's worldwide rights, virtually ensuring its profitability.
as Vincent Vega: Tarantino cast Travolta in Pulp Fiction only because Michael Madsen
, who had a major role—Vic Vega—in Reservoir Dogs, chose to appear in Kevin Costner
's Wyatt Earp
instead. Madsen was still rueing his choice over a decade later. Harvey Weinstein pushed for Daniel Day-Lewis
in the part. Travolta accepted a bargain rate for his services—sources claim either $100,000 or $140,000—but the film's success and his Oscar nomination as Best Actor revitalized his career. Travolta was subsequently cast in several hits including Get Shorty
, in which he played a similar character, and the John Woo
blockbuster Face/Off
. In 2004, Tarantino discussed an idea for a movie starring Travolta and Madsen as the Vega brothers; the concept remains unrealized.
Samuel L. Jackson
as Jules Winnfield: Tarantino had written the part with Jackson in mind, but the actor nearly lost it after his first audition was overshadowed by Paul Calderón
's. Jackson assumed the audition was merely a reading. Harvey Weinstein convinced Jackson to audition a second time, and his performance of the final diner scene won over Tarantino. Jules was originally scripted with a giant afro, but Tarantino and Jackson agreed on the Jheri-curled
wig seen in the film. (One reviewer took it as a "tacit comic statement about the ghettoization of blacks in movies".) Jackson received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Calderon appears in the movie as Paul, a bartender at Marsellus's social club.
Uma Thurman
as Mia Wallace: Miramax favored Holly Hunter
or Meg Ryan
for the role. Alfre Woodard
and Meg Tilly were also considered, but Tarantino wanted Thurman after their first meeting. She dominated most of the film's promotional material, appearing on a bed with cigarette in hand. She was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar and was launched into the celebrity A-list
. She took little advantage of her newfound fame, choosing not to do any big-budget films for the next three years. Thurman would later star in Tarantino's two Kill Bill
movies.
Bruce Willis
as Butch Coolidge: Willis was a major star, but most of his recent films had been box-office disappointments. As described by Peter Bart, taking a role in the modestly budgeted film "meant lowering his salary and risking his star status, but the strategy...paid off royally: Pulp Fiction not only brought Willis new respect as an actor, but also earned him several million dollars as a result of his gross participation." Willis's appearance and physical presence were crucial to Tarantino's interest in casting him: "Bruce has the look of a 50s actor. I can't think of any other star that has that look."
Harvey Keitel
as Winston Wolf or simply "The Wolf": The part was written specifically for Keitel, who had starred in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and was instrumental in getting it produced. In the filmmaker's words, "Harvey had been my favorite actor since I was 16 years old." Keitel had played a character similarly employed as a "cleaner" in Point of No Return
, released a year earlier.
Tim Roth
as "Pumpkin" or "Ringo": Roth had starred in Reservoir Dogs alongside Keitel and was brought on board again. He had used an American accent in the earlier film, but uses his natural, London one in Pulp Fiction. Though Tarantino had written the part specifically with Roth in mind, TriStar head Mike Medavoy preferred Johnny Depp
or Christian Slater
.
Amanda Plummer as Yolanda or "Honey Bunny": Tarantino wrote the role for Plummer, specifically to partner Roth onscreen. Roth had introduced the actress and director, telling Tarantino, "I want to work with Amanda in one of your films, but she has to have a really big gun." Plummer followed up with director Michael Winterbottom
's Butterfly Kiss
, in which she plays a serial killer.
Maria de Medeiros
as Fabienne: Butch's girlfriend. Tarantino met the Portuguese actress while traveling with Reservoir Dogs around the European film festival circuit. She had previously costarred with Thurman in Henry & June
(1990), playing Anaïs Nin
.
Ving Rhames
as Marsellus Wallace: Before Rhames was cast, the part was offered to Sid Haig
, who had appeared in many classic exploitation movies of the 1970s. Haig passed on the role. According to Bender, Rhames gave "one of the best auditions I've ever seen." His acclaimed performance led to his being cast in big-budget features such as Mission Impossible
, Con Air
, and Out of Sight
.
Eric Stoltz
as Lance: Vincent's drug dealer. Courtney Love
later reported that Kurt Cobain
was originally offered the role of Lance; if he had taken it, Love would have played the role of his wife. Tarantino, however, denies that he ever even met Cobain, much less offered him a role in the movie.
Rosanna Arquette
as Jody: Lance's wife. Pam Grier
read for the role, but Tarantino did not believe audiences would find it plausible for Lance to yell at her. Grier was later cast as the lead of Tarantino's Jackie Brown
. Ellen DeGeneres
also read for Jody.
Christopher Walken
as Captain Koons: Walken appears in a single scene, devoted to the Vietnam veteran's monologue about the gold watch. In 1993, Walken had appeared in another small but pivotal role in the "Sicilian scene" in the Tarantino-written True Romance
.
commenced on September 20, 1993. The lead offscreen talent had all worked with Tarantino on Reservoir Dogs—cinematographer
Andrzej Sekuła, film editor Sally Menke
, production designer
David Wasco, and costume designer
Betsy Heimann
. According to Tarantino, "[W]e had $8 million [sic]. I wanted it to look like a $20–25 million movie. I wanted it to look like an epic. It's an epic in everything—in invention, in ambition, in length, in scope, in everything except the price tag." The film, he says, was shot "on 50 ASA
film stock, which is the slowest stock they make. The reason we use it is that it creates an almost no-grain
image, it's lustrous. It's the closest thing we have to 50s Technicolor
." The largest chunk of the budget—$150,000—went to creating the Jack Rabbit Slim's set. It was built in a Culver City warehouse, where it was joined by several other sets as well as the film's production offices. The diner sequence was shot on location in Hawthorne
at the Hawthorne Grill, known for its Googie architecture
. For the costumes, Tarantino took his inspiration from French director Jean-Pierre Melville, who believed that the clothes his characters wore were their symbolic suits of armor. Tarantino cast himself in a modest-sized role as he had in Reservoir Dogs. One of his pop totems, Fruit Brute
, a long-discontinued General Mills
cereal, also returned from the earlier film. The shoot wrapped on November 30. Before Pulp Fictions premiere, Tarantino convinced Avary to forfeit his agreed-on cowriting credit and accept a "story by" credit, so the line "Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino" could be used in advertising and onscreen.
was composed for Pulp Fiction, with Quentin Tarantino instead using an eclectic assortment of surf music
, rock and roll
, soul
, and pop
songs. Dick Dale
's rendition of "Misirlou
" plays during the opening credits. Tarantino chose surf music as the basic musical style for the film, but not, he insists, because of its association with surfing culture: "To me it just sounds like rock and roll, even Morricone
music. It sounds like rock and roll spaghetti Western
music." Some of the songs were suggested to Tarantino by his friends Chuck Kelley and Laura Lovelace, who were credited as music consultants. Lovelace also appeared in the film as Laura, a waitress; she reprises the role in Jackie Brown. The soundtrack album, Music from the Motion Picture Pulp Fiction
, was released along with the film in 1994. The album peaked on the Billboard 200
chart at number 21. The single, Urge Overkill
's cover of the Neil Diamond
song "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon
", reached number 59.
Estella Tincknell describes how the particular combination of well-known and obscure recordings helps establish the film as a "self-consciously 'cool' text. [The] use of the mono-tracked, beat-heavy style of early 1960s U.S. 'underground' pop mixed with 'classic' ballads such as Dusty Springfield
's 'Son of a Preacher Man
' is crucial to the film's postmodern knowingness." She contrasts the soundtrack with that of Forrest Gump
, the highest-grossing film of 1994, which also relies on period pop recordings: "[T]he version of 'the sixties' offered by Pulp Fiction...is certainly not that of the publicly recognized counter-culture featured in Forrest Gump, but is, rather, a more genuinely marginal form of sub-culture based around a lifestyle—surfing, 'hanging'—that is resolutely apolitical." The soundtrack is central, she says, to the film's engagement with the "younger, cinematically knowledgeable spectator" it solicits.
. The Weinsteins "hit the beach like commandos", bringing the picture's entire cast over. The film was unveiled at a midnight hour screening and caused a sensation. It won the Palme d'Or
, the festival's top prize, generating a further wave of publicity. The first U.S. review of the film was published on May 23 in industry trade magazine Variety
. Todd McCarthy called Pulp Fiction a "spectacularly entertaining piece of pop culture...a startling, massive success." From Cannes forward, Tarantino was on the road continuously, promoting the film. Over the next few months it played in smaller festivals around Europe, building buzz: Nottingham, Munich, Taormina, Locarno, Norway
, and San Sebastian. Tarantino later said, "One thing that's cool is that by breaking up the linear structure, when I watch the film with an audience, it does break [the audience's] alpha
state. It's like, all of a sudden, 'I gotta watch this...I gotta pay attention.' You can almost feel everybody moving in their seats. It's actually fun to watch an audience in some ways chase after a movie." In late September, it opened the New York Film Festival
. The New York Times
published its review the day of the opening. Janet Maslin
called the film a "triumphant, cleverly disorienting journey through a demimonde that springs entirely from Mr. Tarantino's ripe imagination, a landscape of danger, shock, hilarity and vibrant local color.... [He] has come up with a work of such depth, wit and blazing originality that it places him in the front ranks of American film makers."
On October 14, 1994, Pulp Fiction went into general release in the United States. As Peter Biskind describes, "It was not platformed, that is, it did not open in a handful of theaters and roll out slowly as word of mouth built, the traditional way of releasing an indie film; it went wide immediately, into 1,100 theaters." In the eyes of some cultural critics, Reservoir Dogs had given Tarantino a reputation for glamorizing violence. Miramax played with the issue in its marketing campaign: "You won't know the facts till you've seen the fiction", went one slogan. Pulp Fiction was the top-grossing film at the box office its first weekend, edging out a Sylvester Stallone
vehicle, The Specialist
, which was in its second week and playing at more than twice as many theaters. Against its budget of $8.5 million and about $10 million in marketing costs, Pulp Fiction wound up grossing $107.93 million at the U.S. box office, making it the first "indie" film to surpass $100 million. Worldwide, it took in nearly $213 million. In terms of domestic grosses, it was the tenth biggest film of 1994, even though it played on substantially fewer screens than any other film in the top 20. Popular engagement with the film, such as speculation about the contents of the precious briefcase, "indicates the kind of cult status that Pulp Fiction achieved almost immediately." As MovieMaker
puts it, "The movie was nothing less than a national cultural phenomenon." Abroad, as well: In Britain, where it opened a week after its U.S. release, not only was the film a big hit, but in book form its screenplay became the most successful in UK publishing history, a top-ten bestseller.
of the Chicago Sun-Times
describing it as "so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine
way that you want to rub noses in it—the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films.'" Richard Corliss
of Time
wrote, "It towers over the year's other movies as majestically and menacingly as a gang lord at a preschool. It dares Hollywood films to be this smart about going this far. If good directors accept Tarantino's implicit challenge, the movie theater could again be a great place to live in." In Newsweek
, David Ansen
wrote, "The miracle of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is how, being composed of secondhand, debased parts, it succeeds in gleaming like something new." "You get intoxicated by it," wrote Entertainment Weekly
s Owen Gleiberman
, "high on the rediscovery of how pleasurable a movie can be. I'm not sure I've ever encountered a filmmaker who combined discipline and control with sheer wild-ass joy the way that Tarantino does." "There's a special kick that comes from watching something this thrillingly alive", wrote Peter Travers
of Rolling Stone
. "Pulp Fiction is indisputably great." Overall, the film attained exceptionally high ratings among U.S. reviewers: a 95% score at Rotten Tomatoes
and a Metascore of 94 on Metacritic
.
The Los Angeles Times was one of the few major news outlets to publish a negative review on the film's opening weekend. Kenneth Turan
wrote, "The writer-director appears to be straining for his effects. Some sequences, especially one involving bondage harnesses and homosexual rape, have the uncomfortable feeling of creative desperation, of someone who's afraid of losing his reputation scrambling for any way to offend sensibilities." Some who reviewed it in the following weeks took more exception to the predominant critical reaction than to Pulp Fiction itself. While not panning the film, Stanley Kauffman of The New Republic
felt that "the way that [it] has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. Pulp Fiction nourishes, abets, cultural slumming." Responding to comparisons between Tarantino's film and the work of French New Wave
director Jean-Luc Godard
, especially his first, most famous feature, Jonathan Rosenbaum
of the Chicago Reader wrote, "The fact that Pulp Fiction is garnering more extravagant raves than Breathless ever did tells you plenty about which kind of cultural references are regarded as more fruitful—namely, the ones we already have and don't wish to expand." Observing in the National Review
that "[n]o film arrives with more advance hype", John Simon
was unswayed: "titillation cures neither hollowness nor shallowness".
Debate about the film spread beyond the review pages. Violence was often the theme. In the Washington Post, Donna Britt described how she was happy not to see Pulp Fiction on a recent weekend and thus avoid "discussing the rousing scene in which a gunshot sprays somebody's brains around a car interior". Some commentators took exception to the film's frequent use of the word "nigger
". In the Chicago Tribune
, Todd Boyd argued that the word's recurrence "has the ability to signify the ultimate level of hipness for white males who have historically used their perception of black masculinity as the embodiment of cool". In Britain, James Wood
, writing in The Guardian
, set the tone for much subsequent criticism: "Tarantino represents the final triumph of postmodernism, which is to empty the artwork of all content, thus avoiding its capacity to do anything except helplessly represent our agonies.... Only in this age could a writer as talented as Tarantino produce artworks so vacuous, so entirely stripped of any politics, metaphysics, or moral interest."
, National Board of Review, Los Angeles Film Critics Association
, Boston Society of Film Critics
, Society of Texas Film Critics, Southeastern Film Critics Association
, and Kansas City Film Critics Circle. Tarantino was named Best Director by all seven of those organizations as well as by the New York Film Critics Circle and Chicago Film Critics Association
. The screenplay won several prizes, with various awarding bodies ascribing credit differently. At the Golden Globe Award
s, Tarantino, named as sole recipient of the Best Screenplay honor, failed to mention Avary in his acceptance speech. In February 1995, the film received seven Oscar nominations—Best Picture, Director, Actor (Travolta), Supporting Actor (Jackson), Supporting Actress (Thurman), Original Screenplay, and Film Editing. Travolta, Jackson, and Thurman were each nominated as well for the 1st Screen Actors Guild Awards, presented on February 25, but none took home the honor. At the Academy Awards ceremony the following month, Tarantino and Avary were announced as joint winners of the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The furor around the film was still going strong: much of the March issue of Artforum
was devoted to its critical dissection. Pulp Fiction garnered four honors at the Independent Spirit Awards
, held at the end of the month: best feature, director, male lead (Jackson), and screenplay (Tarantino). At the British Academy Film Awards, Tarantino and Avary shared the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay
, and Jackson won for Best Supporting Actor
.
argued that Pulp Fiction posed a major challenge to the "ossification of American movies with their brutal formulas". In Siskel's view,
's Psycho [1960], Arthur Penn
's Bonnie and Clyde
[1967], and Stanley Kubrick
's A Clockwork Orange
[1971]. Each film shook up a tired, bloated movie industry and used a world of lively lowlifes to reflect how dull other movies had become. And that, I predict, will be the ultimate honor for Pulp Fiction. Like all great films, it criticizes other movies.
Ken Dancyger writes that its "imitative and innovative style"—like that of its predecessor, Reservoir Dogs
—represents
In a widely covered speech on May 31, 1995, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole
attacked the American entertainment industry for peddling "nightmares of depravity". Pulp Fiction was soon associated with his charges concerning gratuitous violence. Dole had not, in fact, mentioned the film; he cited two less celebrated movies based on Tarantino screenplays, Natural Born Killers
and True Romance
. In September 1996, Dole did accuse Pulp Fiction—which he had not seen—of promoting "the romance of heroin".
Paula Rabinowitz expresses the general film industry opinion that Pulp Fiction "simultaneously resurrected John Travolta and film noir". In Peter Biskind's description, it created a "guys-with-guns frenzy". The stylistic influence of Pulp Fiction soon became apparent. Less than a year after the picture's release, British critic Jon Ronson attended the National Film School
's end-of-semester screenings and assessed the impact: "Out of the five student movies I watched, four incorporated violent shoot-outs over a soundtrack of iconoclastic 70s pop hits, two climaxed with all the main characters shooting each other at once, and one had two hitmen discussing the idiosyncrasies of The Brady Bunch
before offing their victim. Not since Citizen Kane
has one man appeared from relative obscurity to redefine the art of moviemaking." Among the first Hollywood films cited as its imitators were Destiny Turns on the Radio
(1995), in which Tarantino acted, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead
(1995), and 2 Days in the Valley
(1996). It "triggered a myriad of clones", writes Fiona Villella. Internationally, according to David Desser, it "not only influenced a British brand of noir, but extended the noir vision virtually around the world." Pulp Fictions effect on film form was still reverberating in 2007, when David Denby
of The New Yorker
credited it with initiating the ongoing cycle of disordered cinematic narratives.
Its impact on Hollywood was deeper still. According to Variety
, the trajectory of Pulp Fiction from Cannes launch to commercial smash "forever altered the game" of so-called independent cinema
. It "cemented Miramax's place as the reigning indie superpower", writes Biskind. "Pulp became the Star Wars
of independents, exploding expectations for what an indie film could do at the box office." The film's large financial return on its small budget
In 2001, Variety, noting the increasing number of actors switching back and forth between expensive studio films and low-budget independent or indie-style projects, suggested that the "watershed moment for movie stars" came with the decision by Willis—one of Hollywood's highest-paid performers—to appear in Pulp Fiction.
And its impact was even broader than that. It has been described as a "major cultural event", an "international phenomenon" that influenced television, music, literature, and advertising. Not long after its release, it was identified as a significant focus of attention within the growing community of Internet users. Adding Pulp Fiction to his roster of "Great Movies" in 2001, Roger Ebert called it "the most influential film of the decade". Four years later, Times Corliss wrote much the same: "(unquestionably) the most influential American movie of the 90s".
Several scenes and images from the film achieved iconic status; in 2008, Entertainment Weekly
declared, "You'd be hard-pressed, by now, to name a moment from Quentin Tarantino's film that isn't iconic." Jules and Vincent's "Royale with Cheese" dialogue became famous. It was referenced more than a decade and a half later in the Travolta vehicle From Paris with Love
. The adrenalin shot to Mia Wallace's heart is on Premiere
s list of "100 Greatest Movie Moments". The scene of Travolta and Thurman's characters dancing has been frequently homaged, most unambiguously in the 2005 film Be Cool
, starring the same two actors. The image of Travolta and Jackson's characters standing side by side in suit and tie, pointing their guns, has also become widely familiar. In 2007, BBC News
reported that "London transport workers have painted over an iconic mural by 'guerrilla artist' Banksy
.... The image depicted a scene from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns." Certain lines were adopted popularly as catchphrases, in particular Marsellus's threat, "I'm 'a get medieval on your ass." Jules's "Ezekiel" recitation was voted the fourth greatest movie speech of all time in a 2004 poll.
Pulp Fiction now appears in several critical assessments of all-time great films. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly named it the best film of the past quarter-century. That same year, the American Film Institute
's "Ten Top Ten" poll ranked it number 7 all-time in the gangster film genre. In 2007, it was voted 94th overall on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list. In 2005, it was named one of Times "All-Time 100 Movies
". As of January 2010, it is number 10 on Metacritic's list of all-time highest scores. The film ranks very highly in popular surveys. A 2008 Empire
poll combining the opinions of readers, movie industry professionals, and critics named Pulp Fiction the ninth best film of all time. In a 2007 poll of the online film community, it placed eleventh. In a 2006 readers' poll by the British magazine Total Film
, it ranked as the number 3 film in history. It was voted as the fourth greatest film of all time in a nationwide poll for Britain's Channel 4
in 2001.
detective fiction. "[I]t kind of went somewhere else". Geoffrey O'Brien sees the result as connected "rather powerfully to a parallel pulp tradition: the tales of terror and the uncanny practiced by such writers as Cornell Woolrich
[and] Fredric Brown
.... Both dealt heavily in the realm of improbable coincidences and cruel cosmic jokes, a realm that Pulp Fiction makes its own." In particular, O'Brien finds a strong affinity between the intricate plot mechanics and twists of Brown's novels and the recursive, interweaving structure of Pulp Fiction. Philip French describes the film's narrative as a "circular movement or Möbius strip
of a kind Resnais
and Robbe-Grillet
would admire." James Mottram regards crime novelist Elmore Leonard
, whose influence Tarantino has acknowledged, as the film's primary literary antecedent. He suggests that Leonard's "rich dialogue" is reflected in Tarantino's "popular-culture-strewn jive"; he also points to the acute, extremely dark sense of humor Leonard applies to the realm of violence as a source of inspiration.
Robert Kolker sees the "flourishes, the apparent witty banality of the dialogue, the goofy fracturing of temporality [as] a patina over a pastiche
. The pastiche...is essentially of two films that Tarantino can't seem to get out of his mind: Mean Streets
[1973; directed by Martin Scorsese
] and The Killing [1956; directed by Stanley Kubrick
]." He contrasts Pulp Fiction with postmodern Hollywood predecessors Hudson Hawk
(1991; starring Willis) and Last Action Hero
(1993; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger
) that "took the joke too far...simply mocked or suggested that they were smarter than the audience" and flopped. Todd McCarthy writes that the film's "striking widescreen compositions often contain objects in extreme close-up as well as vivid contrasts, sometimes bringing to mind the visual strategies of Sergio Leone
", an acknowledged hero of Tarantino's. To Martin Rubin, the "expansive, brightly colored widescreen visuals" evoke comedy directors such as Frank Tashlin
and Blake Edwards
.
The movie's host of pop culture
allusions, ranging from the famous image of Marilyn Monroe
's skirt flying up over a subway grating to Jules addressing a soon-to-be victim as "Flock of Seagulls" because of his haircut, have led many critics to discuss it within the framework of postmodernism
. Describing the film in 2005 as Tarantino's "postmodern masterpiece...to date", David Walker writes that it "is marked by its playful reverence for the 1950s...and its constantly teasing and often deferential references to other films". He characterizes its convoluted narrative technique as "postmodern tricksiness". Calling the film a "terminally hip postmodern collage", Foster Hirsch finds Pulp Fiction far from a masterpiece: "authoritative, influential, and meaningless". Set "in a world that could exist only in the movies", it is "a succulent guilty pleasure, beautifully made junk food for cinéastes
". O'Brien, dismissing attempts to associate the movie with film noir
, argues that "Pulp Fiction is more a guided tour of an infernal theme park decorated with cultural detritus, Buddy Holly
and Mamie Van Doren
, fragments of blaxploitation
and Roger Corman
and Shogun Assassin
, music out of a twenty-four-hour oldies station for which all the decades since the fifties exist simultaneously." Catherine Constable takes the moment in which a needle filled with adrenaline is plunged into the comatose Mia's heart as exemplary. She proposes that it "can be seen as effecting her resurrection from the dead, simultaneously recalling and undermining the Gothic
convention of the vampire's stake. On this model, the referencing of previous aesthetic forms and styles moves beyond...empty pastiche, sustaining an 'inventive and affirmative' mode of postmodernism."
Mark T. Conard asks, "[W]hat is the film about?" and answers, "American nihilism
." Hirsch suggests, "If the film is actually about anything other than its own cleverness, it seems dedicated to the dubious thesis that hit men are part of the human family." Richard Alleva argues that "Pulp Fiction has about as much to do with actual criminality or violence as Cyrano de Bergerac
with the realities of seventeenth-century France or The Prisoner of Zenda
with Balkan politics." He reads the movie as a form of romance whose allure is centered in the characters' nonnaturalistic discourse, "wise-guy literate, media-smart, obscenely epigram
matic". In Alan Stone's view, the "absurd dialogue", like that between Vincent and Jules in the scene where the former accidentally kills Marvin, "unexpectedly transforms the meaning of the violence cliché.... Pulp Fiction unmasks the macho myth by making it laughable and deheroicizes the power trip glorified by standard Hollywood violence." Stone reads the film as "politically correct
. There is no nudity and no violence directed against women.... [It] celebrates interracial friendship and cultural diversity; there are strong women and strong black men, and the director swims against the current of class stereotype."
Where Stone sees a celebration, Kolker finds a vacuum: "The postmodern insouciance, violence, homophobia, and racism of Pulp Fiction were perfectly acceptable because the film didn't pretend seriousness and therefore didn't mock it." Calling it the "acme of postmodern nineties filmmaking", he explains, "the postmodern is about surfaces; it is flattened spatiality in which event and character are in a steady state of reminding us that they are pop-cultural figures." According to Kolker,
Henry A. Giroux
argues that Tarantino "empties violence of any critical social consequences, offering viewers only the immediacy of shock, humor, and irony-without-insight as elements of mediation. None of these elements gets beyond the seduction of voyeuristic gazing...[t]he facile consumption of shocking images and hallucinatory delight."
s to other movies. "Tarantino's characters", writes Gary Groth, "inhabit a world where the entire landscape is composed of Hollywood product. Tarantino is a cinematic kleptomaniac—he literally can't help himself." Two scenes in particular have prompted discussion of the film's highly intertextual style. Many have assumed that the dance sequence at Jack Rabbit Slim's was intended as a reference to Travolta's star-making performance as Tony Manero in the epochal Saturday Night Fever
(1977); Tarantino, however, credits a scene in the Jean-Luc Godard
film Bande à part (1964) with the inspiration. According to the filmmaker,
Jerome Charyn
argues that, beyond "all the better", Travolta's presence is essential to the power of the scene, and of the film:
Estella Tincknell notes that while the "diner setting seems to be a simulacrum of a 'fifties' restaurant...the twist contest is a musical sequence which evokes 'the sixties,' while Travolta's dance performance inevitably references 'the seventies' and his appearance in Saturday Night Fever.... The 'past' thus becomes a more general 'pastness' in which the stylistic signifiers of various decades are loaded in to a single moment." She also argues that in this passage the film "briefly shifts from its habitually ironic discourse to one that references the conventions of the classic film musical
and in doing so makes it possible for the film to inhabit an affective space that goes beyond stylistic allusion."
The pivotal moment in which Marsellus crosses the street in front of Butch's car and notices him evokes the scene in which Marion Crane's boss sees her under similar circumstances in Psycho. Marsellus and Butch are soon held captive by Maynard and Zed, "two sadistic honkies straight out of Deliverance
" (1972), directed by John Boorman
. Zed shares a name with Sean Connery
's character in Boorman's follow-up, the science-fiction film Zardoz
(1974). When Butch decides to rescue Marsellus, in Glyn White's words, "he finds a trove of items with film-hero resonances". Critics have identified these weapons with a range of possible allusions:
baseball bat— Walking Tall
(1973); The Untouchables
(1987) chainsaw— The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
(1974); The Evil Dead II (1987) katana
(samurai sword)—many, including Seven Samurai (1954); The Yakuza
(1975); Shogun Assassin
(1980)
At the conclusion of the scene, a portentous line of Marsellus's echoes one from the 1973 crime drama Charley Varrick
, directed by another of Tarantino's heroes, Don Siegel
; the name of the character who speaks it there is Maynard.
David Bell argues that far from going against the "current of class stereotype", this scene, like Deliverance, "mobilize[s] a certain construction of poor white country folk—and particularly their sexualization...'rustic sexual expression often takes the form of homosexual rape' in American movies." Stephen Paul Miller believes the Pulp Fiction scene goes down much easier than the one it echoes: "The buggery perpetrated is not at all as shocking as it was in Deliverance.... The nineties film reduces seventies competition, horror, and taboo into an entertainingly subtle adrenaline play—a fiction, a pulp fiction." Giroux reads the rape scene homage similarly: "in the end Tarantino's use of parody is about repetition, transgression, and softening the face of violence by reducing it to the property of film history." In Groth's view, the crucial difference is that "in Deliverance the rape created the film's central moral dilemma whereas in Pulp Fiction it was merely 'the single weirdest day of [Butch's] life.'"
Neil Fulwood focuses on Butch's weapon selection, writing, "Here, Tarantino's love of movies is at its most open and nonjudgemental, tipping a nod to the noble and the notorious, as well as sending up his own reputation as an enfant terrible of movie violence. Moreover, the scene makes a sly comment about the readiness of cinema to seize upon whatever is to hand for its moments of mayhem and murder." White asserts that "the katana he finally, and significantly, selects identifies him with...honour
able heroes." Conard argues that the first three items symbolize a nihilism that Butch is rejecting. The traditional Japanese sword, in contrasts, represents a culture with a well-defined moral code and thus connects Butch with a more meaningful approach to life.
, Clutch Cargo
, The Brady Bunch
, The Partridge Family
, The Avengers
, The Three Stooges, The Flintstones
, I Spy, Green Acres
, Kung Fu
, Happy Days
, and last but not least, Mia's fictional pilot, Fox Force Five.
"The above list, with the possible exception of The Avengers," writes Miklitsch, "suggests that Pulp Fiction has less of an elective affinity with the cinematic avant-gardism of Godard than with mainstream network programming." Jonathan Rosenbaum had brought TV into his analysis of the Tarantino/Godard comparison, acknowledging that the directors were similar in wanting to cram everything they like onscreen: "But the differences between what Godard likes and what Tarantino likes and why are astronomical; it's like comparing a combined museum, library, film archive, record shop, and department store with a jukebox, a video-rental outlet, and an issue of TV Guide
."
Sharon Willis focuses on the way a television show (Clutch Cargo) marks the beginning of, and plays on through, the scene between young Butch and his father's comrade-in-arms. The Vietnam War veteran is played by Christopher Walken, whose presence in the role evokes his performance as a traumatized G.I. in the 1978 Vietnam War movie The Deer Hunter
. Willis writes that "when Captain Koons enters the living room, we see Walken in his function as an image retrieved from a repertoire of 1970s television and movie versions of ruined masculinity
in search of rehabilitation.... [T]he gray light of the television presiding over the scene seems to inscribe the ghostly paternal gaze." Miklitsch asserts that, for some critics, the film is a "prime example of the pernicious ooze-like influence of mass culture exemplified by their bête noire: TV." Kolker might not disagree, arguing that "Pulp Fiction is a simulacrum of our daily exposure to television; its homophobes, thugs and perverts, sentimental boxers and pimp promoters move through a series of long-take tableaux: we watch, laugh, and remain with nothing to comprehend."
". Tarantino has said that there is no explanation for its contents—it is simply a MacGuffin
, a pure plot device
. Originally, the case was to contain diamonds, but this was seen as too mundane. For filming purposes, it contained a hidden orange light bulb that produced an otherworldly glow. In a 2007 video interview with fellow director and friend Robert Rodriguez
, Tarantino purportedly "reveals" the secret contents of the briefcase, but the film cuts out and skips the scene in the style employed in Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007), with an intertitle that reads "Missing Reel". The interview resumes with Rodriguez discussing how radically the "knowledge" of the briefcase's contents alters one's understanding of the movie.
Despite Tarantino's statements, many solutions to what one scholar calls this "unexplained postmodern puzzle" have been proposed. A strong similarity has often been observed with the 1955 film noir
Kiss Me Deadly
. That movie, whose protagonist Tarantino has cited as a source for Butch, features a glowing briefcase housing an atomic explosive. In scholar Paul Gormley's view, this connection with Kiss Me Deadly, and a similar one with Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981), makes it possible to read the eerie glow as symbolic of violence itself. To Susan Fraiman, the unseen contents represent "defended, mystified, male interiority. Much valued, much vaunted, and never finally shown, this radiant, indefinable softness is locked within a hard, exterior shell. Even Jules, who wants to lose the baggage of a barricaded self, walks out of the movie clutching it still." The idea that the briefcase contains Marsellus's soul gained popular currency in the mid-1990s. Analyzing the notion, Roger Ebert dismissed it as "nothing more than a widely distributed urban legend given false credibility by the mystique of the Net".
25:17, before he executes someone. We hear the passage three times—in the introductory sequence in which Jules and Vincent reclaim Marsellus's briefcase from the doomed Brett; that same recitation a second time, at the beginning of "The Bonnie Situation", which overlaps the end of the earlier sequence; and in the epilogue at the diner. The first version of the passage is as follows:
The second version, from the diner scene, is identical except for the final line: "And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you."
While the final two sentences of Jules's speech are similar to the actual cited passage, the first two are fabricated from various biblical phrases. The text of Ezekiel 25 preceding verse 17 indicates that God's wrath is retribution for the hostility of the Philistines. In the King James version from which Jules's speech is adapted, Ezekiel 25:17 reads in its entirety, "And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them." Tarantino's primary inspiration for the speech was the work of Japanese martial arts star Sonny Chiba
. Its text and its identification as Ezekiel 25:17 derive from an almost identical creed that appears at the beginning of the Chiba movie Karate Kiba
(The Bodyguard; 1976), where it is both shown as a scrolling text and read by an offscreen narrator. In the 1980s television series Kage no Gundan (Shadow Warriors), Chiba's character would lecture the villain-of-the-week about how the world must be rid of evil before killing him. A killer delivers a similar biblical rant in Modesty Blaise
, the hardback but pulp-style novel Vincent is shown with in two scenes.
Two critics who have analyzed the role of the speech find different ties between Jules's transformation and the issue of postmodernity
. Gormley argues that unlike the film's other major characters—Marsellus aside—Jules is
Adele Reinhartz
writes that the "depth of Jules's transformation" is indicated by the difference in his two deliveries of the passage: "In the first, he is a majestic and awe-inspiring figure, proclaiming the prophecy with fury and self-righteousness.... In the second...he appears to be a different sort of man altogether.... [I]n true postmodern fashion, [he] reflects on the meaning of his speech and provides several different ways that it might pertain to his current situation." Similar to Gormley, Conard argues that as Jules reflects on the passage, it dawns on him "that it refers to an objective framework of value and meaning that is absent from his life"; to Conard, this contrasts with the film's prevalent representation of a nihilistic culture. Rosenbaum finds much less in Jules's revelation: "[T]he spiritual awakening at the end of Pulp Fiction, which Jackson performs beautifully, is a piece of jive avowedly inspired by kung-fu movies. It may make you feel good, but it certainly doesn't leave you any wiser."
, "Honey Bunny" whines, "I gotta go pee!"
As described by Peter and Will Brooker, "In three significant moments Vincent retires to the bathroom [and] returns to an utterly changed world where death is threatened." The threat increases in magnitude as the narrative progresses chronologically, and is realized in the third instance:
In the Brookers' analysis, "Through Vince...we see the contemporary world as utterly contingent, transformed, disastrously, in the instant you are not looking." Fraiman finds it particularly significant that Vincent is reading Modesty Blaise in two of these instances. She links this fact with the traditional derisive view of women as "the archetypal consumers of pulp":
Willis reads Pulp Fiction in almost precisely the opposite direction, finding "its overarching project as a drive to turn shit into gold. This is one way of describing the project of redeeming and recycling popular culture, especially the popular culture of one's childhood, as is Tarantino's wont as well as his stated aim." Despite that, argues Fraiman, "Pulp Fiction demonstrates...that even an open pulpophile like Tarantino may continue to feel anxious and emasculated by his preferences."
It also received the following nominations:
In the balloting by the National Society of Film Critics, Samuel L. Jackson was the runner-up in both the Best Actor
and the Best Supporting Actor
categories.
Crime film
Crime films are films which focus on the lives of criminals. The stylistic approach to a crime film varies from realistic portrayals of real-life criminal figures, to the far-fetched evil doings of imaginary arch-villains. Criminal acts are almost always glorified in these movies.- Plays and films...
directed by Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
, who co-wrote its screenplay with Roger Avary
Roger Avary
Roger Avary is a Canadian film and television producer, screenwriter, olive farmer and director in the American mass media industry. He was behind the screenplays of the films Silent Hill and Beowulf...
. The film is known for its rich, eclectic dialogue, ironic mix of humor and violence, nonlinear storyline, and host of cinematic allusions and pop culture references. The film was nominated for seven Oscars
67th Academy Awards
The 67th Academy Awards, honoring the best films of 1994, were held on March 27, 1995 at the Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, California. They were hosted by well-known comedian and talk show host David Letterman....
, including Best Picture
Academy Award for Best Picture
The Academy Award for Best Picture is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to artists working in the motion picture industry. The Best Picture category is the only category in which every member of the Academy is eligible not only...
; Tarantino and Avary won for Best Original Screenplay. It was also awarded the Palme d'Or
Palme d'Or
The Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and is presented to the director of the best feature film of the official competition. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du...
at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival
1994 Cannes Film Festival
The 1994 Cannes Film Festival started on 12 May and ran until 23 May. The Palme d'Or went to the American film Pulp Fiction directed by Quentin Tarantino.-Official Selection:*Clint Eastwood *Catherine Deneuve...
. A major critical and commercial success, it revitalized the career of its leading man, John Travolta
John Travolta
John Joseph Travolta is an American actor, dancer and singer. Travolta first became known in the 1970s, after appearing on the television series Welcome Back, Kotter and starring in the box office successes Saturday Night Fever and Grease...
, who received an Academy Award nomination
Academy Award for Best Actor
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry...
, as did costars Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel Leroy Jackson is an American film and television actor and film producer. After becoming involved with the Civil Rights Movement, he moved on to acting in theater at Morehouse College, and then films. He had several small roles such as in the film Goodfellas before meeting his mentor,...
and Uma Thurman
Uma Thurman
Uma Karuna Thurman is an American actress and model. She has performed in leading roles in a variety of films, ranging from romantic comedies and dramas to science fiction and action movies. Among her best-known roles are those in the Quentin Tarantino films Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill...
.
Directed in a highly stylized manner, Pulp Fiction joins the intersecting storylines of Los Angeles mobsters, fringe players, small-time criminals, and a mysterious briefcase. Considerable screen time is devoted to conversations and monologues that reveal the characters' senses of humor and perspectives on life. The film's title refers to the pulp magazine
Pulp magazine
Pulp magazines , also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long...
s and hardboiled
Hardboiled
Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined...
crime novels popular during the mid-20th century, known for their graphic violence and punchy dialogue. Pulp Fiction is self-referential
Self-reference
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding...
from its opening moments, beginning with a title card
Intertitle
In motion pictures, an intertitle is a piece of filmed, printed text edited into the midst of the photographed action, at various points, generally to convey character dialogue, or descriptive narrative material related to, but not necessarily covered by, the material photographed.Intertitles...
that gives two dictionary definitions of "pulp". The plot, as in many of Tarantino's other works, is presented out of chronological sequence.
The picture's self-reflexivity, unconventional structure, and extensive use of homage
Homage
Homage is a show or demonstration of respect or dedication to someone or something, sometimes by simple declaration but often by some more oblique reference, artistic or poetic....
and pastiche
Pastiche
A pastiche is a literary or other artistic genre or technique that is a "hodge-podge" or imitation. The word is also a linguistic term used to describe an early stage in the development of a pidgin language.-Hodge-podge:...
have led critics to describe it as a prime example of postmodern film
Postmodernist film
Postmodernist film describes the articulation of ideas of postmodernism through the cinematic medium. Postmodernist film upsets the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization and destroys the audience's suspension of disbelief to create a work in which a less-recognizable...
. Considered by some critics a black comedy
Black comedy
A black comedy, or dark comedy, is a comic work that employs black humor or gallows humor. The definition of black humor is problematic; it has been argued that it corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor; and that, as humor has been defined since Freud as a comedic act that anesthetizes...
, the film is also frequently labeled a "neo-noir". Critic Geoffrey O'Brien
Geoffrey O'Brien
Geoffrey O'Brien is an American poet, editor, book and film critic, translator, and cultural historian. In 1992, he joined the staff of the Library of America as Executive Editor, becoming Editor-in-Chief in 1998.-Biography:...
argues otherwise: "The old-time noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
passions, the brooding melancholy and operatic death scenes, would be altogether out of place in the crisp and brightly lit wonderland that Tarantino conjures up. [It is] neither neo-noir nor a parody of noir". Similarly, Nicholas Christopher
Nicholas Christopher
-Background:Christopher graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. He teaches at Columbia University. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books. His novels can be considered as magic realist...
calls it "more gangland camp
Camp (style)
Camp is an aesthetic sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its taste and ironic value. The concept is closely related to kitsch, and things with camp appeal may also be described as being "cheesy"...
than neo-noir", and Foster Hirsch
Foster Hirsch
Foster Hirsch is the author of sixteen books on subjects related to theatre and movies. A native of California, Hirsch received his B.A. from Stanford University, and holds M.F.A, M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University...
suggests that its "trippy fantasy landscape" characterizes it more definitively than any genre label. Pulp Fiction is viewed as the inspiration for many later movies that adopted various elements of its style. The nature of its development, marketing, and distribution and its consequent profitability had a sweeping effect on the field of independent cinema
Independent film
An independent film, or indie film, is a professional film production resulting in a feature film that is produced mostly or completely outside of the major film studio system. In addition to being produced and distributed by independent entertainment companies, independent films are also produced...
(although it is not an independent film itself). Considered a cultural watershed, Pulp Fictions influence has been felt in several other media.
Narrative structure
In keeping with writer-director Quentin Tarantino's trademark of nonlinear storytelling, the narrative is presented out of sequence. Pulp Fiction is structured around three distinct but interrelated storylines—in Tarantino's conception, mob hitman Vincent Vega is the lead of the first story, prizefighter Butch Coolidge is the lead of the second, and Vincent's fellow contract killer, Jules Winnfield, is the lead of the third. Although each storyline focuses on a different series of incidents, they connect and intersect in various ways. The film starts out with a diner hold-up staged by "Pumpkin" and "Honey Bunny", then picks up the stories of Vincent, Jules, Butch, and several other important characters, including mob kingpin Marsellus Wallace, his wife, Mia, and underworld problem-solver Winston Wolf. It finally returns to where it began, in the diner: Vincent and Jules, who have stopped in for a bite, find themselves embroiled in the hold-up. There are a total of seven narrative sequences—the three primary storylines are preceded by identifying intertitles on a black screen:- Prologue—The Diner (i)
- Prelude to "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife"
- "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife"
- Prelude to "The Gold Watch" (a—flashback, b—present)
- "The Gold Watch"
- "The Bonnie Situation"
- Epilogue—The Diner (ii)
If the seven sequences were ordered chronologically, they would run: 4a, 2, 6, 1, 7, 3, 4b, 5. Sequences 1 and 7 partially overlap and are presented from different points of view; the same is true of sequences 2 and 6. In Philip Parker's description, the structural form is "an episodic narrative with circular events adding a beginning and end and allowing references to elements of each separate episode to be made throughout the narrative." Other analysts describe the structure simply as a "circular narrative".
Plot
Prologue"Pumpkin" (Tim Roth
Tim Roth
Simon Timothy "Tim" Roth is an English film actor and director best known for his roles in the American films,Legend of 1900, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, Skellig, Planet of the Apes, The Incredible Hulk and Rob Roy, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for...
) and "Honey Bunny" (Amanda Plummer) are having breakfast in a diner. They decide to rob it after realizing they could make money off the customers as well as the business, as they did during their previous heist. Moments after they initiate the hold-up, the scene breaks off and the title credits roll.
Prelude to "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife"
As Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel Leroy Jackson is an American film and television actor and film producer. After becoming involved with the Civil Rights Movement, he moved on to acting in theater at Morehouse College, and then films. He had several small roles such as in the film Goodfellas before meeting his mentor,...
) drives, Vincent Vega (John Travolta
John Travolta
John Joseph Travolta is an American actor, dancer and singer. Travolta first became known in the 1970s, after appearing on the television series Welcome Back, Kotter and starring in the box office successes Saturday Night Fever and Grease...
) talks about his experiences in Europe, from where he has just returned: the hash bars in Amsterdam, the French McDonald's
McDonald's
McDonald's Corporation is the world's largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants, serving around 64 million customers daily in 119 countries. Headquartered in the United States, the company began in 1940 as a barbecue restaurant operated by the eponymous Richard and Maurice McDonald; in 1948...
and its "Royale with Cheese
Quarter Pounder
The Quarter Pounder is a hamburger product sold by international fast food chain McDonald's, originally containing a patty with a precooked weight of a quarter of a pound .-History:...
". The pair—both wearing dress suits—are on their way to retrieve a briefcase from Brett (Frank Whaley
Frank Whaley
Frank Joseph Whaley is an American film and television actor known for his roles in independent films.-Personal life:Whaley was born in Syracuse, New York, the son of Josephine and Robert W. Whaley, Sr. He is half-Irish and half-Sicilian and grew up in Syracuse. He has two sisters and an older...
), who has transgressed against their boss, gangster Marsellus Wallace. Jules tells Vincent that Marsellus had someone thrown off a fourth-floor balcony for giving his wife a foot massage. Vincent says that Marsellus has asked him to escort his wife while Marsellus is out of town. They conclude their banter and "get into character", which soon involves executing Brett in dramatic fashion after Jules recites a baleful "biblical" pronouncement.
Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife
In a virtually empty cocktail lounge, aging prizefighter Butch Coolidge (Bruce WillisBruce Willis
Walter Bruce Willis , better known as Bruce Willis, is an American actor, producer, and musician. His career began in television in the 1980s and has continued both in television and film since, including comedic, dramatic, and action roles...
) accepts a large sum of money from Marsellus (Ving Rhames
Ving Rhames
Irving Rameses "Ving" Rhames is an American actor best known for his work in Bringing Out the Dead, Pulp Fiction, Baby Boy, Don King: Only in America, and the Mission: Impossible film series.-Early life and education:...
), agreeing to take a dive
Match fixing
In organised sports, match fixing, game fixing, race fixing, or sports fixing occurs as a match is played to a completely or partially pre-determined result, violating the rules of the game and often the law. Where the sporting competition in question is a race then the incident is referred to as...
in his upcoming match. Vincent and Jules—now inexplicably dressed in T-shirts and shorts—arrive to deliver the briefcase, and Butch and Vincent briefly cross paths. The next day, Vincent drops by the house of Lance (Eric Stoltz
Eric Stoltz
Eric Hamilton Stoltz is an American actor, director and producer. He is widely known for playing the role of Rocky Dennis in the biographical drama film Mask, which earned him the nomination for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture...
) and Jody (Rosanna Arquette
Rosanna Arquette
Rosanna Lauren Arquette is an American actress, film director, and producer.-Early life:Arquette was born in New York City, the daughter of Brenda Olivia "Mardi" , an actress, poet, theater operator, activist, acting teacher, and therapist, and Lewis Arquette, an actor and director. Her paternal...
) to score some high-grade heroin. He shoots up before driving over to meet Mrs. Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman
Uma Thurman
Uma Karuna Thurman is an American actress and model. She has performed in leading roles in a variety of films, ranging from romantic comedies and dramas to science fiction and action movies. Among her best-known roles are those in the Quentin Tarantino films Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill...
) and take her out. They head to Jack Rabbit Slim's, a 1950s-themed restaurant
Theme restaurant
Theme restaurants are restaurants in which the concept of the restaurant takes priority over everything else, influencing the architecture, food, music, and overall 'feel' of the restaurant...
staffed by lookalikes of the decade's pop icons. Mia recounts her experience acting in a failed television pilot
Television pilot
A "television pilot" is a standalone episode of a television series that is used to sell the show to a television network. At the time of its inception, the pilot is meant to be the "testing ground" to see if a series will be possibly desired and successful and therefore a test episode of an...
, "Fox Force Five".
After participating in a twist
Twist (dance)
The Twist was a dance inspired by rock and roll music. It became the first worldwide dance craze in the early 1960s, enjoying immense popularity among young people and drawing fire from critics who felt it was too provocative. It inspired dances such as the Jerk, the Pony, the Watusi, the Mashed...
contest, they return to the Wallace house with the trophy. While Vincent is in the bathroom, Mia finds his stash of heroin in his coat pocket. Mistaking it for cocaine, she snorts it and overdoses. Vincent rushes her to Lance's house for help. Together, they administer an adrenaline shot to Mia's heart, reviving her. Before parting ways, Mia and Vincent agree not to tell Marsellus of the incident.
Prelude to "The Gold Watch"
Television time for young Butch (Chandler Lindauer
Chandler Lindauer
Chandler Lindauer is an American actor. He best known for his role as young Butch in Pulp Fiction.-External links:...
) is interrupted by the arrival of Vietnam veteran Captain Koons (Christopher Walken
Christopher Walken
Christopher Walken is an American stage and screen actor. He has appeared in more than 100 movies and television shows, including Joe Dirt, Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, The Prophecy trilogy, The Dogs of War, Sleepy Hollow, Brainstorm, The Dead Zone, A View to a Kill, At Close Range, King of New...
). Koons explains that he has brought a gold watch, passed down through generations of Coolidge men since World War I. Butch's father died of dysentery while in a POW camp, and at his dying request Koons hid the watch in his rectum for two years in order to deliver it to Butch. A bell rings, startling the adult Butch out of this reverie. He is in his boxing colors—it is time for the fight he has been paid to throw.
The Gold Watch
Butch flees the arena, having won the bout. Making his getaway by taxi, he learns from the death-obsessed driver, Esmarelda Villalobos (Angela JonesAngela Jones
Angela Jones is an American actress. She was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania then raised in Jeannette, Pennsylvania where she graduated in 1986. Both towns are located approximately 25 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. She is a graduate of Point Park College in Pittsburgh.Quentin Tarantino...
), that he killed the opposing fighter. Butch has double-crossed Marsellus, betting his payoff on himself at very favorable odds. The next morning, at the motel where he and his girlfriend, Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros
Maria de Medeiros
Maria de Medeiros Esteves Vitorino de Almeida, DamSE , better known as Maria de Medeiros , is a Portuguese actress, director, and singer who has been involved in both European and American film productions.-Personal life:...
), are lying low, Butch discovers that she has forgotten to pack the irreplaceable watch. He returns to his apartment to retrieve it, although Marsellus's men are almost certainly looking for him. Butch finds the watch quickly, but thinking he is alone, pauses for a snack. Only then does he notice a submachine gun
Submachine gun
A submachine gun is an automatic carbine, designed to fire pistol cartridges. It combines the automatic fire of a machine gun with the cartridge of a pistol. The submachine gun was invented during World War I , but the apex of its use was during World War II when millions of the weapon type were...
on the kitchen counter. Hearing the toilet flush, Butch readies the gun in time to kill a startled Vincent Vega exiting the bathroom.
Butch drives away but while waiting at a traffic light, Marsellus walks by and recognizes him. Butch rams Marsellus with the car, then another automobile collides with his. After a foot chase the two men land in a pawnshop. The shopowner, Maynard (Duane Whitaker
Duane Whitaker
Duane Whitaker is an American actor.Duane Whitaker is probably best known for his role in Quentin Tarantino's popular 1994 film Pulp Fiction as Maynard, the sadistic pawn shop owner. He wrote and portrayed the title role in Eddie Presley...
), captures them at gunpoint and ties them up in a half-basement area. Maynard is joined by Zed (Peter Greene
Peter Greene
Peter Greene is an American character actor.A native of Montclair, New Jersey, Greene did not pursue a career in acting until his mid 20s...
); they take Marsellus to another room to rape him, leaving a silent masked figure referred to as "the gimp" to watch a tied-up Butch. Butch breaks loose and knocks out the gimp. He is about to flee when he decides to save Marsellus. As Zed is sodomizing
Sodomy
Sodomy is an anal or other copulation-like act, especially between male persons or between a man and animal, and one who practices sodomy is a "sodomite"...
Marsellus on a pommel horse
Pommel horse
The pommel horse is an artistic gymnastics apparatus. Traditionally, it is used by only male gymnasts. Originally made of a metal frame with a wooden body and a leather cover, modern pommel horses have a metal body covered with foam rubber and leather, with plastic handles .- History :The pommel...
, Butch kills Maynard with a katana
Katana
A Japanese sword, or , is one of the traditional bladed weapons of Japan. There are several types of Japanese swords, according to size, field of application and method of manufacture.-Description:...
. Marsellus retrieves Maynard's shotgun and shoots Zed in the groin. Marsellus informs Butch that they are even with respect to the botched fight fix, so long as he never tells anyone about the rape and departs Los Angeles forever. Butch agrees and returns to pick up Fabienne on Zed's chopper
Chopper (motorcycle)
A chopper is a type of motorcycle that was either modified from an original motorcycle design or built from scratch to have a hand-crafted appearance. The main features of a chopper that make it stand out are its longer frame design accompanied by a stretch front end...
.
The Bonnie Situation
The story returns to Vincent and Jules at Brett's. After they execute him, another man (Alexis ArquetteAlexis Arquette
Alexis Arquette is an American trans woman, actress, musician, and cabaret performer.-Early life:...
) bursts out of the bathroom and shoots wildly at them, missing every time before an astonished Jules and Vincent return fire. Jules decides this is a miracle and a sign from God for him to retire as a hitman. They drive off with one of Brett's associates, Marvin (Phil LaMarr
Phil LaMarr
Phillip "Phil" LaMarr is an American actor, comedian and voice actor. One of the original cast members on the sketch comedy series MADtv, he is also known for his small, but memorable role as Marvin in Pulp Fiction...
), their informant. Vincent asks Marvin for his opinion about the "miracle", and accidentally shoots him in the face.
Forced to remove their bloodied car from the road, Jules calls upon the house of his friend Jimmie (Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence...
). Jimmie's wife, Bonnie, is due back from work soon and he is very anxious that she not encounter the scene. At Jules's request, Marsellus arranges for the help of Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel
Harvey Keitel
Harvey Keitel is an American actor. Some of his most notable starring roles were in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, Ridley Scott's The Duellists and Thelma and Louise, Ettore Scola's That Night in Varennes, Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Jane Campion's The...
). "The Wolf" takes charge of the situation, ordering Jules and Vincent to clean the car, hide the body in the trunk, dispose of their own bloody clothes, and change into T-shirts and shorts provided by Jimmie. They drive the car to a junkyard, from where Wolf and the owner's daughter, Raquel (Julia Sweeney
Julia Sweeney
Julia Anne Sweeney is an American actress, comedian and author best known as a cast member on Saturday Night Live and for her autobiographical solo shows.-Personal life:...
), head off to breakfast and Jules and Vincent decide to do the same.
Epilogue
As Jules and Vincent eat breakfast in a coffee shop the discussion returns to Jules's decision to retire. In a brief cutaway, we see "Pumpkin" and "Honey Bunny" shortly before they initiate the hold-up from the movie's first scene. While Vincent is in the bathroom, the hold-up commences. "Pumpkin" demands all of the patrons' valuables, including Jules's mysterious case. Jules surprises "Pumpkin" (whom he calls "Ringo"), holding him at gunpoint. "Honey Bunny", hysterical, trains her gun on Jules. Vincent emerges from the restroom with his gun trained on her, creating a Mexican standoff
Mexican standoff
A Mexican standoff is a slang term defined as a stalemate or impasse; a confrontation that neither side can foreseeably win. The term is most often used in lieu of "stalemate" when the confrontational situation is exceptionally dangerous for all parties involved.In popular culture, the Mexican...
. Reprising his pseudo-biblical passage, Jules expresses his ambivalence about his life of crime. As his first act of redemption, he allows the two robbers to take the cash they have stolen and leave, pondering how they were spared and leaving the briefcase to be returned to Marsellus, finishing the hitman's final job for his boss.
Writing
The first element of what would become the Pulp Fiction screenplay was written by Roger AvaryRoger Avary
Roger Avary is a Canadian film and television producer, screenwriter, olive farmer and director in the American mass media industry. He was behind the screenplays of the films Silent Hill and Beowulf...
in the fall of 1990:
The initial inspiration was the three-part horror anthology film
Anthology film
An anthology film is a feature film consisting of several different short films, often tied together by only a single theme, premise, or brief interlocking event . Sometimes each one is directed by a different director...
Black Sabbath
Black Sabbath (film)
The motion picture Black Sabbath, whose Italian title, I Tre volti della paura, translates as The Three Faces of Fear, is a 1963 Italian horror film directed by Mario Bava. Boris Karloff, in addition to appearing in the linking passages, has a role in "The Wurdalak" segment...
(1963), by Italian filmmaker Mario Bava
Mario Bava
Mario Bava was an Italian director, screenwriter, and cinematographer remembered as one of the greatest names from the "golden age" of Italian horror films.-Biography:Mario Bava was born in San Remo, Liguria, Italy...
. The Tarantino–Avary project was provisionally titled "Black Mask", after the seminal hardboiled
Hardboiled
Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined...
crime fiction magazine. Tarantino's script was produced as Reservoir Dogs
Reservoir Dogs
Reservoir Dogs is an American crime film marking debut of director and writer Quentin Tarantino. It depicts the events before and after a botched diamond heist, but not the heist itself. Reservoir Dogs stars an ensemble cast: Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, and...
, his directorial debut; Avary's, titled "Pandemonium Reigns", would form the basis for the "Gold Watch" storyline of Pulp Fiction.
With work on Reservoir Dogs completed, Tarantino returned to the notion of a trilogy film: "I got the idea of doing something that novelists get a chance to do but filmmakers don't: telling three separate stories, having characters float in and out with different weights depending on the story." Tarantino explains that the idea "was basically to take like the oldest chestnuts that you've ever seen when it comes to crime stories—the oldest stories in the book.... You know, 'Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife'—the oldest story about...the guy's gotta go out with the big man's wife and don't touch her. You know, you've seen the story a zillion times." "I'm using old forms of storytelling and then purposely having them run awry", he says. "Part of the trick is to take these movie characters, these genre characters and these genre situations and actually apply them to some of real life's rules and see how they unravel." In at least one case, boxer Butch Coolidge, Tarantino had in mind a specific character from a classic Hollywood crime story: "I wanted him to be basically like Ralph Meeker
Ralph Meeker
Ralph Meeker was an American stage and film actor best-known for starring in the 1953 Broadway production of Picnic, and in the 1955 film noir cult classic Kiss Me Deadly.-Career:...
as Mike Hammer
Mike Hammer
Michael "Mike" Hammer is a fictional detective created by the American author Mickey Spillane in the 1947 book I, the Jury .-Description:...
in Aldrich
Robert Aldrich
Robert Aldrich was an American film director, writer and producer, notable for such films as Kiss Me Deadly , The Big Knife , What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? , Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte , The Flight of the Phoenix , The Dirty Dozen , and The Longest Yard .-Biography:Robert...
's Kiss Me Deadly
Kiss Me Deadly
Kiss Me Deadly is a 1955 film noir drama produced and directed by Robert Aldrich starring Ralph Meeker. The screenplay was written by A.I. Bezzerides, based on the Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer mystery novel Kiss Me, Deadly. Kiss Me Deadly is often considered a classic of the noir genre. The film...
[1955]. I wanted him to be a bully and a jerk".
Tarantino went to work on the script for Pulp Fiction in Amsterdam in March 1992. He was joined there by Avary, who contributed "Pandemonium Reigns" to the project and participated in its rewriting as well as the development of the new storylines that would link up with it. Two scenes originally written by Avary for the True Romance
True Romance
True Romance is a 1993 American romance crime film written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott. The film stars Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette with an ensemble cast consisting of Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin...
screenplay, exclusively credited to Tarantino, were incorporated into the opening of "The Bonnie Situation": the "miraculous" missed shots by the hidden gunman and the rear seat automobile killing. The notion of the crimeworld "cleaner" that became the heart of the episode was inspired by a short, Curdled
Curdled (film)
Curdled is 1996 black comedy written and directed by Reb Braddock. The film stars Angela Jones as a Colombian immigrant who takes a crime scene cleanup job, and discovers evidence about a local serial killer dubbed the "Blue Blood Killer" for his targeting of socialites...
, that Tarantino saw at a film festival. He cast the lead actress, Angela Jones
Angela Jones
Angela Jones is an American actress. She was born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania then raised in Jeannette, Pennsylvania where she graduated in 1986. Both towns are located approximately 25 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. She is a graduate of Point Park College in Pittsburgh.Quentin Tarantino...
, in Pulp Fiction and later backed the filmmakers' production of a feature-length version of Curdled. The script included a couple of made-up commercial brands that would feature often in later Tarantino films: Big Kahuna burgers (a Big Kahuna soda cup appears in Reservoir Dogs) and Red Apple cigarettes. As he worked on the script, Tarantino also accompanied Reservoir Dogs around the European film festivals. Released in the U.S. in October 1992, the picture was a critical and commercial success. In January 1993, the Pulp Fiction script was complete.
Financing
Tarantino and his producer, Lawrence BenderLawrence Bender
Lawrence Bender is an American film producer. He rose to fame by producing Reservoir Dogs in 1992 and has since produced all of Quentin Tarantino's films with the exception of Death Proof....
, brought the script to Jersey Films, the production company run by Danny DeVito
Danny DeVito
Daniel Michael DeVito, Jr. , better known as Danny DeVito, is an American actor, comedian, director and producer. He first gained prominence for his portrayal of Louie De Palma on the ABC and NBC television series Taxi , for which he won a Golden Globe and an Emmy.DeVito and his wife, Rhea Perlman,...
, Michael Shamberg
Michael Shamberg
Michael Shamberg is an American former Time-Life correspondent and current film producer.-Life and career:His credits include Erin Brockovich, A Fish Called Wanda, Garden State, Gattaca, Pulp Fiction and The Big Chill...
, and Stacey Sher
Stacey Sher
-Early life:Born in New York but raised in Fort Lauderdale, Sher is a graduate of University of Southern California's Peter Stark Producing Program.-Movie career:...
. Before even seeing Reservoir Dogs, Jersey had attempted to sign Tarantino for his next project. Ultimately a development deal worth around $1 million had been struck—the deal gave A Band Apart
A Band Apart
A Band Apart Films was a production company created by Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender, which was active from 1991 to about 2006. Its name is a play on the French New Wave classic, Bande à part by filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, whose work was highly influential on the work of the company's members...
, Bender and Tarantino's newly formed production company, initial financing and office facilities; Jersey got a share of the project and the right to shop the script to a studio. Jersey had a distribution and "first look" deal with Columbia TriStar, which paid Tarantino for the right to consider exercising its option. In February, Pulp Fiction appeared on a Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
list of films in preproduction at TriStar. In June, however, the studio put the script into turnaround. According to a studio executive, TriStar chief Mike Medavoy
Mike Medavoy
Morris Mike Medavoy is an American film producer and executive, co-founder of Orion Pictures , former chairman of TriStar Pictures, former head of production for United Artists and current chairman and CEO of Phoenix Pictures.-Early life and career:Medavoy was born in Shanghai, China in 1941 to...
found it "too demented". There were suggestions that TriStar was resistant to backing a film featuring a heroin user; there were also indications that the studio simply saw the project as too low-budget for its desired star-driven image. Avary—who was about to start shooting his own directorial debut, Killing Zoe
Killing Zoe
Killing Zoe is a 1994 film, written and directed by Roger Avary. The story details a safe cracker named Zed who returns to France to aid an old friend in performing a doomed bank heist...
—has said that TriStar's objections were comprehensive, encompassing the script's fundamental structure. He characterizes the studio's position: "'This is the worst thing ever written. It makes no sense. Someone's dead and then they're alive. It's too long, violent, and unfilmable.'... So I thought, 'That's that!'"
Bender brought the script to Miramax, the formerly independent studio that had recently been acquired by Disney. Harvey Weinstein
Harvey Weinstein
Harvey Weinstein, CBE is an American film producer and movie studio chairman. He is best known as co-founder of Miramax Films. He and his brother Bob have been co-chairmen of The Weinstein Company, their film production company, since 2005...
—co-chairman of Miramax, along with his brother, Bob
Bob Weinstein
Robert "Bob" Weinstein is an American film and theatre producer, the founder and head of Dimension Films, former co-chairman of Miramax Films, and current head, with his brother Harvey Weinstein, of The Weinstein Company.-Career:...
—was instantly enthralled by the script and the company picked it up. Pulp Fiction, the first Miramax project to get a green light
Greenlight
To green-light a project is to give permission or a go ahead to move forward with a project. In the context of the movie and TV businesses, to green-light something is to formally approve its production finance, thereby allowing the project to move forward from the development phase to...
after the Disney acquisition, was budgeted at $8.5 million. It became the first movie that Miramax completely financed. Helping hold costs down was the plan Bender executed to pay all the main actors the same amount per week, regardless of their industry status. The biggest star to sign on to the project was Bruce Willis
Bruce Willis
Walter Bruce Willis , better known as Bruce Willis, is an American actor, producer, and musician. His career began in television in the 1980s and has continued both in television and film since, including comedic, dramatic, and action roles...
. Though he had recently appeared in several big-budget flops, he was still a major overseas draw. On the strength of his name, Miramax garnered $11 million for the film's worldwide rights, virtually ensuring its profitability.
Cast
John TravoltaJohn Travolta
John Joseph Travolta is an American actor, dancer and singer. Travolta first became known in the 1970s, after appearing on the television series Welcome Back, Kotter and starring in the box office successes Saturday Night Fever and Grease...
as Vincent Vega: Tarantino cast Travolta in Pulp Fiction only because Michael Madsen
Michael Madsen
Michael Søren Madsen is an American actor, poet, and photographer. He has appeared in more than 150 films, most of them small independent films, though he has starred in central roles in such films as Reservoir Dogs, Free Willy, Donnie Brasco, and Kill Bill, in addition to a supporting role in Sin...
, who had a major role—Vic Vega—in Reservoir Dogs, chose to appear in Kevin Costner
Kevin Costner
Kevin Michael Costner is an American actor, singer, musician, producer, director, and businessman. He has been nominated for three BAFTA Awards, won two Academy Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards. Costner's roles include Lt. John J...
's Wyatt Earp
Wyatt Earp (film)
Wyatt Earp is a 1994 American semi-biographical Western film, written by Dan Gordon and Lawrence Kasdan and directed by Kasdan. It stars Kevin Costner in the title role as lawman Wyatt Earp, and features an ensemble cast that includes Dennis Quaid, Gene Hackman, Isabella Rossellini, Mark Harmon,...
instead. Madsen was still rueing his choice over a decade later. Harvey Weinstein pushed for Daniel Day-Lewis
Daniel Day-Lewis
Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis is an English actor with both British and Irish citizenship. His portrayals of Christy Brown in My Left Foot and Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood won Academy and BAFTA Awards for Best Actor, and Screen Actors Guild as well as Golden Globe Awards for the latter...
in the part. Travolta accepted a bargain rate for his services—sources claim either $100,000 or $140,000—but the film's success and his Oscar nomination as Best Actor revitalized his career. Travolta was subsequently cast in several hits including Get Shorty
Get Shorty (film)
Get Shorty is a 1995 crime-comedy film based on Elmore Leonard's novel of the same name. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld and starring John Travolta, Gene Hackman, Rene Russo, and Danny DeVito, the plot remained true to the book except for a few minor details....
, in which he played a similar character, and the John Woo
John Woo
John Woo Yu-Sen SBS is a Hong Kong-based film director and producer. Recognized for his stylised films of highly choreographed action sequences, Mexican standoffs, and use of slow-motion, Woo has directed several notable Hong Kong action films, among them, A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Hard...
blockbuster Face/Off
Face/Off
Face/Off is a 1997 action thriller film directed by John Woo, starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. The two both play an FBI agent and a terrorist, sworn enemies who assume the physical appearance of one another....
. In 2004, Tarantino discussed an idea for a movie starring Travolta and Madsen as the Vega brothers; the concept remains unrealized.
Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel L. Jackson
Samuel Leroy Jackson is an American film and television actor and film producer. After becoming involved with the Civil Rights Movement, he moved on to acting in theater at Morehouse College, and then films. He had several small roles such as in the film Goodfellas before meeting his mentor,...
as Jules Winnfield: Tarantino had written the part with Jackson in mind, but the actor nearly lost it after his first audition was overshadowed by Paul Calderón
Paul Calderon
Paul Calderón is an American actor.He was born in Puerto Rico. Calderón moved to New York with his family at the age of six, where he grew up on the streets of the Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem...
's. Jackson assumed the audition was merely a reading. Harvey Weinstein convinced Jackson to audition a second time, and his performance of the final diner scene won over Tarantino. Jules was originally scripted with a giant afro, but Tarantino and Jackson agreed on the Jheri-curled
Jheri curl
The Jheri curl is a hairstyle that was common and popular in the African American community especially during the 1970s and 1980s . Invented by and named for Jheri Redding, the Jheri curl gave the wearer a glossy, loosely curled look...
wig seen in the film. (One reviewer took it as a "tacit comic statement about the ghettoization of blacks in movies".) Jackson received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Calderon appears in the movie as Paul, a bartender at Marsellus's social club.
Uma Thurman
Uma Thurman
Uma Karuna Thurman is an American actress and model. She has performed in leading roles in a variety of films, ranging from romantic comedies and dramas to science fiction and action movies. Among her best-known roles are those in the Quentin Tarantino films Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill...
as Mia Wallace: Miramax favored Holly Hunter
Holly Hunter
Holly Hunter is an American actress. Hunter starred in The Piano for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She has also been nominated for Oscars for her roles in Broadcast News, The Firm, and Thirteen...
or Meg Ryan
Meg Ryan
Margaret Mary Emily Anne Hyra , professionally known as Meg Ryan, is an American actress and producer. Raised in Bethel, Connecticut, Ryan began her acting career in 1981 in minor roles, before joining the cast of the CBS soap opera As the World Turns in 1982...
for the role. Alfre Woodard
Alfre Woodard
Alfre Ette Woodard is an American film, stage, and television actress. She has been nominated once for an Academy Award and Grammy Awards, 17 times for Emmy Awards , and has also won a Golden Globe and three Screen Actors Guild Awards.She is known for her role in films such as Cross Creek, Miss...
and Meg Tilly were also considered, but Tarantino wanted Thurman after their first meeting. She dominated most of the film's promotional material, appearing on a bed with cigarette in hand. She was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar and was launched into the celebrity A-list
A-list
A-list is a term that alludes to major movie stars, or the most bankable in the Hollywood film industry.The A-list is part of a larger guide called The Hot List that has become an industry-standard guide in Hollywood...
. She took little advantage of her newfound fame, choosing not to do any big-budget films for the next three years. Thurman would later star in Tarantino's two Kill Bill
Kill Bill
Kill Bill Volume 1 is a 2003 action thriller film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It is the first of two volumes that were theatrically released several months apart, the second volume being Kill Bill Volume 2....
movies.
Bruce Willis
Bruce Willis
Walter Bruce Willis , better known as Bruce Willis, is an American actor, producer, and musician. His career began in television in the 1980s and has continued both in television and film since, including comedic, dramatic, and action roles...
as Butch Coolidge: Willis was a major star, but most of his recent films had been box-office disappointments. As described by Peter Bart, taking a role in the modestly budgeted film "meant lowering his salary and risking his star status, but the strategy...paid off royally: Pulp Fiction not only brought Willis new respect as an actor, but also earned him several million dollars as a result of his gross participation." Willis's appearance and physical presence were crucial to Tarantino's interest in casting him: "Bruce has the look of a 50s actor. I can't think of any other star that has that look."
Harvey Keitel
Harvey Keitel
Harvey Keitel is an American actor. Some of his most notable starring roles were in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, Ridley Scott's The Duellists and Thelma and Louise, Ettore Scola's That Night in Varennes, Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Jane Campion's The...
as Winston Wolf or simply "The Wolf": The part was written specifically for Keitel, who had starred in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and was instrumental in getting it produced. In the filmmaker's words, "Harvey had been my favorite actor since I was 16 years old." Keitel had played a character similarly employed as a "cleaner" in Point of No Return
Point of No Return (film)
Point of No Return is a 1993 American action film directed by John Badham and starring Bridget Fonda. It is a remake of Luc Besson's 1990 film Nikita.-Plot:...
, released a year earlier.
Tim Roth
Tim Roth
Simon Timothy "Tim" Roth is an English film actor and director best known for his roles in the American films,Legend of 1900, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, Skellig, Planet of the Apes, The Incredible Hulk and Rob Roy, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for...
as "Pumpkin" or "Ringo": Roth had starred in Reservoir Dogs alongside Keitel and was brought on board again. He had used an American accent in the earlier film, but uses his natural, London one in Pulp Fiction. Though Tarantino had written the part specifically with Roth in mind, TriStar head Mike Medavoy preferred Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp
John Christopher "Johnny" Depp II is an American actor, producer and musician. He has won the Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild award for Best Actor. Depp rose to prominence on the 1980s television series 21 Jump Street, becoming a teen idol...
or Christian Slater
Christian Slater
Christian Michael Leonard Slater is an American actor. He made his film debut with a small role in The Postman Always Rings Twice before playing a leading role in the 1985 film The Legend of Billie Jean...
.
Amanda Plummer as Yolanda or "Honey Bunny": Tarantino wrote the role for Plummer, specifically to partner Roth onscreen. Roth had introduced the actress and director, telling Tarantino, "I want to work with Amanda in one of your films, but she has to have a really big gun." Plummer followed up with director Michael Winterbottom
Michael Winterbottom
Michael Winterbottom is a prolific English filmmaker who has directed seventeen feature films in the past fifteen years. He began his career working in British television before moving into features...
's Butterfly Kiss
Butterfly Kiss
Butterfly Kiss is a 1995 British film, directed by Michael Winterbottom and written by Frank Cottrell Boyce. It stars Amanda Plummer and Saskia Reeves...
, in which she plays a serial killer.
Maria de Medeiros
Maria de Medeiros
Maria de Medeiros Esteves Vitorino de Almeida, DamSE , better known as Maria de Medeiros , is a Portuguese actress, director, and singer who has been involved in both European and American film productions.-Personal life:...
as Fabienne: Butch's girlfriend. Tarantino met the Portuguese actress while traveling with Reservoir Dogs around the European film festival circuit. She had previously costarred with Thurman in Henry & June
Henry & June
Henry & June is a 1990 American film directed by Philip Kaufman and stars Fred Ward, Maria de Medeiros, and Uma Thurman. It is loosely based on the book of the same name by the French author Anaïs Nin, and tells the story of Nin's relationship with Henry Miller and his wife, June.-Plot:The story...
(1990), playing Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin was a French-Cuban author, based at first in France and later in the United States, who published her journals, which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly before her death, her erotic literature, and short stories...
.
Ving Rhames
Ving Rhames
Irving Rameses "Ving" Rhames is an American actor best known for his work in Bringing Out the Dead, Pulp Fiction, Baby Boy, Don King: Only in America, and the Mission: Impossible film series.-Early life and education:...
as Marsellus Wallace: Before Rhames was cast, the part was offered to Sid Haig
Sid Haig
Sid Haig is a American actor. His roles have included acting in Jack Hill's blaxploitation films of the 1970s as well as his role as Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombie's horror films House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects...
, who had appeared in many classic exploitation movies of the 1970s. Haig passed on the role. According to Bender, Rhames gave "one of the best auditions I've ever seen." His acclaimed performance led to his being cast in big-budget features such as Mission Impossible
Mission: Impossible (film)
Mission: Impossible is a 1996 action thriller directed by Brian De Palma and starring Tom Cruise. Following on from the television series of the same name, the plot follows a new agent, Ethan Hunt and his mission to uncover the mole within the CIA who has framed him for the murders of his entire...
, Con Air
Con Air
Con Air is an Academy Award–nominated 1997 American action-thriller film directed by Simon West and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. It stars Nicolas Cage, John Cusack and John Malkovich...
, and Out of Sight
Out of Sight
Out of Sight is a 1998 American crime film. The film was directed by Steven Soderbergh and based on the novel of the same name by Elmore Leonard. It was the first of several collaborations between Soderbergh and star George Clooney. The film was released on June 26, 1998. It was nominated for two...
.
Eric Stoltz
Eric Stoltz
Eric Hamilton Stoltz is an American actor, director and producer. He is widely known for playing the role of Rocky Dennis in the biographical drama film Mask, which earned him the nomination for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture...
as Lance: Vincent's drug dealer. Courtney Love
Courtney Love
Courtney Michelle Love is an American rock musician. Love is the lead vocalist, lyricist, and rhythm guitarist for alternative rock band Hole, which she formed in 1989, and is an actress who has moved from bit parts in Alex Cox films to significant and acclaimed roles in The People vs...
later reported that Kurt Cobain
Kurt Cobain
Kurt Donald Cobain was an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the grunge band Nirvana...
was originally offered the role of Lance; if he had taken it, Love would have played the role of his wife. Tarantino, however, denies that he ever even met Cobain, much less offered him a role in the movie.
Rosanna Arquette
Rosanna Arquette
Rosanna Lauren Arquette is an American actress, film director, and producer.-Early life:Arquette was born in New York City, the daughter of Brenda Olivia "Mardi" , an actress, poet, theater operator, activist, acting teacher, and therapist, and Lewis Arquette, an actor and director. Her paternal...
as Jody: Lance's wife. Pam Grier
Pam Grier
Pamela Suzette "Pam" Grier is an American actress. She became famous in the early 1970s, after starring in a string of moderately successful women in prison and blaxploitation films such as 1974's Foxy Brown. Her career was revitalized in 1997 after her appearance in Quentin Tarantino's film...
read for the role, but Tarantino did not believe audiences would find it plausible for Lance to yell at her. Grier was later cast as the lead of Tarantino's Jackie Brown
Jackie Brown (film)
Jackie Brown is a 1997 American crime drama film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It is an adaptation of the novel Rum Punch by American novelist Elmore Leonard and pays homage to 1970s blaxploitation films....
. Ellen DeGeneres
Ellen DeGeneres
Ellen Lee DeGeneres is an American stand-up comedienne, television host and actress. She hosts the syndicated talk show The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and was also a judge on American Idol for one year, having joined the show in its ninth season....
also read for Jody.
Christopher Walken
Christopher Walken
Christopher Walken is an American stage and screen actor. He has appeared in more than 100 movies and television shows, including Joe Dirt, Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, The Prophecy trilogy, The Dogs of War, Sleepy Hollow, Brainstorm, The Dead Zone, A View to a Kill, At Close Range, King of New...
as Captain Koons: Walken appears in a single scene, devoted to the Vietnam veteran's monologue about the gold watch. In 1993, Walken had appeared in another small but pivotal role in the "Sicilian scene" in the Tarantino-written True Romance
True Romance
True Romance is a 1993 American romance crime film written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott. The film stars Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette with an ensemble cast consisting of Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin...
.
Filming
Principal photographyPrincipal photography
thumb|300px|Film production on location in [[Newark, New Jersey]].Principal photography is the phase of film production in which the movie is filmed, with actors on set and cameras rolling, as distinct from pre-production and post-production....
commenced on September 20, 1993. The lead offscreen talent had all worked with Tarantino on Reservoir Dogs—cinematographer
Cinematographer
A cinematographer is one photographing with a motion picture camera . The title is generally equivalent to director of photography , used to designate a chief over the camera and lighting crews working on a film, responsible for achieving artistic and technical decisions related to the image...
Andrzej Sekuła, film editor Sally Menke
Sally Menke
Sally JoAnne Menke was an American film editor with more than 20 film credits since 1984. She had a long-time collaboration with director Quentin Tarantino, having edited all of his films...
, production designer
Production designer
In film and television, a production designer is the person responsible for the overall look of a filmed event such as films, TV programs, music videos or adverts. Production designers have one of the key creative roles in the creation of motion pictures and television. Working directly with the...
David Wasco, and costume designer
Costume Designer
A costume designer or costume mistress/master is a person whose responsibility is to design costumes for a film or stage production. He or she is considered an important part of the "production team", working alongside the director, scenic and lighting designers as well as the sound designer. The...
Betsy Heimann
Betsy Faith Heimann
Betsy Heimann was born in Chicago, Illinois and is a costume designer in Hollywood.-Filmography:*Rush Hour 3 *Lady in the Water *Be Cool *Red Dragon *Vanilla Sky...
. According to Tarantino, "[W]e had $8 million [sic]. I wanted it to look like a $20–25 million movie. I wanted it to look like an epic. It's an epic in everything—in invention, in ambition, in length, in scope, in everything except the price tag." The film, he says, was shot "on 50 ASA
Film speed
Film speed is the measure of a photographic film's sensitivity to light, determined by sensitometry and measured on various numerical scales, the most recent being the ISO system....
film stock, which is the slowest stock they make. The reason we use it is that it creates an almost no-grain
Film grain
Film grain or granularity is the random optical texture of processed photographic film due to the presence of small particles of a metallic silver, or dye clouds, developed from silver halide that have received enough photons. While film grain is a function of such particles it is not the same...
image, it's lustrous. It's the closest thing we have to 50s Technicolor
Technicolor
Technicolor is a color motion picture process invented in 1916 and improved over several decades.It was the second major process, after Britain's Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952...
." The largest chunk of the budget—$150,000—went to creating the Jack Rabbit Slim's set. It was built in a Culver City warehouse, where it was joined by several other sets as well as the film's production offices. The diner sequence was shot on location in Hawthorne
Hawthorne, California
Hawthorne is a city in southwestern Los Angeles County, California. The city at the 2010 census had a population of 84,293, up from 84,112 at the 2000 census.-Geography:...
at the Hawthorne Grill, known for its Googie architecture
Googie architecture
Googie architecture is a form of modern architecture, a subdivision of futurist architecture influenced by car culture and the Space and Atomic Ages....
. For the costumes, Tarantino took his inspiration from French director Jean-Pierre Melville, who believed that the clothes his characters wore were their symbolic suits of armor. Tarantino cast himself in a modest-sized role as he had in Reservoir Dogs. One of his pop totems, Fruit Brute
Fruit Brute
Fruit Brute was one of a line of five monster-themed breakfast cereals produced by General Mills for the North American market.. It is also the name of the cereal's mascot, a humorous cartoon werewolf. The frosted fruit-flavored cereal contained lime flavored marshmallows. Fruit Brute was produced...
, a long-discontinued General Mills
General Mills
General Mills, Inc. is an American Fortune 500 corporation, primarily concerned with food products, which is headquartered in Golden Valley, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. The company markets many well-known brands, such as Betty Crocker, Yoplait, Colombo, Totinos, Jeno's, Pillsbury, Green...
cereal, also returned from the earlier film. The shoot wrapped on November 30. Before Pulp Fictions premiere, Tarantino convinced Avary to forfeit his agreed-on cowriting credit and accept a "story by" credit, so the line "Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino" could be used in advertising and onscreen.
Music
No film scoreFilm score
A film score is original music written specifically to accompany a film, forming part of the film's soundtrack, which also usually includes dialogue and sound effects...
was composed for Pulp Fiction, with Quentin Tarantino instead using an eclectic assortment of surf music
Surf music
Surf music is a genre of popular music associated with surf culture, particularly as found in Orange County and other areas of Southern California. It was particularly popular between 1961 and 1965, has subsequently been revived and was highly influential on subsequent rock music...
, rock and roll
Rock and roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...
, soul
Soul music
Soul music is a music genre originating in the United States combining elements of gospel music and rhythm and blues. According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, soul is "music that arose out of the black experience in America through the transmutation of gospel and rhythm & blues into a form of...
, and pop
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
songs. Dick Dale
Dick Dale
Dick Dale is an American surf rock guitarist, known as The King of the Surf Guitar. He experimented with reverberation and made use of custom made Fender amplifiers, including the first-ever 100-watt guitar amplifier.-Early life:Dale was born in South Boston, Massachusetts and lived in nearby...
's rendition of "Misirlou
Misirlou
Misirlou , is a popular Greek song with popularity in five styles of music: Greek rebetiko, Middle-Eastern belly dancing, Jewish klezmer, American surf rock, and international orchestral easy listening .- History :...
" plays during the opening credits. Tarantino chose surf music as the basic musical style for the film, but not, he insists, because of its association with surfing culture: "To me it just sounds like rock and roll, even Morricone
Ennio Morricone
Ennio Morricone, Grand Officer OMRI, , is an Italian composer and conductor, who wrote music to more than 500 motion pictures and television series, in a career lasting over 50 years. His scores have been included in over 20 award-winning films as well as several symphonic and choral pieces...
music. It sounds like rock and roll spaghetti Western
Spaghetti Western
Spaghetti Western, also known as Italo-Western, is a nickname for a broad sub-genre of Western films that emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's unique and much copied film-making style and international box-office success, so named by American critics because most were produced and...
music." Some of the songs were suggested to Tarantino by his friends Chuck Kelley and Laura Lovelace, who were credited as music consultants. Lovelace also appeared in the film as Laura, a waitress; she reprises the role in Jackie Brown. The soundtrack album, Music from the Motion Picture Pulp Fiction
Pulp Fiction (soundtrack)
Music from the Motion Picture Pulp Fiction is the soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino's 1994 film Pulp Fiction. No traditional film score was commissioned for Pulp Fiction. The film contains a mix of American rock and roll, surf music, pop and soul...
, was released along with the film in 1994. The album peaked on the Billboard 200
Billboard 200
The Billboard 200 is a ranking of the 200 highest-selling music albums and EPs in the United States, published weekly by Billboard magazine. It is frequently used to convey the popularity of an artist or groups of artists...
chart at number 21. The single, Urge Overkill
Urge Overkill
Urge Overkill is an alternative rock band, formed in Chicago, United States, consisting of Nash Kato , and Eddie "King" Roeser . Their cover of Neil Diamond's song "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon" appeared prominently in the movie Pulp Fiction, and became a hit in 1994...
's cover of the Neil Diamond
Neil Diamond
Neil Leslie Diamond is an American singer-songwriter with a career spanning over five decades from the 1960s until the present....
song "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon
Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon
"Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon" is a song written by Neil Diamond, whose recording of it on Bang Records reached #10 on the U.S. pop singles chart in 1967. The song garnered a second life span when it appeared on the 1994 Pulp Fiction soundtrack, performed by rock band Urge Overkill...
", reached number 59.
Estella Tincknell describes how the particular combination of well-known and obscure recordings helps establish the film as a "self-consciously 'cool' text. [The] use of the mono-tracked, beat-heavy style of early 1960s U.S. 'underground' pop mixed with 'classic' ballads such as Dusty Springfield
Dusty Springfield
Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'BrienSources use both Isabel and Isobel as the spelling of her second name. OBE , known professionally as Dusty Springfield and dubbed The White Queen of Soul, was a British pop singer whose career extended from the late 1950s to the 1990s...
's 'Son of a Preacher Man
Son of a Preacher Man
"Son of a Preacher Man" is a song recorded by Dusty Springfield in September 1968 and featured on the album, Dusty in Memphis. It was written by John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins. The rights to cover "Son of a Preacher Man" were originally offered to Aretha Franklin, who turned it down...
' is crucial to the film's postmodern knowingness." She contrasts the soundtrack with that of Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump is a 1994 American epic comedy-drama romance film based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Winston Groom. The film was directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright and Gary Sinise...
, the highest-grossing film of 1994, which also relies on period pop recordings: "[T]he version of 'the sixties' offered by Pulp Fiction...is certainly not that of the publicly recognized counter-culture featured in Forrest Gump, but is, rather, a more genuinely marginal form of sub-culture based around a lifestyle—surfing, 'hanging'—that is resolutely apolitical." The soundtrack is central, she says, to the film's engagement with the "younger, cinematically knowledgeable spectator" it solicits.
Release and box office
Pulp Fiction premiered in May 1994 at the Cannes Film Festival1994 Cannes Film Festival
The 1994 Cannes Film Festival started on 12 May and ran until 23 May. The Palme d'Or went to the American film Pulp Fiction directed by Quentin Tarantino.-Official Selection:*Clint Eastwood *Catherine Deneuve...
. The Weinsteins "hit the beach like commandos", bringing the picture's entire cast over. The film was unveiled at a midnight hour screening and caused a sensation. It won the Palme d'Or
Palme d'Or
The Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and is presented to the director of the best feature film of the official competition. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du...
, the festival's top prize, generating a further wave of publicity. The first U.S. review of the film was published on May 23 in industry trade magazine Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
. Todd McCarthy called Pulp Fiction a "spectacularly entertaining piece of pop culture...a startling, massive success." From Cannes forward, Tarantino was on the road continuously, promoting the film. Over the next few months it played in smaller festivals around Europe, building buzz: Nottingham, Munich, Taormina, Locarno, Norway
Norwegian International Film Festival
The Norwegian International Film Festival is a film festival held annually in Haugesund, Norway. The festival goes back to 1973.In 1985, the Amanda award was instituted. The Amanda is awarded every year at the festival in different movie categories...
, and San Sebastian. Tarantino later said, "One thing that's cool is that by breaking up the linear structure, when I watch the film with an audience, it does break [the audience's] alpha
Alpha wave
Alpha waves are neural oscillations in the frequency range of 8–12 Hz arising from synchronous and coherent electrical activity of thalamic pacemaker cells in humans...
state. It's like, all of a sudden, 'I gotta watch this...I gotta pay attention.' You can almost feel everybody moving in their seats. It's actually fun to watch an audience in some ways chase after a movie." In late September, it opened the New York Film Festival
New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival has been a major film festival since it began in 1963 in New York. The films are selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center...
. The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
published its review the day of the opening. Janet Maslin
Janet Maslin
Janet Maslin is an American journalist, best known as a film and literary critic for The New York Times. She served as the Times film critic from 1977–1999.- Biography :...
called the film a "triumphant, cleverly disorienting journey through a demimonde that springs entirely from Mr. Tarantino's ripe imagination, a landscape of danger, shock, hilarity and vibrant local color.... [He] has come up with a work of such depth, wit and blazing originality that it places him in the front ranks of American film makers."
On October 14, 1994, Pulp Fiction went into general release in the United States. As Peter Biskind describes, "It was not platformed, that is, it did not open in a handful of theaters and roll out slowly as word of mouth built, the traditional way of releasing an indie film; it went wide immediately, into 1,100 theaters." In the eyes of some cultural critics, Reservoir Dogs had given Tarantino a reputation for glamorizing violence. Miramax played with the issue in its marketing campaign: "You won't know the facts till you've seen the fiction", went one slogan. Pulp Fiction was the top-grossing film at the box office its first weekend, edging out a Sylvester Stallone
Sylvester Stallone
Michael Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone , commonly known as Sylvester Stallone, and nicknamed Sly Stallone, is an American actor, filmmaker, screenwriter, film director and occasional painter. Stallone is known for his machismo and Hollywood action roles. Two of the notable characters he has portrayed...
vehicle, The Specialist
The Specialist
The Specialist is a 1994 American action film from Warner Bros. Pictures. It is directed by Luis Llosa, produced by Jerry Weintraub, and written by Alexandra Seros...
, which was in its second week and playing at more than twice as many theaters. Against its budget of $8.5 million and about $10 million in marketing costs, Pulp Fiction wound up grossing $107.93 million at the U.S. box office, making it the first "indie" film to surpass $100 million. Worldwide, it took in nearly $213 million. In terms of domestic grosses, it was the tenth biggest film of 1994, even though it played on substantially fewer screens than any other film in the top 20. Popular engagement with the film, such as speculation about the contents of the precious briefcase, "indicates the kind of cult status that Pulp Fiction achieved almost immediately." As MovieMaker
MovieMaker
“Moviemaker” redirects here. For the software, see Windows Movie Maker.MovieMaker is an American magazine focused on the art and business of making movies with a special emphasis on independent film....
puts it, "The movie was nothing less than a national cultural phenomenon." Abroad, as well: In Britain, where it opened a week after its U.S. release, not only was the film a big hit, but in book form its screenplay became the most successful in UK publishing history, a top-ten bestseller.
Critical response
The response of major American film reviewers was widely favorable. Roger EbertRoger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
of the Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...
describing it as "so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine
Fanzine
A fanzine is a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who share their interest...
way that you want to rub noses in it—the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films.'" Richard Corliss
Richard Corliss
Richard Nelson Corliss is a writer for Time magazine who focuses on movies, with the occasional article on music or sports. Corliss is the former editor-in-chief of Film Comment...
of Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
wrote, "It towers over the year's other movies as majestically and menacingly as a gang lord at a preschool. It dares Hollywood films to be this smart about going this far. If good directors accept Tarantino's implicit challenge, the movie theater could again be a great place to live in." In Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, David Ansen
David Ansen
David Ansen is a reviewer and senior editor for Newsweek, where he has been reviewing movies since 1977. He came to Newsweek after several years as the chief film critic at Boston's The Real Paper...
wrote, "The miracle of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is how, being composed of secondhand, debased parts, it succeeds in gleaming like something new." "You get intoxicated by it," wrote Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
s Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman is an American film critic for Entertainment Weekly, a position he has held since the magazine's launch in 1990. From 1981–89, he worked at the Boston Phoenix....
, "high on the rediscovery of how pleasurable a movie can be. I'm not sure I've ever encountered a filmmaker who combined discipline and control with sheer wild-ass joy the way that Tarantino does." "There's a special kick that comes from watching something this thrillingly alive", wrote Peter Travers
Peter Travers
Peter Travers is an American film critic, who has written for, in turn, People and Rolling Stone. Travers also hosts a celebrity interview show called Popcorn on ABC News Now and ABCNews.com.-Career:...
of Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
. "Pulp Fiction is indisputably great." Overall, the film attained exceptionally high ratings among U.S. reviewers: a 95% score at Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
and a Metascore of 94 on Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
.
The Los Angeles Times was one of the few major news outlets to publish a negative review on the film's opening weekend. Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan is an American film critic and Lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.-Background:...
wrote, "The writer-director appears to be straining for his effects. Some sequences, especially one involving bondage harnesses and homosexual rape, have the uncomfortable feeling of creative desperation, of someone who's afraid of losing his reputation scrambling for any way to offend sensibilities." Some who reviewed it in the following weeks took more exception to the predominant critical reaction than to Pulp Fiction itself. While not panning the film, Stanley Kauffman of The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
felt that "the way that [it] has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. Pulp Fiction nourishes, abets, cultural slumming." Responding to comparisons between Tarantino's film and the work of French New Wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
director Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
, especially his first, most famous feature, Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum is an American film critic. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 until 2008, when he retired at the age of 65...
of the Chicago Reader wrote, "The fact that Pulp Fiction is garnering more extravagant raves than Breathless ever did tells you plenty about which kind of cultural references are regarded as more fruitful—namely, the ones we already have and don't wish to expand." Observing in the National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
that "[n]o film arrives with more advance hype", John Simon
John Simon (critic)
John Ivan Simon is an American author and literary, theater, and film critic.-Personal life:Simon was born in Subotica, Bačka, County of Bačka, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later, known as Yugoslavia . He is of Hungarian descent...
was unswayed: "titillation cures neither hollowness nor shallowness".
Debate about the film spread beyond the review pages. Violence was often the theme. In the Washington Post, Donna Britt described how she was happy not to see Pulp Fiction on a recent weekend and thus avoid "discussing the rousing scene in which a gunshot sprays somebody's brains around a car interior". Some commentators took exception to the film's frequent use of the word "nigger
Nigger
Nigger is a noun in the English language, most notable for its usage in a pejorative context to refer to black people , and also as an informal slang term, among other contexts. It is a common ethnic slur...
". In the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
, Todd Boyd argued that the word's recurrence "has the ability to signify the ultimate level of hipness for white males who have historically used their perception of black masculinity as the embodiment of cool". In Britain, James Wood
James Wood (critic)
James Wood is a literary critic, essayist and novelist. he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.-Background and education:...
, writing in The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, set the tone for much subsequent criticism: "Tarantino represents the final triumph of postmodernism, which is to empty the artwork of all content, thus avoiding its capacity to do anything except helplessly represent our agonies.... Only in this age could a writer as talented as Tarantino produce artworks so vacuous, so entirely stripped of any politics, metaphysics, or moral interest."
Awards season
Around the turn of the year, Pulp Fiction was named Best Picture by the National Society of Film CriticsNational Society of Film Critics
The National Society of Film Critics is an American film critic organization. As of December 2007 the NSFC had approximately 60 members who wrote for a variety of weekly and daily newspapers.-History:...
, National Board of Review, Los Angeles Film Critics Association
Los Angeles Film Critics Association
The Los Angeles Film Critics Association was founded in 1975. Its main purpose is to present yearly awards to members of the film industry who have excelled in their fields. These awards are presented each January...
, Boston Society of Film Critics
Boston Society of Film Critics
The Boston Society of Film Critics is an organization of film reviewers from Boston, Massachusetts, United States, based publications.The BSFC was formed in 1981 to make "Boston's unique critical perspective heard on a national and international level by awarding commendations to the best of the...
, Society of Texas Film Critics, Southeastern Film Critics Association
Southeastern Film Critics Association
The Southeastern Film Critics Association is an organization of film reviewers from publications based in the Southeastern United States....
, and Kansas City Film Critics Circle. Tarantino was named Best Director by all seven of those organizations as well as by the New York Film Critics Circle and Chicago Film Critics Association
Chicago Film Critics Association
The Chicago Film Critics Association is an American film critic association.-Members:Current members include:*Sarah Knight Adamson*Zbigniew Banas*Shelley Cameron*Dave Canfield*Vittorio Carli*Erik Childress*Camerin Courtney*Bonnie DeShong...
. The screenplay won several prizes, with various awarding bodies ascribing credit differently. At the Golden Globe Award
Golden Globe Award
The Golden Globe Award is an accolade bestowed by the 93 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association recognizing excellence in film and television, both domestic and foreign...
s, Tarantino, named as sole recipient of the Best Screenplay honor, failed to mention Avary in his acceptance speech. In February 1995, the film received seven Oscar nominations—Best Picture, Director, Actor (Travolta), Supporting Actor (Jackson), Supporting Actress (Thurman), Original Screenplay, and Film Editing. Travolta, Jackson, and Thurman were each nominated as well for the 1st Screen Actors Guild Awards, presented on February 25, but none took home the honor. At the Academy Awards ceremony the following month, Tarantino and Avary were announced as joint winners of the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The furor around the film was still going strong: much of the March issue of Artforum
Artforum
Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
was devoted to its critical dissection. Pulp Fiction garnered four honors at the Independent Spirit Awards
Independent Spirit Awards
The Independent Spirit Awards , founded in 1984, are awards dedicated to independent filmmakers. Winners were typically presented with acrylic glass pyramids containing suspended shoestrings representing the paltry budgets of independent films. In 1986, the event was renamed the Independent Spirit...
, held at the end of the month: best feature, director, male lead (Jackson), and screenplay (Tarantino). At the British Academy Film Awards, Tarantino and Avary shared the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay
BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay
The BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay is the British Academy Film Award for the best script not based upon previously published material. It has been awarded since 1984, when the original category was split into two awards, the other being the BAFTA Award for Best Adapted...
, and Jackson won for Best Supporting Actor
BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Best Actor in a Supporting Role is a British Academy Film award presented annually by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding supporting performance in a film...
.
Influence and reputation
Pulp Fiction quickly came to be regarded as one of the most significant films of its era. In 1995, in a special edition of Siskel & Ebert devoted to Tarantino, Gene SiskelGene Siskel
Eugene Kal "Gene" Siskel was an American film critic and journalist for the Chicago Tribune. Along with colleague Roger Ebert, he hosted the popular review show Siskel & Ebert At the Movies from 1975 until his death....
argued that Pulp Fiction posed a major challenge to the "ossification of American movies with their brutal formulas". In Siskel's view,
Pulp Fiction calls to mind other violent watershed films that were considered classics in their time and still are. Hitchcock
the violent intensity of
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
's Psycho [1960], Arthur Penn
Arthur Penn
Arthur Hiller Penn was an American film director and producer with a career as a theater director as well. Penn amassed a critically acclaimed body of work throughout the 1960s and 1970s.-Early years:...
's Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde (film)
The film was originally offered to François Truffaut, the best-known director of the New Wave movement, who made contributions to the script. He passed on the project to make Fahrenheit 451. The producers approached Jean-Luc Godard next...
[1967], and Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
's A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange (film)
A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It was written, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick...
[1971]. Each film shook up a tired, bloated movie industry and used a world of lively lowlifes to reflect how dull other movies had become. And that, I predict, will be the ultimate honor for Pulp Fiction. Like all great films, it criticizes other movies.
Ken Dancyger writes that its "imitative and innovative style"—like that of its predecessor, Reservoir Dogs
Reservoir Dogs
Reservoir Dogs is an American crime film marking debut of director and writer Quentin Tarantino. It depicts the events before and after a botched diamond heist, but not the heist itself. Reservoir Dogs stars an ensemble cast: Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, and...
—represents
a new phenomenon, the movie whose style is created from the context of movie life rather than real life. The consequence is twofold—the presumption of deep knowledge on the part of the audience of those forms such as the gangster films or Westerns, horror films or adventure films. And that the parody or alteration of that film creates a new form, a different experience for the audience.
In a widely covered speech on May 31, 1995, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole
Bob Dole
Robert Joseph "Bob" Dole is an American attorney and politician. Dole represented Kansas in the United States Senate from 1969 to 1996, was Gerald Ford's Vice Presidential running mate in the 1976 presidential election, and was Senate Majority Leader from 1985 to 1987 and in 1995 and 1996...
attacked the American entertainment industry for peddling "nightmares of depravity". Pulp Fiction was soon associated with his charges concerning gratuitous violence. Dole had not, in fact, mentioned the film; he cited two less celebrated movies based on Tarantino screenplays, Natural Born Killers
Natural Born Killers
Natural Born Killers is a 1994 crime/black comedy film directed by Oliver Stone about two victims of traumatic childhoods who became lovers and psychopathic serial killers, and are irresponsibly glorified by the mass media...
and True Romance
True Romance
True Romance is a 1993 American romance crime film written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott. The film stars Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette with an ensemble cast consisting of Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin...
. In September 1996, Dole did accuse Pulp Fiction—which he had not seen—of promoting "the romance of heroin".
Paula Rabinowitz expresses the general film industry opinion that Pulp Fiction "simultaneously resurrected John Travolta and film noir". In Peter Biskind's description, it created a "guys-with-guns frenzy". The stylistic influence of Pulp Fiction soon became apparent. Less than a year after the picture's release, British critic Jon Ronson attended the National Film School
National Film and Television School
The National Film and Television School was established in 1971 and is based at Beaconsfield Studios in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, and it is located close to Pinewood Studios.-History:...
's end-of-semester screenings and assessed the impact: "Out of the five student movies I watched, four incorporated violent shoot-outs over a soundtrack of iconoclastic 70s pop hits, two climaxed with all the main characters shooting each other at once, and one had two hitmen discussing the idiosyncrasies of The Brady Bunch
The Brady Bunch
The Brady Bunch is an American sitcom created by Sherwood Schwartz and starring Robert Reed, Florence Henderson, and Ann B. Davis. The series revolved around a large blended family...
before offing their victim. Not since Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film, directed by and starring Orson Welles. Many critics consider it the greatest American film of all time, especially for its innovative cinematography, music and narrative structure. Citizen Kane was Welles' first feature film...
has one man appeared from relative obscurity to redefine the art of moviemaking." Among the first Hollywood films cited as its imitators were Destiny Turns on the Radio
Destiny Turns on the Radio
Destiny Turns on the Radio is an American action-comedy film, directed by Jack Baran. Its visual style and mix of humorous and violent elements are reminiscent of Pulp Fiction, whose director, Quentin Tarantino, costars.-Plot:...
(1995), in which Tarantino acted, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead
Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead
Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead is a 1995 crime film directed by Gary Fleder from a screenplay written by Scott Rosenberg. The film features an ensemble cast that includes Andy García, Christopher Lloyd, Steve Buscemi, Christopher Walken, Fairuza Balk, and Gabrielle Anwar.The film's title...
(1995), and 2 Days in the Valley
2 Days in the Valley
2 Days in the Valley is a 1996 film, directed by John Herzfeld. The film revolves around the events over 48 hours in the lives of a group of people who are drawn together by a murder. Several parallel storylines overlap one another in the film.-Plot:...
(1996). It "triggered a myriad of clones", writes Fiona Villella. Internationally, according to David Desser, it "not only influenced a British brand of noir, but extended the noir vision virtually around the world." Pulp Fictions effect on film form was still reverberating in 2007, when David Denby
David Denby (film critic)
David Denby is an American journalist, best known as a film critic for The New Yorker magazine.-Background and education:Denby grew up in New York City. He received a B.A...
of The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
credited it with initiating the ongoing cycle of disordered cinematic narratives.
Its impact on Hollywood was deeper still. According to Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
, the trajectory of Pulp Fiction from Cannes launch to commercial smash "forever altered the game" of so-called independent cinema
Independent film
An independent film, or indie film, is a professional film production resulting in a feature film that is produced mostly or completely outside of the major film studio system. In addition to being produced and distributed by independent entertainment companies, independent films are also produced...
. It "cemented Miramax's place as the reigning indie superpower", writes Biskind. "Pulp became the Star Wars
Star Wars
Star Wars is an American epic space opera film series created by George Lucas. The first film in the series was originally released on May 25, 1977, under the title Star Wars, by 20th Century Fox, and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, followed by two sequels, released at three-year...
of independents, exploding expectations for what an indie film could do at the box office." The film's large financial return on its small budget
transform[ed] the industry's attitude toward the lowly indies...spawning a flock of me-too classics divisions.... [S]mart studio executives suddenly woke up to the fact that grosses and market share, which got all the press, were not the same as profits.... Once the studios realized that they could exploit the economies of (small) scale, they more or less gave up buying or remaking the films themselves, and either bought the distributors, as Disney had Miramax, or started their own...copy[ing] Miramax's marketing and distribution strategies.
In 2001, Variety, noting the increasing number of actors switching back and forth between expensive studio films and low-budget independent or indie-style projects, suggested that the "watershed moment for movie stars" came with the decision by Willis—one of Hollywood's highest-paid performers—to appear in Pulp Fiction.
And its impact was even broader than that. It has been described as a "major cultural event", an "international phenomenon" that influenced television, music, literature, and advertising. Not long after its release, it was identified as a significant focus of attention within the growing community of Internet users. Adding Pulp Fiction to his roster of "Great Movies" in 2001, Roger Ebert called it "the most influential film of the decade". Four years later, Times Corliss wrote much the same: "(unquestionably) the most influential American movie of the 90s".
Several scenes and images from the film achieved iconic status; in 2008, Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
declared, "You'd be hard-pressed, by now, to name a moment from Quentin Tarantino's film that isn't iconic." Jules and Vincent's "Royale with Cheese" dialogue became famous. It was referenced more than a decade and a half later in the Travolta vehicle From Paris with Love
From Paris with Love (film)
From Paris with Love is a 2010 action film starring John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers and directed by Pierre Morel. The screenplay was co-written by Luc Besson. The film was released in the United States on February 5, 2010.-Plot:...
. The adrenalin shot to Mia Wallace's heart is on Premiere
Premiere (magazine)
Premiere was an American and New York City-based film magazine published by Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., published between the years 1987 and 2007. The original version of the magazine, Première , was started in France in 1976 and is still being published there.-History:The magazine originally...
s list of "100 Greatest Movie Moments". The scene of Travolta and Thurman's characters dancing has been frequently homaged, most unambiguously in the 2005 film Be Cool
Be Cool
Be Cool is a 2005 crime-comedy film adapted from Elmore Leonard's 1999 novel of the same name and the sequel to Leonard's 1990 novel Get Shorty about mobster Chili Palmer's entrance into the film industry.The film adaptation of Be Cool began production in 2003. It was directed by F...
, starring the same two actors. The image of Travolta and Jackson's characters standing side by side in suit and tie, pointing their guns, has also become widely familiar. In 2007, BBC News
BBC News
BBC News is the department of the British Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online...
reported that "London transport workers have painted over an iconic mural by 'guerrilla artist' Banksy
Banksy
Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter.His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine irreverent dark humour with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique...
.... The image depicted a scene from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns." Certain lines were adopted popularly as catchphrases, in particular Marsellus's threat, "I'm 'a get medieval on your ass." Jules's "Ezekiel" recitation was voted the fourth greatest movie speech of all time in a 2004 poll.
Pulp Fiction now appears in several critical assessments of all-time great films. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly named it the best film of the past quarter-century. That same year, the American Film Institute
American Film Institute
The American Film Institute is an independent non-profit organization created by the National Endowment for the Arts, which was established in 1967 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act...
's "Ten Top Ten" poll ranked it number 7 all-time in the gangster film genre. In 2007, it was voted 94th overall on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list. In 2005, it was named one of Times "All-Time 100 Movies
All-Time 100 Greatest Movies
"ALL-TIME" 100 Movies is a compilation by Time magazine featuring and celebrating 100 of the best films released between March 3, 1923 and early 2005...
". As of January 2010, it is number 10 on Metacritic's list of all-time highest scores. The film ranks very highly in popular surveys. A 2008 Empire
Empire (magazine)
Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. From the first issue in July 1989, the magazine was edited by Barry McIlheney and published by Emap. Bauer purchased Emap Consumer Media in early 2008...
poll combining the opinions of readers, movie industry professionals, and critics named Pulp Fiction the ninth best film of all time. In a 2007 poll of the online film community, it placed eleventh. In a 2006 readers' poll by the British magazine Total Film
Total Film
Total Film is a British film magazine published 13 times a year by Future Publishing. The magazine was launched in 1997 and offers film, DVD and Blu-ray news, reviews and features...
, it ranked as the number 3 film in history. It was voted as the fourth greatest film of all time in a nationwide poll for Britain's Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
in 2001.
Critical analysis
Tarantino has stated that he originally planned "to do a Black Mask movie", referring to the magazine largely responsible for popularizing hardboiledHardboiled
Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined...
detective fiction. "[I]t kind of went somewhere else". Geoffrey O'Brien sees the result as connected "rather powerfully to a parallel pulp tradition: the tales of terror and the uncanny practiced by such writers as Cornell Woolrich
Cornell Woolrich
Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich was an American novelist and short story writer who sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley....
[and] Fredric Brown
Fredric Brown
Fredric Brown was an American science fiction and mystery writer. He was born in Cincinnati.He had two sons: James Ross Brown and Linn Lewis Brown ....
.... Both dealt heavily in the realm of improbable coincidences and cruel cosmic jokes, a realm that Pulp Fiction makes its own." In particular, O'Brien finds a strong affinity between the intricate plot mechanics and twists of Brown's novels and the recursive, interweaving structure of Pulp Fiction. Philip French describes the film's narrative as a "circular movement or Möbius strip
Möbius strip
The Möbius strip or Möbius band is a surface with only one side and only one boundary component. The Möbius strip has the mathematical property of being non-orientable. It can be realized as a ruled surface...
of a kind Resnais
Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais is a French film director whose career has extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Nuit et Brouillard , an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.He began...
and Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet , was a French writer and filmmaker. He was, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice...
would admire." James Mottram regards crime novelist Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard
Elmore John Leonard Jr. , better known as Elmore Leonard, is an American novelist and screenwriter. His earliest published novels in the 1950s were westerns, but Leonard went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures.Among his...
, whose influence Tarantino has acknowledged, as the film's primary literary antecedent. He suggests that Leonard's "rich dialogue" is reflected in Tarantino's "popular-culture-strewn jive"; he also points to the acute, extremely dark sense of humor Leonard applies to the realm of violence as a source of inspiration.
Robert Kolker sees the "flourishes, the apparent witty banality of the dialogue, the goofy fracturing of temporality [as] a patina over a pastiche
Pastiche
A pastiche is a literary or other artistic genre or technique that is a "hodge-podge" or imitation. The word is also a linguistic term used to describe an early stage in the development of a pidgin language.-Hodge-podge:...
. The pastiche...is essentially of two films that Tarantino can't seem to get out of his mind: Mean Streets
Mean Streets
Mean Streets is a 1973 drama film directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Scorsese and Mardik Martin. The film stars Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro. It was released by Warner Bros. on October 2, 1973...
[1973; directed by Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film historian. In 1990 he founded The Film Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to film preservation, and in 2007 he founded the World Cinema Foundation...
] and The Killing [1956; directed by Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
]." He contrasts Pulp Fiction with postmodern Hollywood predecessors Hudson Hawk
Hudson Hawk
Hudson Hawk is a 1991 American action comedy film directed by Michael Lehmann. Bruce Willis stars in the title role and also co-wrote the story. Danny Aiello, Andie MacDowell, James Coburn, David Caruso, Lorraine Toussaint, Frank Stallone, Sandra Bernhard, and Richard E...
(1991; starring Willis) and Last Action Hero
Last Action Hero
Last Action Hero is a 1993 American action-comedy-fantasy film directed and produced by John McTiernan. It is a satire of the action genre and its clichés, containing several parodies of action films in the form of films within the film....
(1993; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger is an Austrian-American former professional bodybuilder, actor, businessman, investor, and politician. Schwarzenegger served as the 38th Governor of California from 2003 until 2011....
) that "took the joke too far...simply mocked or suggested that they were smarter than the audience" and flopped. Todd McCarthy writes that the film's "striking widescreen compositions often contain objects in extreme close-up as well as vivid contrasts, sometimes bringing to mind the visual strategies of Sergio Leone
Sergio Leone
Sergio Leone was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter most associated with the "Spaghetti Western" genre.Leone's film-making style includes juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots...
", an acknowledged hero of Tarantino's. To Martin Rubin, the "expansive, brightly colored widescreen visuals" evoke comedy directors such as Frank Tashlin
Frank Tashlin
Frank Tashlin, born Francis Fredrick von Taschlein, also known as Tish Tash or Frank Tash was an American animator, screenwriter, and film director.-Animator:...
and Blake Edwards
Blake Edwards
Blake Edwards was an American film director, screenwriter and producer.Edwards' career began in the 1940s as an actor, but he soon turned to writing radio scripts at Columbia Pictures...
.
The movie's host of pop culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
allusions, ranging from the famous image of Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s....
's skirt flying up over a subway grating to Jules addressing a soon-to-be victim as "Flock of Seagulls" because of his haircut, have led many critics to discuss it within the framework of postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
. Describing the film in 2005 as Tarantino's "postmodern masterpiece...to date", David Walker writes that it "is marked by its playful reverence for the 1950s...and its constantly teasing and often deferential references to other films". He characterizes its convoluted narrative technique as "postmodern tricksiness". Calling the film a "terminally hip postmodern collage", Foster Hirsch finds Pulp Fiction far from a masterpiece: "authoritative, influential, and meaningless". Set "in a world that could exist only in the movies", it is "a succulent guilty pleasure, beautifully made junk food for cinéastes
Cinephile
Kenny Inglis and Susan Wallace are the duo behind Cinephile, a trip-hop band from Glasgow famous for the song "What Becomes of Us ?" which was played during an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation....
". O'Brien, dismissing attempts to associate the movie with film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
, argues that "Pulp Fiction is more a guided tour of an infernal theme park decorated with cultural detritus, Buddy Holly
Buddy Holly
Charles Hardin Holley , known professionally as Buddy Holly, was an American singer-songwriter and a pioneer of rock and roll...
and Mamie Van Doren
Mamie Van Doren
Mamie Van Doren is an American actress and singer; who rose to popularity as Universal Pictures's version of 20th Century Fox's Marilyn Monroe....
, fragments of blaxploitation
Blaxploitation
Blaxploitation or blacksploitation is a film genre which emerged in the United States circa 1970. It is considered an ethnic sub-genre of the general category of exploitation films. Blaxploitation films were originally made specifically for an urban black audience, although the genre's audience...
and Roger Corman
Roger Corman
Roger William Corman is an American film producer, director and actor. He has mostly worked on low-budget B movies. Some of Corman's work has an established critical reputation, such as his cycle of films adapted from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, and in 2009 he won an Honorary Academy Award for...
and Shogun Assassin
Shogun Assassin
Shogun Assassin, known in Japan as , is a jidaigeki film made for the British and American markets and released in 1980. In 2006 it was restored and re-released on DVD in North America by AnimEigo....
, music out of a twenty-four-hour oldies station for which all the decades since the fifties exist simultaneously." Catherine Constable takes the moment in which a needle filled with adrenaline is plunged into the comatose Mia's heart as exemplary. She proposes that it "can be seen as effecting her resurrection from the dead, simultaneously recalling and undermining the Gothic
Gothic fiction
Gothic fiction, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, subtitled "A Gothic Story"...
convention of the vampire's stake. On this model, the referencing of previous aesthetic forms and styles moves beyond...empty pastiche, sustaining an 'inventive and affirmative' mode of postmodernism."
Mark T. Conard asks, "[W]hat is the film about?" and answers, "American nihilism
Nihilism
Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...
." Hirsch suggests, "If the film is actually about anything other than its own cleverness, it seems dedicated to the dubious thesis that hit men are part of the human family." Richard Alleva argues that "Pulp Fiction has about as much to do with actual criminality or violence as Cyrano de Bergerac
Cyrano de Bergerac (play)
Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. Although there was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, the play bears very scant resemblance to his life....
with the realities of seventeenth-century France or The Prisoner of Zenda
The Prisoner of Zenda
The Prisoner of Zenda is an adventure novel by Anthony Hope, published in 1894. The king of the fictional country of Ruritania is drugged on the eve of his coronation and thus unable to attend his own coronation. Political forces are such that in order for the king to retain his crown his...
with Balkan politics." He reads the movie as a form of romance whose allure is centered in the characters' nonnaturalistic discourse, "wise-guy literate, media-smart, obscenely epigram
Epigram
An epigram is a brief, interesting, usually memorable and sometimes surprising statement. Derived from the epigramma "inscription" from ἐπιγράφειν epigraphein "to write on inscribe", this literary device has been employed for over two millennia....
matic". In Alan Stone's view, the "absurd dialogue", like that between Vincent and Jules in the scene where the former accidentally kills Marvin, "unexpectedly transforms the meaning of the violence cliché.... Pulp Fiction unmasks the macho myth by making it laughable and deheroicizes the power trip glorified by standard Hollywood violence." Stone reads the film as "politically correct
Politically Correct
Politically Correct may refer to:*Political correctness, language, ideas, policies, or behaviour seeking to minimize offence to groups of people-See also:*Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, book by James Finn Garner, published in 1994...
. There is no nudity and no violence directed against women.... [It] celebrates interracial friendship and cultural diversity; there are strong women and strong black men, and the director swims against the current of class stereotype."
Where Stone sees a celebration, Kolker finds a vacuum: "The postmodern insouciance, violence, homophobia, and racism of Pulp Fiction were perfectly acceptable because the film didn't pretend seriousness and therefore didn't mock it." Calling it the "acme of postmodern nineties filmmaking", he explains, "the postmodern is about surfaces; it is flattened spatiality in which event and character are in a steady state of reminding us that they are pop-cultural figures." According to Kolker,
Pulp Fiction was so popular. Not because all audiences got all or any of its references to Scorsese and Kubrick, but because the narrative and spatial structure of the film never threatened to go beyond themselves into signification. The film's cycle of racist and homophobic jokes might threaten to break out into a quite nasty view of the world, but this nastiness keeps being laughed off—by the mock intensity of the action, the prowling, confronting, perverse, confined, and airless nastiness of the world Tarantino creates.
That's why
Henry A. Giroux
Henry Giroux
Henry Giroux, born September 18, 1943, in Providence, Rhode Island, is an American cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies,...
argues that Tarantino "empties violence of any critical social consequences, offering viewers only the immediacy of shock, humor, and irony-without-insight as elements of mediation. None of these elements gets beyond the seduction of voyeuristic gazing...[t]he facile consumption of shocking images and hallucinatory delight."
Cinema
Pulp Fiction is full of homageHomage
Homage is a show or demonstration of respect or dedication to someone or something, sometimes by simple declaration but often by some more oblique reference, artistic or poetic....
s to other movies. "Tarantino's characters", writes Gary Groth, "inhabit a world where the entire landscape is composed of Hollywood product. Tarantino is a cinematic kleptomaniac—he literally can't help himself." Two scenes in particular have prompted discussion of the film's highly intertextual style. Many have assumed that the dance sequence at Jack Rabbit Slim's was intended as a reference to Travolta's star-making performance as Tony Manero in the epochal Saturday Night Fever
Saturday Night Fever
Saturday Night Fever is a 1977 drama film directed by John Badham and starring: John Travolta as Tony Manero, an immature young man whose weekends are spent visiting a local Brooklyn discothèque; Karen Lynn Gorney as his dance partner and eventual friend; and Donna Pescow as Tony's former dance...
(1977); Tarantino, however, credits a scene in the Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
film Bande à part (1964) with the inspiration. According to the filmmaker,
Everybody thinks that I wrote this scene just to have John Travolta dancing. But the scene existed before John Travolta was cast. But once he was cast, it was like, "Great. We get to see John dance. All the better."... My favorite musical sequences have always been in Godard, because they just come out of nowhere. It's so infectious, so friendly. And the fact that it's not a musical, but he's stopping the movie to have a musical sequence, makes it all the more sweet.
Jerome Charyn
Jerome Charyn
Jerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life...
argues that, beyond "all the better", Travolta's presence is essential to the power of the scene, and of the film:
Travolta's entire career becomes "backstoryBack-storyA back-story, background story, or backstory is the literary device of a narrative chronologically earlier than, and related to, a narrative of primary interest. Generally, it is the history of characters or other elements that underlie the situation existing at the main narrative's start...
", the myth of a movie star who has fallen out of favor, but still resides in our memory as the king of disco. We keep waiting for him to shed his paunch, put on a white polyester suit, and enter the 2001 Odyssey club in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where he will dance for us and never, never stop. Daniel Day-Lewis couldn't have woken such a powerful longing in us. He isn't part of America's own mad cosmology.... Tony Manero [is] an angel sitting on Vince's shoulder.... [Vince and Mia's] actual dance may be closer to the choreography of Anna KarinaAnna KarinaAnna Karina is a Danish film actress, director, and screenwriter who has spent most of her working life in France. Karina is known as a muse of the director, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave...
's shuffle with her two bumbling gangster boyfriends in Bande à part, but even that reference is lost to us, and we're with Tony again....
Estella Tincknell notes that while the "diner setting seems to be a simulacrum of a 'fifties' restaurant...the twist contest is a musical sequence which evokes 'the sixties,' while Travolta's dance performance inevitably references 'the seventies' and his appearance in Saturday Night Fever.... The 'past' thus becomes a more general 'pastness' in which the stylistic signifiers of various decades are loaded in to a single moment." She also argues that in this passage the film "briefly shifts from its habitually ironic discourse to one that references the conventions of the classic film musical
Musical film
The musical film is a film genre in which songs sung by the characters are interwoven into the narrative, sometimes accompanied by dancing. The songs usually advance the plot or develop the film's characters, though in some cases they serve merely as breaks in the storyline, often as elaborate...
and in doing so makes it possible for the film to inhabit an affective space that goes beyond stylistic allusion."
The pivotal moment in which Marsellus crosses the street in front of Butch's car and notices him evokes the scene in which Marion Crane's boss sees her under similar circumstances in Psycho. Marsellus and Butch are soon held captive by Maynard and Zed, "two sadistic honkies straight out of Deliverance
Deliverance
Deliverance is a 1972 American thriller film produced and directed by John Boorman. Principal cast members include Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ronny Cox and Ned Beatty in his film debut. The film is based on a 1970 novel of the same name by American author James Dickey, who has a small role in the...
" (1972), directed by John Boorman
John Boorman
John Boorman is a British filmmaker who is a long time resident of Ireland and is best known for his feature films such as Point Blank, Deliverance, Zardoz, Excalibur, The Emerald Forest, Hope and Glory, The General and The Tailor of Panama.-Early life:Boorman was born in Shepperton, Surrey,...
. Zed shares a name with Sean Connery
Sean Connery
Sir Thomas Sean Connery , better known as Sean Connery, is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards and three Golden Globes Sir Thomas Sean Connery (born 25 August 1930), better known as Sean Connery, is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy...
's character in Boorman's follow-up, the science-fiction film Zardoz
Zardoz
Zardoz is a 1974 science fiction/fantasy film written, produced, and directed by John Boorman. It stars Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, and Sara Kestelman. Zardoz was Connery's second post-James Bond role...
(1974). When Butch decides to rescue Marsellus, in Glyn White's words, "he finds a trove of items with film-hero resonances". Critics have identified these weapons with a range of possible allusions:
- hammer—
Walking Tall
Walking Tall is a 1973 semi-biopic of Sheriff Buford Pusser, a former professional wrestler-turned-lawman in McNairy County, Tennessee. It starred Joe Don Baker as Pusser...
(1973); The Untouchables
The Untouchables (1987 film)
The Untouchables is a 1987 American crime-drama film directed by Brian De Palma and written by David Mamet. Based on the book The Untouchables, the film stars Kevin Costner as government agent Eliot Ness. It also stars Robert De Niro as gang leader Al Capone and Sean Connery as Irish-American...
(1987)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a 1974 American independent horror film directed and produced by Tobe Hooper, who cowrote it with Kim Henkel. It stars Marilyn Burns, Paul A. Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, and Gunnar Hansen, who respectively portray Sally Hardesty, Franklin Hardesty, the...
(1974); The Evil Dead II (1987)
Katana
A Japanese sword, or , is one of the traditional bladed weapons of Japan. There are several types of Japanese swords, according to size, field of application and method of manufacture.-Description:...
(samurai sword)—many, including
The Yakuza
The Yakuza is a 1974 neo-noir gangster film directed by Sydney Pollack, written by Leonard Schrader, Paul Schrader, and Robert Towne.The Yakuza portrays the clash of traditional Japanese values during Japan's transition from the US occupation to economic success in the early 1970s...
(1975); Shogun Assassin
Shogun Assassin
Shogun Assassin, known in Japan as , is a jidaigeki film made for the British and American markets and released in 1980. In 2006 it was restored and re-released on DVD in North America by AnimEigo....
(1980)
At the conclusion of the scene, a portentous line of Marsellus's echoes one from the 1973 crime drama Charley Varrick
Charley Varrick
Charley Varrick is a 1973 crime film directed by Don Siegel and starring Walter Matthau, Andrew Robinson, Joe Don Baker and John Vernon. The film was based on the novel The Looters by John H. Reese.-Plot:...
, directed by another of Tarantino's heroes, Don Siegel
Don Siegel
Donald Siegel was an influential American film director and producer. His name variously appeared in the credits of his films as both Don Siegel and Donald Siegel.-Early life:...
; the name of the character who speaks it there is Maynard.
David Bell argues that far from going against the "current of class stereotype", this scene, like Deliverance, "mobilize[s] a certain construction of poor white country folk—and particularly their sexualization...'rustic sexual expression often takes the form of homosexual rape' in American movies." Stephen Paul Miller believes the Pulp Fiction scene goes down much easier than the one it echoes: "The buggery perpetrated is not at all as shocking as it was in Deliverance.... The nineties film reduces seventies competition, horror, and taboo into an entertainingly subtle adrenaline play—a fiction, a pulp fiction." Giroux reads the rape scene homage similarly: "in the end Tarantino's use of parody is about repetition, transgression, and softening the face of violence by reducing it to the property of film history." In Groth's view, the crucial difference is that "in Deliverance the rape created the film's central moral dilemma whereas in Pulp Fiction it was merely 'the single weirdest day of [Butch's] life.'"
Neil Fulwood focuses on Butch's weapon selection, writing, "Here, Tarantino's love of movies is at its most open and nonjudgemental, tipping a nod to the noble and the notorious, as well as sending up his own reputation as an enfant terrible of movie violence. Moreover, the scene makes a sly comment about the readiness of cinema to seize upon whatever is to hand for its moments of mayhem and murder." White asserts that "the katana he finally, and significantly, selects identifies him with...honour
Honour
Honour or honor is an abstract concept entailing a perceived quality of worthiness and respectability that affects both the social standing and the self-evaluation of an individual or corporate body such as a family, school, regiment or nation...
able heroes." Conard argues that the first three items symbolize a nihilism that Butch is rejecting. The traditional Japanese sword, in contrasts, represents a culture with a well-defined moral code and thus connects Butch with a more meaningful approach to life.
Television
Robert Miklitsch argues that "Tarantino's telephilia" may be more central to the guiding sensibility of Pulp Fiction than the filmmaker's love for rock 'n' roll and even cinema:Pulp Fiction confirms his observation: Speed Racer
Talking about his generation, one that came of age in the '70s, Tarantino has commented that the "number one thing we all shared wasn't music, that was a Sixties thing. Our culture was television." A random list of the TV programs referenced in
Speed Racer
Speed Racer is an English adaptation name of the Japanese manga and anime, which centered on automobile racing. Mach GoGoGo was originally serialized in print form in Shueisha's 1958 Shōnen Book, and was released in tankōbon book form by Sun Wide Comics, re-released in Japan by Fusosha...
, Clutch Cargo
Clutch Cargo
Clutch Cargo is an animated television series produced by Cambria Productions and syndicated beginning on March 9, 1959. Notable for its very limited animation, yet imaginative stories, the series was a surprise hit at the time, and could be seen on 65 stations nationwide in 1960.- Plot :The...
, The Brady Bunch
The Brady Bunch
The Brady Bunch is an American sitcom created by Sherwood Schwartz and starring Robert Reed, Florence Henderson, and Ann B. Davis. The series revolved around a large blended family...
, The Partridge Family
The Partridge Family
The Partridge Family is an American television sitcom about a widowed mother and her five children who embark on a music career. The series originally ran from September 25, 1970 until August 31, 1974, the last new episode airing on March 23, 1974, on the ABC network, as part of a Friday-night lineup...
, The Avengers
The Avengers (TV series)
The Avengers is a spy-fi British television series set in the 1960s Britain. The Avengers initially focused on Dr. David Keel and his assistant John Steed . Hendry left after the first series and Steed became the main character, partnered with a succession of assistants...
, The Three Stooges, The Flintstones
The Flintstones
The Flintstones is an animated, prime-time American television sitcom that screened from September 30, 1960 to April 1, 1966, on ABC. Produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions, The Flintstones was about a working class Stone Age man's life with his family and his next-door neighbor and best friend. It...
, I Spy, Green Acres
Green Acres
Green Acres is an American television series starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor as a couple who move from New York City to a country farm...
, Kung Fu
Kung Fu (TV series)
Kung Fu is an American television series that starred David Carradine. It was created by Ed Spielman, directed and produced by Jerry Thorpe, and developed by Herman Miller, who was also a writer for, and co-producer of, the series...
, Happy Days
Happy Days
Happy Days is an American television sitcom that originally aired from January 15, 1974, to September 24, 1984, on ABC. Created by Garry Marshall, the series presents an idealized vision of life in mid-1950s to mid-1960s America....
, and last but not least, Mia's fictional pilot, Fox Force Five.
"The above list, with the possible exception of The Avengers," writes Miklitsch, "suggests that Pulp Fiction has less of an elective affinity with the cinematic avant-gardism of Godard than with mainstream network programming." Jonathan Rosenbaum had brought TV into his analysis of the Tarantino/Godard comparison, acknowledging that the directors were similar in wanting to cram everything they like onscreen: "But the differences between what Godard likes and what Tarantino likes and why are astronomical; it's like comparing a combined museum, library, film archive, record shop, and department store with a jukebox, a video-rental outlet, and an issue of TV Guide
TV Guide
TV Guide is a weekly American magazine with listings of TV shows.In addition to TV listings, the publication features television-related news, celebrity interviews, gossip and film reviews and crossword puzzles...
."
Sharon Willis focuses on the way a television show (Clutch Cargo) marks the beginning of, and plays on through, the scene between young Butch and his father's comrade-in-arms. The Vietnam War veteran is played by Christopher Walken, whose presence in the role evokes his performance as a traumatized G.I. in the 1978 Vietnam War movie The Deer Hunter
The Deer Hunter
The Deer Hunter is a 1978 drama film co-written and directed by Michael Cimino about a trio of Russian American steel worker friends and their infantry service in the Vietnam War. The film stars Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep, John Savage, John Cazale, and George Dzundza...
. Willis writes that "when Captain Koons enters the living room, we see Walken in his function as an image retrieved from a repertoire of 1970s television and movie versions of ruined masculinity
Masculinity
Masculinity is possessing qualities or characteristics considered typical of or appropriate to a man. The term can be used to describe any human, animal or object that has the quality of being masculine...
in search of rehabilitation.... [T]he gray light of the television presiding over the scene seems to inscribe the ghostly paternal gaze." Miklitsch asserts that, for some critics, the film is a "prime example of the pernicious ooze-like influence of mass culture exemplified by their bête noire: TV." Kolker might not disagree, arguing that "Pulp Fiction is a simulacrum of our daily exposure to television; its homophobes, thugs and perverts, sentimental boxers and pimp promoters move through a series of long-take tableaux: we watch, laugh, and remain with nothing to comprehend."
The mysterious briefcase
The combination of the mysterious suitcase is 666, the "number of the beastNumber of the Beast
The Number of the Beast is a term in the Book of Revelation, of the New Testament, that is associated with the first Beast of Revelation chapter 13, the Beast of the sea. In most manuscripts of the New Testament and in English translations of the Bible, the number of the Beast is...
". Tarantino has said that there is no explanation for its contents—it is simply a MacGuffin
MacGuffin
A MacGuffin is "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction". The defining aspect of a MacGuffin is that the major players in the story are willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to obtain it, regardless of what the MacGuffin actually is...
, a pure plot device
Plot device
A plot device is an object or character in a story whose sole purpose is to advance the plot of the story, or alternatively to overcome some difficulty in the plot....
. Originally, the case was to contain diamonds, but this was seen as too mundane. For filming purposes, it contained a hidden orange light bulb that produced an otherworldly glow. In a 2007 video interview with fellow director and friend Robert Rodriguez
Robert Rodriguez
Robert Anthony Rodríguez is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, editor and musician. He shoots and produces many of his films in his native Texas and Mexico. He has directed such films as Desperado, From Dusk till Dawn, The Faculty, Spy Kids, Sin City, Planet...
, Tarantino purportedly "reveals" the secret contents of the briefcase, but the film cuts out and skips the scene in the style employed in Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007), with an intertitle that reads "Missing Reel". The interview resumes with Rodriguez discussing how radically the "knowledge" of the briefcase's contents alters one's understanding of the movie.
Despite Tarantino's statements, many solutions to what one scholar calls this "unexplained postmodern puzzle" have been proposed. A strong similarity has often been observed with the 1955 film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
Kiss Me Deadly
Kiss Me Deadly
Kiss Me Deadly is a 1955 film noir drama produced and directed by Robert Aldrich starring Ralph Meeker. The screenplay was written by A.I. Bezzerides, based on the Mickey Spillane Mike Hammer mystery novel Kiss Me, Deadly. Kiss Me Deadly is often considered a classic of the noir genre. The film...
. That movie, whose protagonist Tarantino has cited as a source for Butch, features a glowing briefcase housing an atomic explosive. In scholar Paul Gormley's view, this connection with Kiss Me Deadly, and a similar one with Raiders of the Lost Ark
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a 1981 American action-adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by George Lucas, and starring Harrison Ford. It is the first film in the Indiana Jones franchise...
(1981), makes it possible to read the eerie glow as symbolic of violence itself. To Susan Fraiman, the unseen contents represent "defended, mystified, male interiority. Much valued, much vaunted, and never finally shown, this radiant, indefinable softness is locked within a hard, exterior shell. Even Jules, who wants to lose the baggage of a barricaded self, walks out of the movie clutching it still." The idea that the briefcase contains Marsellus's soul gained popular currency in the mid-1990s. Analyzing the notion, Roger Ebert dismissed it as "nothing more than a widely distributed urban legend given false credibility by the mystique of the Net".
Jules's Bible passage
Jules ritually recites what he describes as a biblical passage, EzekielBook of Ezekiel
The Book of Ezekiel is the third of the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, following the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah and preceding the Book of the Twelve....
25:17, before he executes someone. We hear the passage three times—in the introductory sequence in which Jules and Vincent reclaim Marsellus's briefcase from the doomed Brett; that same recitation a second time, at the beginning of "The Bonnie Situation", which overlaps the end of the earlier sequence; and in the epilogue at the diner. The first version of the passage is as follows:
The second version, from the diner scene, is identical except for the final line: "And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you."
While the final two sentences of Jules's speech are similar to the actual cited passage, the first two are fabricated from various biblical phrases. The text of Ezekiel 25 preceding verse 17 indicates that God's wrath is retribution for the hostility of the Philistines. In the King James version from which Jules's speech is adapted, Ezekiel 25:17 reads in its entirety, "And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them." Tarantino's primary inspiration for the speech was the work of Japanese martial arts star Sonny Chiba
Sonny Chiba
, also known as Sonny Chiba, is a Japanese actor, singer, film producer, film director and martial artist.Chiba was one of the first actors to achieve stardom through his skills in martial arts, initially in Japan and later before an international audience.- Early life :Born in Fukuoka, Fukuoka,...
. Its text and its identification as Ezekiel 25:17 derive from an almost identical creed that appears at the beginning of the Chiba movie Karate Kiba
Karate Kiba
is a martial-arts film starring Sonny Chiba, released in 1973 and based on an action manga by Ikki Kajiwara.A recut version was released in the U.S...
(The Bodyguard; 1976), where it is both shown as a scrolling text and read by an offscreen narrator. In the 1980s television series Kage no Gundan (Shadow Warriors), Chiba's character would lecture the villain-of-the-week about how the world must be rid of evil before killing him. A killer delivers a similar biblical rant in Modesty Blaise
Modesty Blaise (novel)
Modesty Blaise is the title of an action-adventure/spy fiction novel by Peter O'Donnell which was first published in 1965, featuring the character Modesty Blaise which O'Donnell had created for a comic strip in 1963....
, the hardback but pulp-style novel Vincent is shown with in two scenes.
Two critics who have analyzed the role of the speech find different ties between Jules's transformation and the issue of postmodernity
Postmodernity
Postmodernity is generally used to describe the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity...
. Gormley argues that unlike the film's other major characters—Marsellus aside—Jules is
linked to a "thing" beyond postmodern simulation.... [T]his is perhaps most marked when he moves on from being a simulation of a Baptist preacher, spouting Ezekiel because it was "just a cool thing to say...." In his conversion, Jules is shown to be cognizant of a place beyond this simulation, which, in this case, the film constructs as God.
Adele Reinhartz
Adele Reinhartz
Adele Reinhartz is a Canadian academic and a specialist in the history and literature of Christianity and Judaism in the Greco-Roman period, the Gospel of John, early Jewish-Christian relations, literary criticism including feminist literary criticism, feminist exegesis, and the impact of the Bible...
writes that the "depth of Jules's transformation" is indicated by the difference in his two deliveries of the passage: "In the first, he is a majestic and awe-inspiring figure, proclaiming the prophecy with fury and self-righteousness.... In the second...he appears to be a different sort of man altogether.... [I]n true postmodern fashion, [he] reflects on the meaning of his speech and provides several different ways that it might pertain to his current situation." Similar to Gormley, Conard argues that as Jules reflects on the passage, it dawns on him "that it refers to an objective framework of value and meaning that is absent from his life"; to Conard, this contrasts with the film's prevalent representation of a nihilistic culture. Rosenbaum finds much less in Jules's revelation: "[T]he spiritual awakening at the end of Pulp Fiction, which Jackson performs beautifully, is a piece of jive avowedly inspired by kung-fu movies. It may make you feel good, but it certainly doesn't leave you any wiser."
The bathroom
Much of Pulp Fictions action revolves around characters who are in the bathroom or need to use the toilet; Tarantino's other films also feature this trope, though to a lesser extent. At Jack Rabbit Slim's, Mia goes to "powder her nose"—literally; she snorts coke in the restroom, surrounded by a bevy of women vainly primping. Butch and Fabienne play an extended scene in their motel bathroom, he in the shower, she brushing her teeth; the next morning, but just a few seconds later in screen time, she is again brushing her teeth. As Jules and Vincent confront Brett and two of his pals, a fourth man is hiding in the bathroom—his actions will lead to Jules's transformative "moment of clarity". After Marvin's absurd death, Vincent and Jules wash up in Jimmie's bathroom, where they get into a contretemps over a bloody hand towel. When the diner hold-up turns into a Mexican standoffMexican standoff
A Mexican standoff is a slang term defined as a stalemate or impasse; a confrontation that neither side can foreseeably win. The term is most often used in lieu of "stalemate" when the confrontational situation is exceptionally dangerous for all parties involved.In popular culture, the Mexican...
, "Honey Bunny" whines, "I gotta go pee!"
As described by Peter and Will Brooker, "In three significant moments Vincent retires to the bathroom [and] returns to an utterly changed world where death is threatened." The threat increases in magnitude as the narrative progresses chronologically, and is realized in the third instance:
- Vincent and Jules’s diner breakfast and philosophical conversation is aborted by an armed robbery while Vincent is reading on the toilet.
- While Vincent is in the bathroom worrying about the possibility of going too far with Marsellus's wife, Mia mistakes his heroin for cocaine, snorts it, and overdoses.
- During a stakeout at Butch’s apartment, Vincent emerges from the toilet with his book and is killed by Butch.
In the Brookers' analysis, "Through Vince...we see the contemporary world as utterly contingent, transformed, disastrously, in the instant you are not looking." Fraiman finds it particularly significant that Vincent is reading Modesty Blaise in two of these instances. She links this fact with the traditional derisive view of women as "the archetypal consumers of pulp":
Locating popular fiction in the bathroom, Tarantino reinforces its association with shit, already suggested by the dictionary meanings of "pulp" that preface the movie: moist, shapeless matter; also, lurid stories on cheap paper. What we have then is a series of damaging associations—pulp, women, shit—that taint not only male producers of mass-market fiction but also male consumers. Perched on the toilet with his book, Vincent is feminized by sitting instead of standing as well as by his trashy tastes; preoccupied by the anal, he is implicitly infantilized and homosexualized; and the seemingly inevitable result is being pulverized by Butch with a Czech M61 submachine gun. That this fate has to do with Vincent's reading habits is strongly suggested by a slow tilt from the book on the floor directly up to the corpse spilled into the tub.
Willis reads Pulp Fiction in almost precisely the opposite direction, finding "its overarching project as a drive to turn shit into gold. This is one way of describing the project of redeeming and recycling popular culture, especially the popular culture of one's childhood, as is Tarantino's wont as well as his stated aim." Despite that, argues Fraiman, "Pulp Fiction demonstrates...that even an open pulpophile like Tarantino may continue to feel anxious and emasculated by his preferences."
Awards
Pulp Fiction won the following major honors:| Category — Recipient(s) | |
|---|---|
| Academy Awards | Best Original Screenplay — Quentin Tarantino Quentin Tarantino Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and actor. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with films employing nonlinear storylines and the aestheticization of violence... and Roger Avary Roger Avary Roger Avary is a Canadian film and television producer, screenwriter, olive farmer and director in the American mass media industry. He was behind the screenplays of the films Silent Hill and Beowulf... |
| BAFTA Awards | Best Supporting Actor BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role Best Actor in a Supporting Role is a British Academy Film award presented annually by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding supporting performance in a film... — Samuel L. Jackson Samuel L. Jackson Samuel Leroy Jackson is an American film and television actor and film producer. After becoming involved with the Civil Rights Movement, he moved on to acting in theater at Morehouse College, and then films. He had several small roles such as in the film Goodfellas before meeting his mentor,... Best Original Screenplay BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay The BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay is the British Academy Film Award for the best script not based upon previously published material. It has been awarded since 1984, when the original category was split into two awards, the other being the BAFTA Award for Best Adapted... — Quentin Tarantino/Roger Avary |
| Cannes Film Festival 1994 Cannes Film Festival The 1994 Cannes Film Festival started on 12 May and ran until 23 May. The Palme d'Or went to the American film Pulp Fiction directed by Quentin Tarantino.-Official Selection:*Clint Eastwood *Catherine Deneuve... |
Palme d'Or Palme d'Or The Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and is presented to the director of the best feature film of the official competition. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du... — Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, director) |
| Golden Globe Award Golden Globe Award The Golden Globe Award is an accolade bestowed by the 93 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association recognizing excellence in film and television, both domestic and foreign... s |
Best Screenplay (Motion Picture) Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay The Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay - Motion Picture is one of the annual awards given by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association."†" indicates the winner of the Academy Award for Best Writing "‡" indicates the winner of the Academy Award for Best Writing "§" indicates a Golden Globe Award... — Quentin Tarantino |
| National Society of Film Critics National Society of Film Critics The National Society of Film Critics is an American film critic organization. As of December 2007 the NSFC had approximately 60 members who wrote for a variety of weekly and daily newspapers.-History:... |
Best Film National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Film The National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Picture is an annual award given by National Society of Film Critics to honor the best film of the year.... — Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, director) Best Director National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Director The National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Director is an annual award given by National Society of Film Critics to honor the best film director of the year.... — Quentin Tarantino Best Screenplay — Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary |
It also received the following nominations:
| Category — Nominee(s) | |
|---|---|
| Academy Awards | Best Picture Academy Award for Best Picture The Academy Award for Best Picture is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to artists working in the motion picture industry. The Best Picture category is the only category in which every member of the Academy is eligible not only... (Lawrence Bender Lawrence Bender Lawrence Bender is an American film producer. He rose to fame by producing Reservoir Dogs in 1992 and has since produced all of Quentin Tarantino's films with the exception of Death Proof.... , producer) | Best Director Academy Award for Directing The Academy Award for Achievement in Directing , usually known as the Best Director Oscar, is one of the Awards of Merit presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to directors working in the motion picture industry... (Quentin Tarantino) Best Actor Academy Award for Best Actor Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry... (John Travolta John Travolta John Joseph Travolta is an American actor, dancer and singer. Travolta first became known in the 1970s, after appearing on the television series Welcome Back, Kotter and starring in the box office successes Saturday Night Fever and Grease... ) Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry. Since its inception, however, the... (Uma Thurman Uma Thurman Uma Karuna Thurman is an American actress and model. She has performed in leading roles in a variety of films, ranging from romantic comedies and dramas to science fiction and action movies. Among her best-known roles are those in the Quentin Tarantino films Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill... ) | Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry. Since its inception, however, the... (Samuel L. Jackson) | Best Film Editing Academy Award for Film Editing The Academy Award for Film Editing is one of the annual awards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Nominations for this award are closely correlated with the Academy Award for Best Picture. Since 1981, every film selected as Best Picture has also been nominated for the Film Editing... (Sally Menke Sally Menke Sally JoAnne Menke was an American film editor with more than 20 film credits since 1984. She had a long-time collaboration with director Quentin Tarantino, having edited all of his films... ) |
| BAFTA Awards | Best Film BAFTA Award for Best Film This page lists the winners and nominees for the BAFTA Award for Best Film, BAFTA Award for Best Film not in the English Language and Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film for each year, in addition to the retired earlier versions of those awards... (Lawrence Bender/Quentin Tarantino) | Achievement in Direction BAFTA Award for Best Direction Winners of the BAFTA Award for Best Direction presented by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.-2010s:* 2010 - David Fincher – The Social Network** Tom Hooper – The King's Speech** Danny Boyle – 127 Hours... (Quentin Tarantino) Best Actress in a Leading Role BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role Best Actress in a Leading Role is a British Academy Film award presented annually by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts to recognise an actress who has delivered an outstanding leading performance in a film.- Winners and nominees :... (Uma Thurman) | Best Actor in a Leading Role BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role Best Actor in a Leading Role is a British Academy Film award presented annually by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding leading performance in a film.-Superlatives:... (John Travolta) Best Cinematography BAFTA Award for Best Cinematography -Best Cinematography - Colour:* 1963 - From Russia with Love - Ted Moore** Nine Hours to Rama – Arthur Ibbetson** The Running Man – Robert Krasker** Sammy Going South – Erwin Hillier** The Scarlet Blade – Jack Asher... (Andrzej Sekuła) | Best Editing BAFTA Award for Best Editing The BAFTA Award for Best Editing is one of several annual awards presented by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts . The film-voting members of the Academy select the five nominated films in each category; only the principal editor for each film are named, which excludes additional... (Sally Menke) | Best Sound BAFTA Award for Best Sound The British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for Best Sound has been presented to its winners since 1968 and sound designers of all nationalities are eligible to receive the award.-Winners 1968-present:... (Stephen Hunter Flick/Ken King/Rick Ash/David Zupancic) |
| Golden Globe Awards | Best Motion Picture (Drama) Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Drama This page lists the winners and nominees for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama, since its institution in 1951. The organizer, Hollywood Foreign Press Association , is an organization of journalists who cover the United States film industry, but are affiliated with publications... (Lawrence Bender) | Best Director (Motion Picture) Golden Globe Award for Best Director - Motion Picture This page lists the winners of and nominees for the Golden Globe Award for Best Director. Since its inception in 1943, it has been presented annually by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an organization composed of journalists who cover the United States film industry for publications based... (Quentin Tarantino) Best Actor (Motion Picture—Drama) (John Travolta) Best Supporting Actor (Motion Picture) (Samuel L. Jackson) | Best Supporting Actress (Motion Picture) (Uma Thurman) |
In the balloting by the National Society of Film Critics, Samuel L. Jackson was the runner-up in both the Best Actor
National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actor
The National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actor is an annual award given by the National Society of Film Critics to honor the best leading actor of the year.-1960s:-1970s:-1980s:-1990s:-2000s:-2010s:...
and the Best Supporting Actor
National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor
The National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor is an annual film award given by the National Society of Film Critics.The awards was given for the first time in 1968 .-1960s:-1970s:-1980s:-1990s:...
categories.