Pulp Fiction

365 Films

Entry #37

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Directed by Quentin Tarantino

This is a very difficult entry for me to submit.  Pulp Fiction has already been written about to death by much smarter and much more eloquent thinkers than myself and I would be incapable of adding anything new, let alone insightful to the discussion.  On top of that, it’s kind of really hard to like Quentin Tarantino anymore, right?  I don’t mean as a filmmaker (even though I was nowhere near crazy about Django Unchained) but just as an over-exposed celebrity personality.  Every time he opens his mouth, I’m either shielding my eyes from embarrassment or stabbing a kitchen knife into a couch in a blind rage.  There are times when I wish it were against the law for filmmakers to give interviews or really open their mouths in any public forum, for that matter.  I kid, I kid (not really), what I’m trying to get at here is that Pulp Fiction has acquired a lot of additional baggage since its 1994 release and not all of it positive.  The nice thing about being a ten-year-old movie going novice in the year 1994 is that I had no idea who Quentin Tarantino was nor did I have any idea about the massive amounts of hype his movie had accrued.  All I knew about it was that Bruce Willis was the voice of the baby from Look Who’s Talking and that John Travolta was the father of that baby in the same film (exactly the reason Tarantino cast those two, I am sure).  The details are fuzzy about my initial viewing.  I remember there being a significant amount of gunplay, which, at the time was enough to hold my interest.  I remember the profanity and foul language came fast and furious, which was another valuable asset.  And I very vividly remember the moment where Travolta is about to stab Uma Thurman in the heart with a shot of adrenaline.  I was horrified, yet thoroughly transfixed that all I could do was turn to my Mom and say, “I really shouldn’t be here.”  It was almost as if I was in a waking nightmare.  Then he slams the needle down and that nerve-shattering thud hits the soundtrack and like the air being let out of a balloon, all of my tension dissipated.  That may have been the moment I became desensitized to on screen violence because about 45 minutes later a man’s head is turned into an exploding mass of reddish goo at close range and I was oinking for more.  That was my main take away from Pulp Fiction at the age of ten: that movies could go anywhere they damn well please.  That one moment I could be hiding under the seat in abject terror and the very next laughing hysterically, the combination of which proved to be liberating.  Movies were not confined to genre or plot mechanics anymore; they could be crafted like magic tricks filled with misdirection and sleight of hand.  That is what I believe to be the ultimate accomplishment of Pulp Fiction.  Every time I see it, it feels new and fresh and no matter how many times Mr. Tarantino goes out of his way to act like a jackass on TV and in print, I still love it.