Pulp Fiction - Quentin Tarantino

"I’m American honey. Our names don’t mean a shit”.

So says one of the characters in the movie Pulp Fiction. This is one of the numerous dialogues that could be easily used to introduce this movie – a movie that is so devious in its approach and so deceptive in its execution that it could lead any person, not acquainted with the Tarantino style of filmmaking, to a state funeral with a funky hairdo and gangster rap blaring from his junkie car speakers.

Quentin Tarantino, before he decided to make a movie, was a clerk at a video rental store. He never received any formal education in cinema. Rather it was through his job, as well as by frequenting the numerous run-down grindhouses playing B-movies, that helped develop his near encyclopaedic knowledge in films and his fetish for urban cool and machismo. He made his directorial debut with the brilliant Reservoir Dogs that literally turned the very concept of a heist movie on its head. And then he decided to make Pulp Fiction through which he made nearly as powerful and unforgettable an assault on the very idiom of cinema as did the Nouvelle Vague maestro Jean-Luc Godard with A Bout De Souffle (Breathless). It also emerged as the finest and the single most influential movie of the 90s.

Pulp Fiction is the epitome of wild, wacky and quirky filmmaking. It is outrageously violent – it made a complete mockery of blood and killing; uncontrollably profane – the movie perhaps has more F-words than any other movie in the entire history of cinema; profusely wicked – the movie made fun of nearly every sensitive and so-called sanctimonious issues ranging from religion to race to even homosexuality; and unabashedly bizarre. And despite all its twisted sense of humour and idiosyncrasies that can best be described by the word ‘Tarantanian’, Pulp Fiction was also the zenith of pop-culture no-holes-barred entertainment, the kind of monster fun that any popcorn and cola addict would feast on.

On the surface Pulp Fiction is a tale of hitmen, dopeheads, mobsters, crime gone wrong and chase thrills. But the movie has so many plot developments and so much time-twisting, that the story takes a complete backseat. Hell, the movie has more MacGuffins than Hitchcock’s Psycho. The important consideration here is the execution that borders on the thin line between eccentricity and genius. The story twists, turns and then twists some more to present a delirious and utterly magnetic alter-ego of American Dream and the American way of life.

It is absolutely impossible to define Pulp Fiction with generic terms. It glides and dances through a host of film genres and sub-genres ranging from gangster, crime dramas, neo-noirs, chase thrillers to blaxpoitation films, satires, musicals, black comedies and rom-coms. The movie pays subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle homage to a plethora of past and present movies, as well as to Japanese animes and Manga comic strips. Even Bartolucci attempted the same with his controversial Dreamers, but it never reached the lofty heights attained by this magnum opus from the mad American genius. Indeed, Tarantino must have made love to the mad-cap script before he stepped behind the camera. Or perhaps he was under the influence of some yet unknown mixture of crack, LSD and marijuana.

As was in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction boasts of some incredible performances. However, unlike the former which completely made use of some of America’s finest character actors like Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen and Harvey Keitel, the latter has a mix of both amazing character actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel and Christopher Walken, as well as A-list stars like Bruce Willis and John Travolta. Every actor, irrespective of screen time, role and importance of character, has delivered terrific performances – Bruce Willis as the prize-fighter Butch Coolidge on the run (atop his “chopper”); Harvey Keitel as the sophisticated trouble-shooter Winston Wolfe; Tim Roth as the queasy gun-toting amateur Pumpkin who decides to rob a restaurant with his girlfriend; Uma Thurman as the white, cocaine-snorting fiancé of a coloured gangster; Christopher Walken as the enigmatic Capt. Koons who has been hiding a precious watch up his you-know-where; John Travolta as a cultured, knowledgeable and disco dancing (reminiscent of his career making turn in Saturday Night Fever) white assassin Vincent Vega in a gang dominated by African-Americans. But the best performance of the movie undoubtedly belongs to the Bible-quoting, profanity addicted, quasi demagogue-cum-hitman Jules Winnfield. And his chemistry with Travolta was sensational to say the least. Even the director himself put in an interesting cameo as a twitchy man with a garage, some bad friends and an intimidating wife.

Pulp Fiction was the toast of 1994 Cannes Film Festival. The critics and the audience alike were dumbstruck when the movie was screened, and it deservedly won Tarantino the coveted Palm d’Or. Unfortunately at the Academy Awards it was pipped to the golden statuette by the more audience friendly and sentimental Oscar bait Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump. My slight gibe at the Tom Hanks starrer is not because it isn’t a remarkable movie (honestly speaking I’ve watched it I don’t remember how many times), but because it doesn’t really hold a candle, from an artistic standpoint, to Tarantino’s explosive masterpiece.

Set against a pulsating retro rock-and-roll track, littered with some of the most quotable dialogues ever heard on silver screen, shot in a manner that easily likens the film to dirt-cheap pulp fictions and made-for-cult-audience B-movies, edited so as to jumble the chronology of time and memory, boasting of an array of superlative performances, and directed with the audacious skill, kinetic pace, visual artistry, cerebral off-the-cuff humour and devilish charm that is quintessential Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction managed the rare troika of massive commercial success, enormous critical appreciation and attainment of avant-garde status without ever being kitsch or overtly experimental.