Pulp Fiction Essay Research Paper Introducinga film

Pulp Fiction Essay, Research Paper

Introducing

a film such as Quentin Tarantino?s Pulp Fiction takes much patience and

significant artistry with words. Tarantino?s work is an audacious, outrageous

look at honor among lowlifes, told in a somewhat radical style overlapping a

handful of separate stories. "Quentin Tarantino is the Jerry Lee Lewis of

cinema, a pounding performer who doesn?t care if he tears up the piano, as

long as everybody is rocking" (R.Ebert). Introducing a film such as Quentin

Tarantino?s Pulp Fiction takes much patience and significant artistry with

words. Tarantino?s work is an audacious, outrageous look at honor among

lowlifes, told in a somewhat radical style overlapping a handful of separate

stories. "Quentin Tarantino is the Jerry Lee Lewis of cinema, a pounding

performer who doesn?t care if he tears up the piano, as long as everybody is

rocking" (R.Ebert). The title is perfect. Like those old pulp magazines

named "Thrilling Wonder Stories" and "Official Detective",

the film creates a world where there are no normal people and no ordinary days;

where breathless prose clatters down fire escapes and leaps into the dumpster.

Or at least there are no ordinary days for those who don?t consider tactless

and accidental murder to be part of their everyday agenda and occupation. The

characters in this film separate societal normality from personal normality. For

example, Jackson and Travolta are magnetic as a pair of hit-men who have

philosophical debates on a regular basis. These characters continue to think

that they?re "just doing their job" and that there jobs are for the

same purpose as any body else?s job – to get paid and then to, in return, pay

the bills. Societal norms push the audience to believe that these characters

along with Ving Rhames, (Marsellus Wallace), are misfits and should be

"taken care of". Tarantino starts us off with a dual definition of

"pulp" one being "a soft, moist, shapeless, mass of matter"

and two being "a book containing lurid subject matter, and being

characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper". This introduces the

audience to the presentation of the film. It?s segmented structure is

Tarantino?s way of playing with the audience?s perceptions. The

entertainment throughout Pulp Fiction is scintillating, it captures the audience

and forces them to piece the segments together in order to form one complete

story. Hence the title containing the word "pulp" and the product

being "rough" and somewhat "unfinished" to the viewer. This

voluble, violent, pumped-up movie isn?t for every taste, not for the

squeamish, but it?s got more vitality than almost any other film of 1994. The

screenplay by Tarantino and Avary is so well written in a psoriatic yet potent

way that you?ll want to rub noses in it – the noses of all those zombie

writers who take "screenwriting classes that teach them the formulas for

writing "hit films". Pulp Fiction is constructed in such a nonlinear

way that you could see it a dozen times and not be able to remember what comes

next. It doubles back on itself telling several interlocking stories about

characters who inhabit a world of crime and intrigue, triple-crosses and

desperation. Vincent Vega (Travolta) and partner Jules Winnfield (Jackson) are a

couple of mid-level hit-men who carry out assignments for a mob boss. We see

them first on their way to a violent showdown discussing such mysteries as why

in Paris they have a French word for Quarter Pounders. They?re as innocent in

their way as Huck and Jim, floating down the Mississippi and speculating on how

foreigners can possibly understand each other. Vince?s and Jule?s careers

are a series of assignments that they can?t quite handle. Especially

Travolta?s character, not only does he kill people inadvertently ("The

car hit a bump") but he doesn?t know how to clean up after himself. Good

thing the two of them know people like Mr. Wolf (Harvey Keitel) who specializes

in messes; and has friends like Lance (Eric Stoltz) who owns a "big medical

encyclopedia" for emergency situations. Uma Thurman can tell you about

those medical procedures. Bruce Willis is compelling as a crooked boxer whose

plan to take it on the lam hits a few detours. Butch Coolidge (Willis) is

supposed to throw a fight but bails and looses Marsellus (Rhames) a lot of loot.

Butch and his girly are to ditch town ASAP but first he needs to make a

dangerous trip back to his apartment for a valuable family heirloom. The history

of this heirloom is described through a flashback dream narrated by Christopher

Walken, a Vietnam veteran. Walken?s dialogue build to the movie?s biggest

laugh. The method of the movie is to involve its characters in sticky

situations, and then let them escape into sticker ones, which is how the boxer

and mob boss end up together as the captives of weird leather freaks in the

basement of a pawn shop. Or how the characters who open the movie, a couple of

stick-up artists (Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer) get in way over their heads. Most

of the action in the movie comes under the heading of "crisis

control". If the situations are inventive and original, so is the dialogue.

A lot of films these days use flat, functional speech; The characters say only

enough to advance the plot. The characters in Pulp Fiction are in love with

words for their own sake. Many of them don?t listen but wait to talk. The

dialogue is off the wall at times and some things seem to be said at peculiar

moments where the "normal" movie viewer might not make complete sense

of it, but that?s the fun. The movie is like an excursion through the lurid

images that lie wound up and trapped inside all those boxes on the Blockbuster

shelves. Tarantino once described the old pulp magazines as cheap, disposable

entertainment that you could take to work with you rolled up and stuck in your

back pocket. Yeah, and not be able to wait for lunch so that you could start

reading them again. Quentin Tarantino, the creator of the lethal thrillers,

"True Romance" and "Reservoir Dogs" returns with his most