Pulp Fiction -- Re-imagined
by Gerald Houghton (1996)
Pulp Fiction is to the 90s what Coppola's Godfather pictures were the 70s and Raging Bull to the 80s. It is an icon, a touchstone for a whole generation of movie-heads. That poster of a manifestly un-politically correct Uma Thurman (low cut, hot pistol, smouldering cigarette) is now as De Rigueur student issue as Betty Blue once was. It made the almost unthinkable vault from Cannes success to the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, even Oscars, and still raked in over $100 million at the US box office. You cannot argue with Tarantino's uber-progeny. So why are we?
Get it straight -- Pulp Fiction is a film that contains much to be admired. Tarantino is to be praised for bringing back some balls to contemporary, popular cinema. Since Reservoir Dogs (1992) people have been writing better dialogue, and, even if we cannot prove it, we only really have one usual suspect to round-up for questioning. That is manifestly not the point.
Nor indeed are we here to debate the man's talent behind the camera: Quentin Tarantino can direct. His style is distinct and undoubtedly owes much to his legendary time in the video store watching whatever they put in front of him. For all he's a new young Turk, Tarantino is very much the classicist. Check the number of extraordinarily long takes in this film (Bruce Willis' introduction; Travolta and Jackson's arrival at the apartment building; the backyard walk to Willis' apartment), and its director's frugal use of close-up. The very non-TV use of widescreen and medium shots make this very much a cinema film. For this, for now, we applaud him.
Similarly, Will Self might have found the screenplay 'hackneyed, exploitative and crass' and walked out after ten minutes, but as a writer Tarantino is at least unsparing of his audience's TV bred narrative mentality. We have here a film that starts and ends in the middle and proceeds to spin itself out from there. Pulp Fiction is clever and proves that there is a mass audience in cinemas and, perhaps more significantly, on video for films that refuse the ordinary. But then again didn't Stanley Kubrick do something similar way back in 1956 with The Killing? Dogs owes Kubrick more of a debt (royalties, even), but two pictures in and Tarantino's structural borrowings could so easily become affectation. For now we'll forgive him, if only because that is arguably the least of Pulp Fiction's troubles.
Pulp Fiction is a bloated mess.
The clue to why is hidden in the title. Not even so much hidden. This is pulp fiction. We think pulp, we think film noir, we think cheap paperbacks, sleazy, lurid, garish. You only have to look to the opening and its American Heritage Dictionary definitions; Tarantino tempts providence when he allows us to know that it can also mean 'a soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter'.
New noir cinema (neo-noir, if you must) tries so hard at emulating its forebears but just cannot shake off the weight of contemporary film. The results are too often either wax museums to past glories or, worse, parody. Think of Greenwald's The Kill-Off or Dahl's Kill Me Again, both from 1989, or the following year's The Hot Spot. That latter is the perfect example -- Dennis Hopper is aiming for the same sweaty, over-sensitised passions that inform, say, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946 -- not Raffleson's soggy, redundant remake) or Double Indemnity (1944), or best of all, Joseph H. Lewis' marvellous Gun Crazy (1949). But The Hot Spot misses on most bases: it's too explicit, too ponderous (noir was never that), and, worst of all, at 130 minutes, much too long.
That last is the iceberg that does for almost every neo-noir (and most contemporary filmmaking into the bargain). Which brings us back to the film under discussion. Pulp Fiction is, at most, an hour-forty masquerading as a two and half hour epic. Where Reservoir Dogs is 99 beautifully sustained, tightly written and edited minutes, Pulp is perfused with longueurs. In his first film Tarantino the writer was in league with Tarantino the director to integrate and streamline the little riffs (the torture sequence; Roth's cover story). Here they sit over the action like an ill-fitting wig. Like a dance routine in a musical, they bring everything to a shuddering halt for three or four minutes; for every monologue like Christopher Walken's Captain Koons (one of Tarantino's single best pieces of writing, quite brilliantly delivered) there are two or three burger routines to be endured.
Evidence: immediately after the (excellent) title sequence we are gifted the whole celebrated 'Royale with Cheese' shtick. What we learn is repeated a few minutes later in the apartment to more immediately comic effect. What it tells us is that the screenwriter learned something vaguely amusing on his travels. That Vincent Vega recently toured Europe is established again -- and better -- during the drug buy. Excise the car ride and the film is immediately lighter almost two minutes. Which brings us, you will be relieved to know, to the point of all this.
Let us establish some ground rules. All times mentioned from hereon are not cast in stone, and everything is cited under the proviso that some tidying of dialogue and, occasionally, motivation may be necessary. That settled, the following is based around recutting the letterboxed UK video release of Pulp Fiction released by Touchstone Home Video, complete with its one slight trim by the BBFC, and recognises the disparity in PAL running times. So, with the admonition that video copying is illegal and under absolutely no circumstances should be indulged, pull up a blank VHS and, forgive me, let's go to work.
CUT
1: As established, the entire first dialogue between Vincent Vega (John Travolta)
and Jules Winfield (Samuel L Jackson). Post-titles the film opens far more
effectively on the lifting of the trunk lid. Welcome to our movie. Approx 2
minutes
CUT 2: The dialogue between Jody (Rosanna Arquette) and Vega about piercing. As with the burgers, Tarantino is crowbarring in something cool he's learned. Aside from the time recovered, it renders more effective and enigmatic Vega's reference in the subsequent scene, particularly as we cannot see clearly when she appears around the door, and removes the irrelevant Bronagh Gallagher altogether. Approx 1 minute
CUT 3: The most dramatic (and to some undoubtedly perplexing) edit. The film now leaps from one of the its best sequences (the whole drug fetishisation) to Lance's (Eric Stolz) house almost half an hour later. What's missing? In a nutshell, Uma Thurman.
Quentin Tarantino cannot write women.
In Dogs, of course, it was never an issue. But with Pulp he cannot avoid bringing the girls out to play in his boy world, and finds himself wanting. They puppet around this picture like expensive props. When Thurman is not riffing about pop culture (all that Fox Force Five nonsense) she has zip. Thus, Tarantino takes her to Jack Rabbit Slim's but has nothing to do with her and Vega once they get there. (Likewise, the restaurant itself is simply a Tarantino wank fantasy, its celeb waiters are crude, its movie poster chic tiresome, and worse yet, it wastes the excellent Steve Buscemi.) The whole role is patently predicated on Tarantino's idea of the perfect date. The only woman in the entire picture to have any measure of credibility is surely Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer), and only then because he gives her a gun and lets her play at being a boy in a skirt.
Plus, Thurman is supernaturally bad. Sticking on a black wig and walking barefoot does not make a good performance. Admittedly even a half decent actress (say, Jennifer Jason Leigh) would have her work cut out with such underwriting, but Uma just compounds the horror. To work, the whole sequence demands a sexual chemistry between Vega and Mia that Tarantino and Thurman cannot supply. To quote Keitel's Wolf later in the film: 'Just because you are a character doesn't mean you have character.'
And again, there is a structural justification for her expulsion: in place of the inane will-they-won't-they bull we do get, we substitute an ambiguity that will never be explained, strengthening any scene that follows involving Vega with his boss. We leap from Vega's post-hit euphoria to the slam-injection on Lance's floor. The Mia we first see is almost dead. Naturally her subsequent joke is also axed. The only other time we see Mrs Wallace is after the fight, the exchange now far more pregnant with menace and subterfuge. We also get to lose a stack of frankly irrelevant and misused songs (Dusty Springfield? Urge Overkill?), and the single biggest misjudgement in the entire picture -- drawing that bloody square on the screen. Approx 28 minutes
CUT 4: Tarantino shows the same remarkable economy he displayed on the robbery in Dogs in not showing Butch's (Bruce Willis) fatal fight, only to spoil it when the film runs slap bang into another of his awful women. And all taxi driver Angela Jones wants to know is: 'What does it feel like? Killing a man?' It's an outbreak of the exotic accent disease that will strike again only minutes later, and it's a gratingly dull cab ride. We keep Butch's phone call, and everything else is out the door. Approx 3 minutes
CUT 5: A second dose of cute foreign accents, in the Bjork-like shape of Maria de Medeiros. Her childishly wide eyes and bafflingly dim talk of pot bellies and Madonna is Pulp Fiction at its most irksome. Arguably the worst character ever to flow from his pen, it's shocking to consider that Tarantino reputedly penned the role originally for the astonishing Swiss actress Irene Jacob after seeing her in Kieslowski's masterly The Double Life of Veronique (1992). She would have carried it better, but even she would not have been safe from career-flattening embarrassment. (Ironic then that Pulp Fiction should beat Kieslowski's far superior Three Colours Red -- starring Jacob -- to the Palme d'Or.) The Fabienne role is necessary, thus various trims to reduce her scenes to the barest minimum. Approx 3 minutes
CUT 6: The most problematic sequence in the entire film. There is no obvious explanation for the extended rape in this movie. It could be a tribute of sorts to Boorman's Deliverance (1972), or maybe just the director's particular fetish, but there is no question that it is anything other than dim-witted, ill-advised and homophobic. Over ten minutes of Tarantino at his most ugly, it is never funny, only repulsive and ignorant; the most otiose scene he has yet committed to film. Things can only be improved by its loss. And again, structurally it leaves open the conflict between Marcellus (Ving Rhames) and Butch. As it stands the film cheats badly -- given what Butch has done and what he's just witnessed, no way would he be allowed to walk. Approx 11 minutes
CUT 7: Given the debt he owes to Keitel, Tarantino serves the actor very badly in this film. The Wolf is a joke. It's a role Keitel would effectively play again as The Cleaner in Badham's grisly The Assassin (1993), where, at least, he got to keep a measure of self-respect. Instead, here he gets to recite pedantic dialogue directed towards a couple of ropy punchlines, that awful on-screen gag about how fast he drives, and suffers the indignity of a scene opposite Tarantino, who should frankly be ashamed of himself for continually sticking his no-talent mug in front of the camera. Trims here, and, finally, axing the feeble-minded washing scene. Approx 4 minutes
What we have here, crudely speaking, are something like 52 minutes of cuts. The resulting picture runs for around 96 minutes, of which 6 are titles and credits. There are other individual lines that could stand removal, and it is arguable that, without the rape, Butch's car crash is no longer strictly necessary. And just what is Marcellus Wallace doing on that street corner anyway?
The net result of all this? Principally, the female roles are reduced to essentials only. For us as viewers -- and for Tarantino's future -- this is no good thing. Reservoir Dogs was essentially theatrical. Women served no purpose other than as cannon fodder. It's no wonder he used Dogs as his calling card picture. This time out he could not avoid the consequences of the other half of the population and all we get are a parade of idealised dates who obviously watch too much TV (Thurman), and strange and alluring foreign cuties (everyone else). Pulp Fiction does little to further the cause of feminism.
Christopher
Walken's role (play to your strengths) becomes more significant, and better yet,
Jackson is now effectively the star of the
film, which, for all intents and
purposes, we had him pegged as anyway.
There is still a slight question remaining over what some (Denzil Washington in particular) cited at the time as the film's racism. This is debatable. Certainly the epithet 'nigger' is universal, albeit the bulk from the lips of either Jackson or Rhames. If there is a problem, it's not a conscious one. Tarantino is using it for seasoning, even though after a while it does seem more like affectation than character. Certainly Spike Lee is reported to have suggested Tarantino (who appeared this year in the former's Girl 6) hold it down in future. Tarantino can be held accountable, but largely acquitted on the grounds of laziness.
Of course, this is sacrificing a sacred cow (or at the very least applying some major plastic surgery). Pulp Fiction made a mint, collected awards like fallen apples, and is even now being reissued on video with two extra scenes tacked on, both expanding the female roles. Some people never learn.
Even this drastic surgery could be seen as merely papering over the cracks while the house crumbles about our ears. Paul Schrader is down on record as being unsure of what Tarantino's success tells us about the future. He contrasts these nihilist wits with the existential anti-heroes of the 70s and finds them wanting. For all it thrills us, for all it makes us laugh, for all it looks great, Pulp Fiction is really a film about nothing except maybe itself, and as we toast the end of cinema's first century, that has to be just the tiniest bit depressing. But then that, as they say, is another story.