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Quentin Tarantino's spectacular PULP FICTION (1994, Miramax, R, priced
for rental) is
something like the Jurassic Park of independent films: a titanically engrossing
and profitable
piece of movie making that excited so much commentary--in print,
on TV, and all over
cyberspace--that its video release doesn't leave a whole lot of uncharted
terrain for a
video critic to cover. Granted, I could buck fashion and take the heretical
route--unlike a
lot of critics, I think the movie has its flaws, both minor (when Uma Thurman
instructs John
Travolta to not be a square, she traces a rectangle in the air) and
not so minor (Maria de
Medeiros, as an annoyingly passive-aggressive girlfriend). But the fact
is, I'll probably end up
owning a copy--of the letterboxed version. The movie is being released
in a pan-and-scan
transfer, which fills your TV screen while disrupting key scenes, as well
as in a
letterboxed edition that remains true to Tarantino's original wide-screen
compositions.
On the non-letterboxed tape, some of the exchanges between two people sitting
across
from each other have been chopped up into a series of back-and-forth
medium closeups,
which isn't the way these scenes are supposed to play.
Nevertheless, in either version the movie remains recommended. But allow
me to suggest
some additional viewing--a selective Pulp Fiction Antecedents Film Festival.
For while
each of the three interlinked stories that make up Pulp Fiction--revolving
around the business
and personal concerns of superbad gangster Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames),
his hitmen
Vincent and Jules (Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson), and boxer Butch (Bruce
Willis)--has
its own attributes, each also alludes to other movies. And I'm not just
talking plotlines; some
of the smallest details hark back to great moments in movie history. Take
Thurman's black page
boy wig, an homage to Louise Brooks' tonsorial stylings in G.W. Pabst's
classic
1928 melodrama Pandora's Box. Variations on that 'do have blared "instant
vixen" in scores of
movies that followed, from Jean-Luc Godard's A Woman Is a Woman to Jonathan
Demme's
Something Wild, and it's no coincidence that all of these movies influenced
Pulp Fiction's overall
tone.
As for what influences the movie's action, the episode in which hapless
Vincent is tempted by
Marcellus' wife, Mia (Thurman), whom he's been asked to "look after," echoes
the vintage
noir Out of the Past, in which Robert Mitchum falls for a bad guy's girl.
When Pulp Fiction's
Butch takes a payoff to throw a fight and then doesn't, Tarantino nods
to director Robert
Wise's engrossing The Set-Up, in which the apostate pugilist (Robert Ryan)
tries to flee
from mobsters after failing to take a dive. The queasy trouble Butch ends
up in, however,
crosses Deliverance with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and features characters
that would
have been inconceivable in Wise's heyday.
Some of Pulp Fiction's influences are a bit more contemporary: Harvey Keitel's
Winston Wolf,
who helps Vincent and Jules dispose of a messy corpse, is a benign take
on Victor "the
Cleaner," the role Keitel played in Point of No Return. Still, Tarantino's
range of references
proves he's smarter than the average hipster. Gen-Xers like to cite Repo
Man's glowing car
trunk as the source of the unearthly light emanating from the briefcase
Vincent and Jules
are delivering to Marcellus, but said glow doubtless originated from a
sealed box in
Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly.
The whole joke behind Jack Rabbit Slim's, the restaurant where Travolta
and Thurman win
the twist contest, is that everything about it is a movie--or a pop-culture--reference.
This
scene's constant name-dropping suggests many titles for bonus viewing.
The mention of a
Douglas Sirk steak, for instance, made me hungry for that director's lush
drama Imitation
of Life.
But Tarantino is a lot more than a walking film encyclopedia. Pulp Fiction
is full of audacious,
original dialogue; his ability to take what seem like minor conversational
themes and dovetail
them onto later exchanges for maximum comic effect is close to genius.
And the action can
be literally he art-stopping. Still, one of the coolest things about Pulp
Fiction is its many links to other
pleasures. When you return your copy, you'll have plenty of ideas about
what to rent next.
A-
