Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Movies Guys Love: Pulp Fiction

By Bob Wire, 2-13-10

	"Don't move or I'll shoot, Mr. Kotter!" "Where's the case? I got a plane full of snakes to catch."

[Profanity Alert: today’s column quotes the movie heavily. The movie contains profanity. Ergo, today’s column contains profanity.]

Here’s a good barometer of how well a movie is written: how many “memorable quotes” does it have on its imdb.com page? Pulp Fiction, the best black comedy of the last twenty years, currently has something like 18 pages of quotes, and it’s all killer, no filler.

This one, for example, uttered by Marsellus after he’s been rescued, mid-rape, from the pawn shop hillbillies: “Don’t tell nobody about this. This shit is between me, you, and Mr. Soon-to-be-livin’-the-rest-of-his-short-ass-life-in-agonizin’-pain rapist here.” It’s a crime that this movie won only a single Oscar, but it’s fitting that it was for Best Original Script.

Pulp Fiction is Quentin Tarantino’s career peak thus far. If Reservoir Dogs was a warning shot across the bow of the Hollywood status quo, Pulp Fiction blew up the whole ship. It’s not for the faint of heart or the thin of skin, but man, what a ride. The acting is flawless, the pacing insanely breathless, and the direction is crazy stylish. Throw in an eclectic soundtrack full of clever surprises, and you’ve got a thoroughly unique experience that’s really an updated blend of several existing styles. Pulp Fiction somehow manages to be seminal AND derivative, taking several stock movie conventions and turning them on their head.

Sure, I love Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown (Kill Bill, not so much), but nothing Tarantino has written, produced or directed has the balls, the brilliant dialogue, the cheeky cinematography or the intoxicating mixture of humor and sudden violence of Pulp Fiction. It is savage, profane, hilarious, voyeuristic and filled with threats and retribution. A lot like my first marriage. Only difference is that when the movie’s over, I still have furniture.

The main reason I never get tired of this film is Samuel L. Jackson. Tarantino was smart enough to give him a lot of camera time, and let his face and those Gremlin eyes do much of the acting. SamJack delivers his lines like Sugar Ray Leonard used to deliver jabs, with speed, precision, and deadly accuracy. His recitation of Ezekiel 25:17 before killing someone is a cinema icon. “I been saying that shit for years,” he explains to someone he’s holding at gunpoint. “And if you heard it, it meant your ass. I never gave much thought to what it meant, I just thought it was some cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass.”

He knows he’s sitting on some killer dialogue, and I imagine his performance—like that of most of the other actors—is so great because it’s every actor’s hope, to have such juicy lines like this to speak: “Hey, a sewer rat might taste like pumpkin pie but I’d never know ‘cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker.”
That’s a part of the discussion he has with his partner Vince, when they’re having breakfast in the diner and Jules is explaining why he doesn’t “dig on swine.” It’s the funniest conversation in the movie. He’s saying that, since pigs roll in their own shit, he won’t eat them. Vincent counters that dogs eat their own feces, but since they have a personality, Jules doesn’t consider them filthy animals. “By that rationale,” says Vince, chewing on his bacon, “if a pig had a better personality, he’d cease to be a filthy animal.” Jules doesn’t miss a beat. “Well,” he says, “we’d have to be talking about one charming motherfuckin’ pig.”

The compound epithet is, of course, SamJack’s trademark expression and he probably got saddled with it mostly because of this very movie. Later in the pig scene, when he turns the tables on Ringo and has the robber fetch SamJack’s wallet out of the sack of loot, Ringo asks him which one it is. “It’s the one that says ‘Bad Mother Fucker’ on it,” says SamJack with a straight face. Ringo fishes the wallet out from the bag, and sure enough, the phrase is stamped into the leather. I still remember the crowd roaring in the theater when I first saw the movie in ‘94.

That’s the beauty of this film to me: Tarantino fearlessly mixes black comedy, nonstop pop culture minutiae and relentless violence. Dozens of movies have been spawned in the ensuing years that try to replicate this potent mix, but nothing has ever come close to stroking it out of the park like Pulp Fiction. It’s practically its own genre, although Martin Scorsese has been doing it longer and more consistently.

When Vincent brings an OD’d Mia Marsellus to his drug dealer’s house for some help, the whole segment is unbearably panicky and tense. By the time they give her an adrenaline shot to the heart and she bursts back to life, I always discover that I’ve been holding my breath for several seconds.

I break this DVD out at least once a year, and it is still mesmerizing and massively entertaining, even though I know what’s coming. Tarantino’s gift for dialogue rivals that of the crime fiction master Elmore Leonard (Jackie Brown actually brought these two legends together, a dream that I thought wasn’t fully realized). The thing that fuels Pulp Fiction is the constant stream of existential banter and everyday, mundane chatter that flies back and forth between the characters, punctuated by horrific, sometimes bizarre, episodes of violence.

The whole movie is littered with racism, vulgarity, gore, heavy drug use and constant profanity. You have to be nearly impossible to offend to thoroughly enjoy it. And lots of us are, judging by its popularity. The ‘N’ word is scattered throughout, and it’s used in every connotation: a salutation among friends; a casual term of endearment; an ignorant, everyday pronoun (“Step away from the nigger”); and a humorous modifier (“Did you see a sign in my yard that said ‘Dead Nigger Storage?’”). Tarantino allows his characters to be real enough to use this word that is a lightning rod for disapproval and disgust, but the fact is it’s just how some people talk.

All the little human touches that are usually brushed over or flattened out by other directors are actually played up, which makes it startling. The way Amanda Plummer’s character smiles goofily at the waitress the whole time she’s refilling her coffee cup (“Garçon means boy,” the waitress tells Amanda’s boyfriend); the unexplained band-aid on the back of Marsellus’s neck as he’s giving Butch his instructions on taking a dive; the way Winston Wolf takes his coffee (“lotsa cream, lotsa sugar”). It’s almost like mixing pointillism with a Jackson Pollack painting.

One scene in particular encapsulates Tarantino’s bloody, ironic comic vision. It’s the one where Butch the boxer returns to his apartment to retrieve his father’s watch, although he’s pretty sure Marsellus’s henchmen will be laying in wait. He lucks out, coming in while Vincent the hit man is on the toilet, reading a book. Neither is aware of the other’s presence. Butch grabs the watch, but instead of leaving, decides to go into the kitchen to grab a bite to eat. He unwraps a couple of Pop-Tarts and pushes them down into the toaster. At that moment he sees Vincent’s Uzi, which the killer has left on the counter. Butch calmly picks it up, inspecting it, and turns to face the bathroom door. Vincent opens the door and looks up, seeing Butch pointing the gun at him. There’s a delicious moment of quiet tension as the two men regard each other, and then the silence is broken when the Pop-Tarts spring up out of the toaster. Butch opens fire. Beautiful.

It’s a long movie, at two and a half hours, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. The sprawling trio of loosely interwoven stories invites comparisons to Robert Altman, but I don’t buy it. I’m also a big fan of Altman’s movies, but they almost seem improvised when compared to the crisp, funny chatter and frenetic camera movement of Pulp Fiction. Hell, each of the three main stories could have been a movie of its own. They are, really, although they’re linked through overlapping characters and constantly shifting time frames. The way Pulp Fiction ends exactly where it began, in the Hawthorne Grill, is intriguing because it closes the circle, but not at the beginning OR the end of the overall tale. It’s somewhere in the middle.

The movie certainly turns off a lot of people, but I think that’s how it is with the best art. It’s not bland entertainment aimed at the lowest common denominator. You have to be a little sick to like it. I love it. Any time someone suggests a viewing, I say the same thing: “Shit, negro, that’s all you had to SAY!”

[Bookmark NewWest.net/BobWire right now, and if you have to use the bathroom, better take your gun in there with you. Now git!]

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By Bob Wire, 2-13-10 | comments (6) | email story | print story