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15 June 2010
Pulp Fiction
Shoot first, ask questions later
By Chester Pach
This essay is excerpted from Pop Culture versus Real America, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. A profile of a responsible gun owner appears here.
Pulp Fiction is one of the most acclaimed, influential, and controversial movies of recent years. Only the second feature film from director Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction premiered in 1994 at the Cannes Film Festival and won the coveted Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest prize. It also earned Tarantino an Academy Award for best original screenplay as well as honors for best director and best film from the National Board of Review. Tarantino’s dark humor and distinctive narrative style spawned many imitators. Time magazine critic Richard Corliss called Pulp Fiction “the most influential American film” of the 1990s.
Other reviewers, however, were not so enthusiastic. Some found the sordid world of the film, teeming with gangsters and drug addicts, depressing and even disgusting. But the single issue that produced the strongest criticism, as Tarantino explained in an interview, was “violence, violence, violence, violence, violence.”
The film begins and ends with a man and woman who casually decide over breakfast at a restaurant to draw their guns, empty the cash register, and rob the other patrons. The two main characters in the film — Vincent, played by John Travolta, and Jules, played by Samuel L. Jackson — are hit men who carry on bizarre conversations before blowing away their victims. In one instance, Vincent accidentally kills a man in the back seat of a car when the gun discharges after the vehicle hits a bump. With the help of Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel), a “fixer” who deals with such criminal complications, they scrub away the blood and the brains from the car almost as if they were cleaning up after a food fight. Winston even arrives in a tuxedo and takes time for coffee as he supervises the disposal of the body.
“Nothing is predictable or familiar within this irresistibly bizarre world,” wrote New York Times film critic Janet Maslin. “You don’t merely enter a theater to see Pulp Fiction,” she explained. Instead, like Alice in Wonderland, “you go down a rabbit hole.”
Chester Pach teaches history at Ohio University, where he holds the title of Outstanding Graduate Faculty Member. He is the author of three books on U.S. politics and foreign policy. His next book, which will soon be published by the University Press of Kansas, is The Presidency of Ronald Reagan.
(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)
