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Pulp Fiction

March 13, 2023

This article is about the film. For other uses, see Pulp fiction.

Pulp Fiction is a 1994 American crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, who conceived it with Roger Avary.[4] Starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Tim Roth, Ving Rhames, and Uma Thurman, it tells several stories of crime in Los Angeles, California. The title refers to the pulp magazines and hardboiled crime novels popular during the mid-20th century, known for their graphic violence and punchy dialogue.

Pulp Fiction
Theatrical release poster
Directed byQuentin Tarantino
Written byQuentin Tarantino
Story by
Produced byLawrence Bender
Starring
CinematographyAndrzej Sekuła
Edited bySally Menke
Production
companies
Distributed byMiramax Films
Release dates
  • May 21, 1994 (1994-05-21) (Cannes)
  • October 14, 1994 (1994-10-14) (United States)
Running time
154 minutes[1]
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$8–8.5 million[2][3]
Box office$213.9 million[2]

Tarantino wrote Pulp Fiction in 1992 and 1993, incorporating scenes that Avary originally wrote for True Romance (1993). Its plot occurs out of chronological order. The film is also self-referential from its opening moments, beginning with a title card that gives two dictionary definitions of "pulp." Considerable screen time is devoted to monologues and casual conversations with eclectic dialogue revealing each character's perspectives on several subjects, and the film features an ironic combination of humor and strong violence. TriStar Pictures reportedly turned down the script as "too demented." Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein was enthralled, however, and the film became the first that Miramax fully financed.

Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and was a major critical and commercial success. It was nominated for seven awards at the 67th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won Best Original Screenplay; it earned Travolta, Jackson, and Thurman Academy Award nominations and boosted their careers. Its development, marketing, distribution, and profitability had a sweeping effect on independent cinema.

Pulp Fiction is widely regarded as Tarantino's masterpiece, with particular praise for its screenwriting.[5] The self-reflexivity, unconventional structure, and extensive homage and pastiche have led critics to describe it as a touchstone of postmodern film. It is often considered a cultural watershed, influencing films and other media that adopted elements of its style. The cast was also widely praised, with Travolta, Thurman, and Jackson earning particular acclaim. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly named it the best film since 1983[6] and it has appeared on many critics' lists of the greatest films ever made. In 2013, Pulp Fiction was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."[7][8][9]

Plot

Narrative structure

Pulp Fiction's narrative is told out of chronological order and follows three main interrelated stories that each have a different protagonist: Vincent Vega, a hitman; Butch Coolidge, a prizefighter; and Jules Winnfield, Vincent's business partner.[10]

The film begins with a diner hold-up staged by a couple, then begins to shift from one storyline to another before returning to the diner for the conclusion. There are seven narrative sequences; the three primary storylines are preceded by intertitles:

  1. "Prologue – The Diner" (i)
  2. Prelude to "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife"
  3. "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife"
  4. Prelude to "The Gold Watch" (a – flashback, b – present)
  5. "The Gold Watch"
  6. "The Bonnie Situation"
  7. "Epilogue – The Diner" (ii)

If the seven sequences were ordered chronologically, they would run: 4a, 2, 6, 1, 7, 3, 4b, 5. Sequences 1 and 7 partially overlap and are presented from different points of view, as do sequences 2 and 6. According to Philip Parker, the structural form is "an episodic narrative with circular events adding a beginning and end and allowing references to elements of each separate episode to be made throughout the narrative".[11] Other analysts describe the structure as a "circular narrative".[12]

Summary

Hitmen Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega arrive at an apartment to retrieve a briefcase for their boss, gangster Marsellus Wallace, from a business partner, Brett. After Vincent checks the contents of the briefcase, Jules shoots one of Brett's associates. He declaims a passage from the Bible, and he and Vincent kill Brett for trying to double-cross Marsellus. They take the briefcase to Marsellus and wait while he bribes boxer Butch Coolidge to take a dive in his upcoming match.

The next day, Vincent purchases heroin from his drug dealer, Lance. He shoots up and drives to meet Marsellus's wife, Mia, having agreed to escort her while Marsellus is out of town. They eat at Jack Rabbit Slim's, a 1950s-themed restaurant, and participate in a twist contest, then return home. While Vincent is in the bathroom, Mia finds his heroin and snorts it, mistaking it for cocaine. She suffers an overdose; Vincent rushes her to Lance's house, where they revive her with an injection of adrenaline into her heart. Vincent drops Mia off at her home, and the two agree never to tell Marsellus about the incident.

Butch bets the bribe money on himself and double-crosses Marsellus, winning the bout but accidentally killing his opponent as well. Knowing that Marsellus will send hitmen after him, he prepares to flee with his girlfriend, Fabienne, but discovers she has forgotten to pack a gold watch passed down to him through his family. Returning to his apartment to retrieve it, he notices a gun on the kitchen counter and hears the toilet flush. When Vincent exits the bathroom, Butch shoots him dead and departs.

When Marsellus spots Butch stopped at a traffic light, Butch rams his car into him, then gets hit by an oncoming vehicle, leaving both of them injured and dazed. Once Marsellus regains consciousness, he shoots at Butch, chasing him into a pawnshop. Butch gains the upper hand and is about to shoot Marsellus, but the shop owner, Maynard, captures them at gunpoint and binds and gags them in the basement. Maynard and his accomplice Zed take Marsellus into another room and begin to rape him, leaving the "gimp" – a silent figure in a bondage suit – to watch over Butch. Butch breaks loose and knocks the gimp unconscious. Instead of fleeing, he decides to save Marsellus, and arms himself with a katana from the pawnshop. He kills Maynard and frees Marsellus, who shoots Zed in the crotch with Maynard's shotgun. Marsellus informs Butch that they are even, and to tell no one about the rape and to depart Los Angeles forever. Butch picks up Fabienne on Zed's motorcycle, and they ride away.

Earlier, after Vincent and Jules have killed Brett in his apartment, another man bursts out of the bathroom and fires at them, but every shot misses; after briefly checking themselves for wounds, Jules and Vincent shoot him dead. While driving away with Brett's associate Marvin, Jules professes that their survival was a miracle, which Vincent disputes. Vincent accidentally shoots Marvin in the face, killing him, and covering Vincent, Jules, and the car interior in blood in broad daylight. They hide the car at the home of Jules's friend Jimmie, who demands they deal with the problem before his wife, Bonnie, comes home. Marsellus sends a cleaner, Winston Wolfe, who directs Jules and Vincent to clean the car, hide the body in the trunk, dispose of their bloody clothes, and take the car to a junkyard.

At a diner, Jules tells Vincent that he plans to retire from his life of crime, convinced that their "miraculous" survival at the apartment was a sign of divine intervention. While Vincent is in the bathroom, a couple, "Pumpkin" and "Honey Bunny", hold up the restaurant and demand Marsellus's briefcase. Jules distracts Pumpkin with its contents, and then overpowers him and holds him at gunpoint; Honey Bunny becomes hysterical and points her gun at Jules. Vincent returns with his gun aimed at her, but Jules defuses the situation. He recites the biblical passage, expresses ambivalence about his life of crime, and allows the robbers to take his cash and leave. Jules and Vincent leave the diner with the briefcase in hand.

Cast

Jules' partner-in-crime, working for Marsellus Wallace. Tarantino cast Travolta in Pulp Fiction because Michael Madsen, who had played Vic Vega in Reservoir Dogs, chose to appear in Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp instead. Madsen has since expressed regret over his decision.[13] Harvey Weinstein pushed for Daniel Day-Lewis in the part.[14] Travolta accepted a reduced rate – sources say either US$100,000 or US$140,000 but the film's success and his Academy Award nomination for Best Actor revitalized his career.[15] Vincent is the brother of Vic Vega aka Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs (1992), and in 2004, Tarantino discussed an idea for a movie starring Travolta and Madsen as the "Vega Brothers"; the concept remains unrealized.[16]
Vincent's partner-in-crime, working for Marsellus Wallace. Jackson's first audition was overshadowed by Paul Calderón; Jackson had assumed the audition was merely a reading. Weinstein convinced him to audition a second time and his performance of the final diner scene won over Tarantino.[17] Jules was originally scripted with a giant afro,[18] but Tarantino's PA mistakenly bought a Jheri curled wig. Tarantino was enraged but Jackson persuaded him to keep it since the hairstyle had gained popularity through the rap group N.W.A.[19] Film critic Owen Gleiberman took it as a "tacit comic statement about the ghettoization of [Black people] in movies".[20] Jackson received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Calderón appears in the film as Paul, a bartender at Marsellus's social club, as well as Marsellus's assistant. Tarantino wrote the role for Laurence Fishburne, who turned it down. According to Tarantino, Fishburne refused it because his team did not see it as a starring role;[21] Fishburne later said he turned it down because he felt the film glamorized heroin.[22]
Wallace's wife and an aspiring actress. Miramax favored Holly Hunter or Meg Ryan for the role of Mia. Alfre Woodard and Meg Tilly were also considered but Tarantino wanted Thurman after their first meeting.[23][24] She dominated the film's promotional material, appearing on a bed with cigarette in hand. She was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Despite being launched into the celebrity A-list, Thurman chose not to do any big-budget films until Batman & Robin (1997) three years later.[25]
A "cleaner" who aids Jules and Vincent. Tarantino wrote the part of Wolfe for Keitel, who had starred in Reservoir Dogs and was instrumental in its production. In Tarantino's words, "Harvey had been my favorite actor since I was 16 years old."[26] Keitel had played a similarly employed character in Point of No Return (1993).[citation needed]
A burglar and Yolanda's boyfriend. Roth had starred in Reservoir Dogs alongside Keitel. He had used an American accent in Reservoir Dogs but used his natural, London accent in Pulp Fiction. Though Tarantino had written the part with Roth in mind, TriStar head Mike Medavoy preferred Johnny Depp or Christian Slater.[27] Early in development, Tarantino had contemplated casting Roth as Vincent and Gary Oldman as Jules, rewriting the characters as "two English guys".[28]
Ringo's girlfriend and partner in crime. Tarantino wrote the role of Yolanda for Plummer to partner her with Roth. Roth had introduced Tarantino to her, saying: "I want to work with Amanda in one of your films but she has to have a really big gun."[29]
Butch's girlfriend. Tarantino met de Medeiros, a Portuguese actress, while traveling with Reservoir Dogs around the European film festival circuit.[30]
A crime boss and employer of Jules and Vincent. Before Rhames was cast, the part of Wallace was initially offered to Max Julien and Sid Haig, but both turned down the role.[31][32] According to Bender, Rhames gave "one of the best auditions I've ever seen".[24] His acclaimed performance led to him being cast in big-budget features such as Mission Impossible (1996), Con Air (1997) and Out of Sight (1998).[33]
Vincent's drug dealer.[34] Gary Oldman was the preferred choice among TriStar executives, based on his portrayal of drug-dealing pimp Drexl Spivey in True Romance (1993).[35][36]
Lance's wife. Pam Grier read for the role, but Tarantino did not believe audiences would find it plausible for Lance to yell at her.[37] Tarantino later cast Grier as the lead role for Jackie Brown. Ellen DeGeneres also read for the part of Jody.[38] Rosanna's sister Alexis (then known as Robert Arquette) also appears in the film, as a man emerging from a bathroom to shoot at and miss Vincent and Jules who then kill him.
A USAF veteran of the Vietnam War who delivers a young Butch his father's coveted gold watch. During Koons' monologue, which is interspersed with colorful descriptions of the Viet Cong, he mentions a soldier called "Winocki".[a] Joe Winocki (John Garfield) is a character in the 1943 film Air Force directed by Howard Hawks, one of Tarantino's favorite directors.[40] Tarantino played a character named Desmond Winocki in a guest appearance on an episode of All-American Girl titled Pulp Sitcom.[41]
An aging boxer on the run from Marsellus having double-crossed him. Willis was already a star but most of his recent films had been critical and box-office disappointments. As related by Peter Bart, participating in the modestly budgeted film "meant lowering his salary and risking his star status but the strategy ... paid off royally: Pulp Fiction not only brought Willis new respect as an actor but also earned him several million dollars".[42] Willis' appearance and physical presence were crucial to Tarantino, "Bruce has the look of a 50s actor. I can't think of any other star that has that look".[43] Butch's look was modeled on Aldo Ray in Nightfall and his demeanor based on Ralph Meeker's portrayal of Mike Hammer in Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly.[44] Chandler Lindauer plays a young Butch.

Bronagh Gallagher plays Jody's friend Trudi who does little but smoke a bong during the scene where Vincent revives Mia. According to author Jason Bailey, "Quentin thought it would be funny to have this casual observer who just happened to be there. All of this was born out of the experience of, when you go to someone's house to buy drugs, there are always people who are just there".[45] Phil LaMarr portrays Marvin, an associate of Jules and Vincent. LaMarr auditioned for Tarantino after both had done a show for an improv group a few months prior.[46] He read for the roles of Jules Winnfield and Brett before being cast as Marvin.[46] Tarantino appears as Jules' friend Jimmie, in whose house they clean up a murder. Tarantino was unsure whether to play Jimmie or Lance, choosing Jimmie as he wanted to be behind the camera during Mia's overdose scene.[36]

Frank Whaley portrays Brett, an associate of Jules and Vincent who has a briefcase requested by Marcellus. Whaley met Tarantino while he was filming Reservoir Dogs at a lab in Sundance Institute. He recalls, "we ended up meeting and spending time together, and I liked him, so I was really happy when he asked me to be in this movie."[47] Burr Steers appears as Roger, a friend of Brett's nicknamed "Flock of Seagulls" by Jules. The scene of the confrontation between Brett and Jules went through several takes due to Steers making mistakes. Steers recalled in an interview that he had found acting difficult due to the loudness of the gunshots.[48]

Angela Jones portrays Esmeralda Villalobos, a cab driver who aids Butch's escape. Her casting and character were inspired by her performance in the 1991 short film Curdled, later remade as a 1996 feature film with finance from Tarantino and again starring Jones.[49] Duane Whitaker, Peter Greene and Stephen Hibbert play Maynard, Zed and the gimp.[50] According to The Daily Beast, these "three psycho hillbillies" that rape Marsellus in Maynard's shop's basement allude to the film Deliverance.[49][50] Steve Buscemi makes a cameo appearance as a waiter at Jack Rabbit Slim's, dressed as Buddy Holly. Buscemi, who had appeared in Reservoir Dogs, was originally considered for the role of Jimmie but was unable to commit.[49] Kathy Griffin appears as herself.[51]

Production

Writing

Roger Avary wrote the first element of what would become the Pulp Fiction screenplay in the fall of 1990:

Tarantino and Avary decided to write a short, on the theory that it would be easier to get made than a feature. But they quickly realized that nobody produces shorts, so the film became a trilogy, with one section by Tarantino, one by Avary, and one by a third director who never materialized. Each eventually expanded his section into a feature-length script.[52]

The initial inspiration was the three-part horror anthology film Black Sabbath (1963), by Italian filmmaker Mario Bava. The Tarantino–Avary project was provisionally titled "Black Mask", after the seminal hardboiled crime fiction magazine.[30] Tarantino's script was produced as Reservoir Dogs, his directorial debut; Avary created the basis for the "Gold Watch" storyline of Pulp Fiction.[53][54]

With work on Reservoir Dogs completed, Tarantino returned to the notion of a trilogy film: "I got the idea of doing something that novelists get a chance to do but filmmakers don't: telling three separate stories, having characters float in and out with different weights depending on the story."[55] Tarantino explains that the idea "was basically to take like the oldest chestnuts that you've ever seen when it comes to crime stories – the oldest stories in the book ... You know, 'Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife' – the oldest story about ... the guy's gotta go out with the big man's wife and don't touch her. You know, you've seen the story a zillion times."[10] "I'm using old forms of storytelling and then purposely having them run awry", he says. "Part of the trick is to take these movie characters, these genre characters and these genre situations and actually apply them to some of real life's rules and see how they unravel."[56] In at least one case, boxer Butch Coolidge, Tarantino had in mind a specific character from a classic Hollywood crime story: "I wanted him to be basically like Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer in Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly [1955]. I wanted him to be a bully and a jerk".[43]

Tarantino went to work on the script for Pulp Fiction in Amsterdam in March 1992,[57] possibly at the Winston Hotel in the Red Light District.[58] He was joined there by Avary, who contributed "Pandemonium Reigns" to the project and participated in its rewriting as well as the development of the new storylines that would link up with it.[53] Two scenes originally written by Avary for the True Romance screenplay, exclusively credited to Tarantino, were incorporated into the opening of "The Bonnie Situation": the "miraculous" missed shots by the hidden gunman and the rear seat automobile killing.[59] The notion of the crimeworld "cleaner" that became the heart of the episode was inspired by a short, Curdled, that Tarantino saw at a film festival. He cast the lead actress, Angela Jones, in Pulp Fiction and later backed the filmmakers' production of a feature-length version of Curdled.[60] The script included a couple of made-up commercial brands that often featured in later Tarantino films: Big Kahuna burgers (a Big Kahuna soda cup appears in Reservoir Dogs) and Red Apple cigarettes.[61] As he worked on the script, Tarantino also accompanied Reservoir Dogs around the European film festivals. Released in the United States in October 1992, the picture was a critical and commercial success. In January 1993, the Pulp Fiction script was complete.[62]

Financing

Tarantino and his producer, Lawrence Bender, brought the script to Jersey Films. Before even seeing Reservoir Dogs, Jersey had attempted to sign Tarantino for his next project.[63] Ultimately a development deal worth around $1 million had been struck: The deal gave A Band Apart, Bender and Tarantino's newly formed production company, initial financing and office facilities; Jersey got a share of the project and the right to shop the script to a studio.[64] Jersey had a distribution and "first look" deal with Columbia TriStar, which paid Tarantino for the right to consider exercising its option.[65] In February, Pulp Fiction appeared on a Variety list of films in pre-production at TriStar.[66] In June, however, the studio put the script into turnaround.[65] According to a studio executive, TriStar chief Mike Medavoy found it "too demented".[67] There were suggestions that TriStar was resistant to back a film featuring a heroin user; there were also indications that the studio simply saw the project as too low-budget for its desired star-driven image.[68] Avary – who was about to start shooting his own directorial debut, Killing Zoe – has said that TriStar's objections were comprehensive, encompassing the script's fundamental structure. He characterizes the studio's position: "'This is the worst thing ever written. It makes no sense. Someone's dead and then they're alive. It's too long, violent, and unfilmable.' ... So I thought, 'That's that!'"[69]

Bender brought the script to Miramax, the formerly independent studio that had recently been acquired by Disney. Harvey Weinstein – co-chairman of Miramax, along with his brother Bob – was instantly enthralled by the script and the company picked it up.[70] Pulp Fiction, the first Miramax project to get a green light after the Disney acquisition, was budgeted at $8.5 million.[3] It became the first movie that Miramax completely financed.[71] Helping hold costs down was the plan Bender executed to pay all the main actors the same amount per week, regardless of their industry status.[72] The biggest star to sign on to the project was Bruce Willis. Though he had recently appeared in several big-budget flops, he was still a major overseas draw. On the strength of his name, Miramax garnered $11 million for the film's worldwide rights, virtually ensuring its profitability.[73]

Filming

 
Willis evoked one 1950s actor in particular for Tarantino: "Aldo Ray in Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall [1956] ... I said let's go for that whole look."[74] His boxing robe, designed by Betsy Heimann, exemplifies Tarantino's notion of costume as symbolic armor.[75]

Principal photography commenced on September 20, 1993.[76] The lead offscreen talent had all worked with Tarantino on Reservoir Dogs – cinematographer Andrzej Sekuła, film editor Sally Menke, production designer David Wasco, and costume designer Betsy Heimann. According to Tarantino, "[W]e had $8 million. I wanted it to look like a $20–25 million movie. I wanted it to look like an epic. It's an epic in everything – in invention, in ambition, in length, in scope, in everything except the price tag."[77] The film, he says, was shot "on 50 ASA film stock, which is the slowest stock they make. The reason we use it is that it creates an almost no-grain image, it's lustrous. It's the closest thing we have to 50s Technicolor."[78] The largest chunk of the budget – $150,000 – went to creating the Jack Rabbit Slim's set.[79] It was built in a Culver City warehouse, where it was joined by several other sets, as well as the film's production offices.[80] The diner sequence was shot on location in Hawthorne at the Hawthorne Grill, known for its Googie architecture.[81] For the costumes, Tarantino took his inspiration from French director Jean-Pierre Melville, who believed that the clothes his characters wore were their symbolic suits of armor.[75] Tarantino cast himself in a modest-sized role as he had in Reservoir Dogs. One of his pop totems, Fruit Brute, a long-discontinued General Mills cereal, also returned from the earlier film.[82] The shoot wrapped on November 30.[83] Before Pulp Fiction's premiere, Tarantino convinced Avary to forfeit his agreed-on cowriting credit and accept a "story by" credit, so the line "Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino" could be used in advertising and onscreen.[23]

Music

Main article: Pulp Fiction (soundtrack)

No film score was composed for Pulp Fiction; Quentin Tarantino instead used an eclectic assortment of surf music, rock and roll, soul, and pop songs. Dick Dale's rendition of "Misirlou" plays during the opening credits. Tarantino chose surf music as the basic musical style for the film, but not, he insists, because of its association with surfing culture: "To me it just sounds like rock and roll, even Morricone music. It sounds like rock and roll spaghetti Western music."[84] Tarantino planned to use a power pop song, My Sharona by The Knack, during the film's rape scene, but ultimately discounted it.[85]

Some of the songs were suggested to Tarantino by his friends Chuck Kelley and Laura Lovelace, who were credited as music consultants. Lovelace also appeared in the film as Laura, a waitress; she reprises the role in Jackie Brown.[86] The soundtrack album was released along with the film in 1994. The album peaked on the Billboard 200 chart at number 21.[87] The single, Urge Overkill's cover of the Neil Diamond song "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon", reached number 59.[88]

Estella Tincknell describes how the particular combination of well-known and obscure recordings helps establish the film as a "self-consciously 'cool' text. [The] use of the mono-tracked, beat-heavy style of early 1960s U.S. 'underground' pop mixed with 'classic' ballads such as Dusty Springfield's 'Son of a Preacher Man' is crucial to the film's postmodern knowingness." She contrasts the soundtrack with that of Forrest Gump, the highest-grossing film of 1994, which also relies on period pop recordings: "[T]he version of 'the sixties' offered by Pulp Fiction ... is certainly not that of the publicly recognized counter-culture featured in Forrest Gump, but is, rather, a more genuinely marginal form of sub-culture based around a lifestyle – surfing, 'hanging' – that is resolutely apolitical." The soundtrack is central, she says, to the film's engagement with the "younger, cinematically knowledgeable spectator" it solicits.[89]

Reception

Release and box office

Pulp Fiction premiered in May 1994 at the Cannes Film Festival. The Weinsteins "hit the beach like commandos", bringing the picture's entire cast over.[90] The film was unveiled at a midnight hour screening and caused a sensation.[91][92] It won the Palme d'Or, the festival's top prize, generating a further wave of publicity.[93]

The first U.S. review of the film was published on May 23 in industry trade magazine Variety. Todd McCarthy called Pulp Fiction a "spectacularly entertaining piece of pop culture ... a startling, massive success."[94] From Cannes forward, Tarantino was on the road continuously, promoting the film.[95] Over the next few months it played in smaller festivals around Europe, building buzz: Nottingham, Munich, Taormina, Locarno, Norway, and San Sebastián.[96] Tarantino later said, "One thing that's cool is that by breaking up the linear structure, when I watch the film with an audience, it does break [the audience's] alpha state. It's like, all of a sudden, 'I gotta watch this ... I gotta pay attention.' You can almost feel everybody moving in their seats. It's actually fun to watch an audience in some ways chase after a movie."[97] In late September, it opened the New York Film Festival. The New York Times published its review the day of the opening. Janet Maslin called the film a "triumphant, cleverly disorienting journey through a demimonde that springs entirely from Mr. Tarantino's ripe imagination, a landscape of danger, shock, hilarity and vibrant local color ... [He] has come up with a work of such depth, wit and blazing originality that it places him in the front ranks of American film makers."[92]

On October 14, 1994, Pulp Fiction went into general release in the United States. As Peter Biskind describes, "It was not platformed, that is, it did not open in a handful of theaters and roll out slowly as word of mouth built, the traditional way of releasing an indie film; it went wide immediately, into 1,100 theaters."[98] In the eyes of some cultural critics, Reservoir Dogs had given Tarantino a reputation for glamorizing violence. Miramax played with the issue in its marketing campaign: "You won't know the facts till you've seen the fiction", went one slogan.[99] Pulp Fiction was the top-grossing film at the US box office its first weekend with a gross of $9,311,882, edging out a Sylvester Stallone vehicle, The Specialist, which was in its second week and playing at more than twice as many theaters. The gross claimed by Miramax was disputed by others. Warner Bros. initially reported an estimated gross of $8.9 million for The Specialist with Bob Weinstein then reporting a gross for Pulp Fiction of $9.1 million, claiming that the film was on another 100 screens that had previously been overlooked. Warners then updated their gross to $9.3 million, claiming they had made a calculation error.[100] Early Monday morning, Miramax reported a gross of $9.3 million with Warners reporting $8.9 million for The Specialist, placing Pulp Fiction first but other industry sources did not believe Miramax's numbers. Variety estimated that Pulp Fiction grossed $8.6 to $9 million for the weekend.[101]

Against its budget of $8.5 million and about $10 million in marketing costs, Pulp Fiction wound up grossing $107.93 million at the U.S. box office, making it the first "indie" film to surpass $100 million. Worldwide, it took in nearly $213 million.[102] In terms of domestic grosses, it was the tenth biggest film of 1994, even though it played on substantially fewer screens than any other film in the top 20.[103] Popular engagement with the film, such as speculation about the contents of the precious briefcase, "indicates the kind of cult status that Pulp Fiction achieved almost immediately."[104] As MovieMaker puts it, "The movie was nothing less than a national cultural phenomenon."[105] Abroad, as well: in Britain, where it opened a week after its U.S. release, not only was the film a big hit, but in book form its screenplay became the most successful in UK publishing history, a top-ten bestseller.[106]

Critical response

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 92% based on 110 reviews, with an average rating of 9.20/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "One of the most influential films of the 1990s, Pulp Fiction is a delirious post-modern mix of neo-noir thrills, pitch-black humor, and pop-culture touchstones."[107] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 94 out of 100, based on 24 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[108] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[109]

The response of major American film reviewers was widely favorable. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described it as "so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it – the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films'".[110] Richard Corliss of TIME wrote, "It towers over the year's other movies as majestically and menacingly as a gang lord at a preschool. It dares Hollywood films to be this smart about going this far. If good directors accept Tarantino's implicit challenge, the movie theater could again be a great place to live in."[111] In Newsweek, David Ansen wrote, "The miracle of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is how, being composed of secondhand, debased parts, it succeeds in gleaming like something new."[112] "You get intoxicated by it," wrote Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, "high on the rediscovery of how pleasurable a movie can be. I'm not sure I've ever encountered a filmmaker who combined discipline and control with sheer wild-ass joy the way that Tarantino does."[20] "There's a special kick that comes from watching something this thrillingly alive", wrote Peter Travers of Rolling Stone. "Pulp Fiction is indisputably great."[113]

The Los Angeles Times was one of the few major news outlets to publish a negative review on the film's opening weekend. Kenneth Turan wrote, "The writer-director appears to be straining for his effects. Some sequences, especially one involving bondage harnesses and homosexual rape, have the uncomfortable feeling of creative desperation, of someone who's afraid of losing his reputation scrambling for any way to offend sensibilities."[114] Some who reviewed it in the following weeks took more exception to the predominant critical reaction than to Pulp Fiction itself. While not panning the film, Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic felt that "the way that [it] has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. Pulp Fiction nourishes, abets, cultural slumming."[115] Responding to comparisons between Tarantino's film and the work of French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, especially his first, most famous feature, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote, "The fact that Pulp Fiction is garnering more extravagant raves than Breathless ever did tells you plenty about which kind of cultural references are regarded as more fruitful – namely, the ones we already have and don't wish to expand."[116] Observing in the National Review that "[n]o film arrives with more advance hype", John Simon was unswayed: "titillation cures neither hollowness nor shallowness".[117]

Debate about the film spread beyond the review pages, with its violence often being the theme. In The Washington Post, Donna Britt described how she was happy not to see Pulp Fiction on a recent weekend and thus avoid "discussing the rousing scene in which a gunshot sprays somebody's brains around a car interior".[118] Some commentators took exception to the film's frequent use of the word "nigger" (mentioned 18 times). In the Chicago Tribune, Todd Boyd argued that the word's recurrence "has the ability to signify the ultimate level of hipness for white males who have historically used their perception of black masculinity as the embodiment of cool".[119] In Britain, James Wood, writing in The Guardian, set the tone for much subsequent criticism: "Tarantino represents the final triumph of postmodernism, which is to empty the artwork of all content, thus avoiding its capacity to do anything except helplessly represent our agonies ... Only in this age could a writer as talented as Tarantino produce artworks so vacuous, so entirely stripped of any politics, metaphysics, or moral interest."[120]

Awards season

Around the turn of the year, Pulp Fiction was named Best Picture by the National Society of Film Critics, National Board of Review, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Boston Society of Film Critics, Society of Texas Film Critics, Southeastern Film Critics Association, and Kansas City Film Critics Circle.[121] Tarantino was named Best Director by all seven of those organizations as well as by the New York Film Critics Circle and Chicago Film Critics Association.[122] The screenplay won several prizes, with various awarding bodies ascribing credit differently. At the 52nd Golden Globe Awards, Tarantino, named as sole recipient of the Best Screenplay honor, failed to mention Avary in his acceptance speech.[123] In February 1995, the film received seven Oscar nominations – Best Picture, Director, Actor (Travolta), Supporting Actor (Jackson), Supporting Actress (Thurman), Original Screenplay, and Film Editing. Travolta, Jackson, and Thurman were each nominated as well for the 1st Screen Actors Guild Awards, presented on February 25, but none took home the honor.[124] At the Academy Awards ceremony the following month, Tarantino and Avary were announced as joint winners of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.[125] The furor around the film was still going strong: much of the March issue of Artforum was devoted to its critical dissection.[126] Pulp Fiction garnered four honors at the Independent Spirit Awards, held at the end of the month – Best Feature, Best Director, Male Lead (Jackson), and Best Screenplay (Tarantino).[127] At the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA), Tarantino and Avary shared the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay, and Jackson won for Best Supporting Actor.[128] The film was nominated for the Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association.[129]

The February 2020 issue of New York Magazine lists Pulp Fiction alongside Citizen Kane, Sunset Boulevard, Dr. Strangelove, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Conversation, Nashville, Taxi Driver, The Elephant Man, In the Bedroom, There Will Be Blood, and Roma as "The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars".[130]

Influence

Pulp Fiction quickly came to be regarded as one of the most significant films of its era. In 1995, in a special edition of Siskel & Ebert devoted to Tarantino, Gene Siskel argued that the work posed a major challenge to the "ossification of American movies with their brutal formulas". In Siskel's view,

the violent intensity of Pulp Fiction calls to mind other violent watershed films that were considered classics in their time and still are. Hitchcock's Psycho [1960], Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde [1967], and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange [1971]. Each film shook up a tired, bloated movie industry and used a world of lively lowlifes to reflect how dull other movies had become. And that, I predict, will be the ultimate honor for Pulp Fiction. Like all great films, it criticizes other movies.[131]

Ken Dancyger writes that its "imitative and innovative style" – like that of its predecessor, Reservoir Dogs – represents

a new phenomenon, the movie whose style is created from the context of movie life rather than real life. The consequence is twofold – the presumption of deep knowledge on the part of the audience of those forms such as the gangster films or Westerns, horror films or adventure films. And that the parody or alteration of that film creates a new form, a different experience for the audience.[132]

 
John Travolta, Uma Thurman and Quentin Tarantino at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, for the film's 20th anniversary tribute.

In a widely covered speech on May 31, 1995, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole attacked the American entertainment industry for peddling "nightmares of depravity". Pulp Fiction was soon associated with his charges concerning gratuitous violence. Dole had not mentioned the film; he cited two less-celebrated movies based on Tarantino screenplays, Natural Born Killers and True Romance.[133] In September 1996, Dole did accuse Pulp Fiction – which he had not seen – of promoting "the romance of heroin".[134]

Paula Rabinowitz expresses the general film industry opinion that Pulp Fiction "simultaneously resurrected John Travolta and film noir".[135] In Peter Biskind's description, it created a "guys-with-guns frenzy".[136] The film has also been labeled as a black comedy[4] and a "neo-noir".[137] Critic Geoffrey O'Brien, however, argued against the classification of Pulp Fiction into the neo-noir genre: "The old-time noir passions, the brooding melancholy and operatic death scenes, would be altogether out of place in the crisp and brightly lit wonderland that Tarantino conjures up. [It is] neither neo-noir nor a parody of noir."[138] Similarly, Nicholas Christopher calls it "more gangland camp than neo-noir",[139] and Foster Hirsch suggests that its "trippy fantasy landscape" characterizes it more definitively than any genre label.[140] Regardless, the stylistic influence of Pulp Fiction soon became apparent. Less than a year after the picture's release, British critic Jon Ronson attended the National Film School's end-of-semester screenings and assessed the impact: "Out of the five student movies I watched, four incorporated violent shoot-outs over a soundtrack of iconoclastic 70s pop hits, two climaxed with all the main characters shooting each other at once, and one had two hitmen discussing the idiosyncrasies of The Brady Bunch before offing their victim. Not since Citizen Kane has one man appeared from relative obscurity to redefine the art of moviemaking."[141] Among the first Hollywood films cited as its imitators were Destiny Turns on the Radio (1995), in which Tarantino acted,[131] Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995),[142] and 2 Days in the Valley (1996).[143] It "triggered a myriad of clones", writes Fiona Villella.[144] Internationally, according to David Desser, it "not only influenced a British brand of noir, but extended the noir vision virtually around the world".[145] Pulp Fiction's effect on film form was still reverberating in 2007, when David Denby of The New Yorker credited it with initiating the ongoing cycle of disordered cinematic narratives.[146]

Its impact on Hollywood was deeper still. According to Variety, the trajectory of Pulp Fiction from Cannes launch to commercial smash "forever altered the game" of so-called independent cinema.[147] It "cemented Miramax's place as the reigning indie superpower",[98] writes Biskind. "Pulp became the Star Wars of independents, exploding expectations for what an indie film could do at the box office."[148] The film's large financial return on its small budget

transform[ed] the industry's attitude toward the lowly indies ... spawning a flock of me-too classics divisions ... [S]mart studio executives suddenly woke up to the fact that grosses and market share, which got all the press, were not the same as profits ... Once the studios realized that they could exploit the economies of (small) scale, they more or less gave up buying or remaking the films themselves, and either bought the distributors, as Disney had Miramax, or started their own ... copy[ing] Miramax's marketing and distribution strategies.[149]

In 2001, Variety, noting the increasing number of actors switching back and forth between expensive studio films and low-budget independent or indie-style projects, suggested that the "watershed moment for movie stars" came with the decision by Willis – one of Hollywood's highest-paid performers – to appear in Pulp Fiction.[150]

And its impact was even broader than that. It has been described as a "major cultural event", an "international phenomenon" that influenced television, music, literature, and advertising.[144][151] Not long after its release, it was identified as a significant focus of attention within the growing community of Internet users.[152] Adding Pulp Fiction to his roster of The Great Movies in 2001, Roger Ebert called it "the most influential film of the decade".[153] Four years later, Time's Corliss wrote much the same: "(unquestionably) the most influential American movie of the 90s".[154]

Several scenes and images from the film achieved iconic status; in 2008, Entertainment Weekly declared, "You'd be hard-pressed, by now, to name a moment from Quentin Tarantino's film that isn't iconic."[155] Jules and Vincent's "Royale with Cheese" dialogue became famous.[156] It was referenced more than a decade and a half later in the Travolta vehicle From Paris with Love.[157] The adrenalin shot to Mia Wallace's heart is on Premiere's list of "100 Greatest Movie Moments".[158] The scene of Travolta and Thurman's characters dancing has been frequently homaged, most unambiguously in the 2005 film Be Cool, starring the same two actors.[159] The image of Travolta and Jackson's characters standing side by side in suit and tie, pointing their guns, has also become widely familiar. In 2007, BBC News reported that "London transport workers have painted over an iconic mural by 'guerrilla artist' Banksy ... The image depicted a scene from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns."[160] Certain lines were adopted popularly as catchphrases, in particular Marsellus's threat, "I'm 'a get medieval on your ass."[161] Jules's "Ezekiel" recitation was voted the fourth greatest movie speech of all time in a 2004 poll. One of the more notable homages to Jules "Biblical" quote was one Jackson himself played a part in, near the end of 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Jackson's character Col. Nick Fury, presumed dead, visits his own gravestone, on which, below Fury's name is inscribed "The path of the righteous man ..." Ezekiel 25:17.[162] In 2019, it was reported that Dominic Cummings, special political adviser to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, quoted Jules by telling Conservative MPs to "be cool like Fonzies" as political pressure built to request an extension to the date of the UK's withdrawal from the European Union.[163]

Pulp Fiction now appears in several critical assessments of all-time great films. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly named it the best film of the past quarter-century.[155] That same year, the American Film Institute's "Ten Top Ten" poll ranked it number 7 all-time in the gangster film genre.[164] In 2007, it was voted 94th overall on the AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movies list.[165] In 2005, it was named one of "Time's All-Time 100 Movies".[154] As of September 2018, it is number 54 on Metacritic's list of all-time highest scores.[166] The film ranks very highly in popular surveys. A 2008 Empire poll combining the opinions of readers, movie industry professionals, and critics named Pulp Fiction the ninth-best film of all time.[167] In a 2006 readers' poll by the British magazine Total Film, it ranked as the number three film in history.[168] It was voted as the fourth-greatest film of all time in a nationwide poll for Britain's Channel 4 in 2001.[169]

Critical analysis

Tarantino has stated that he originally planned "to do a Black Mask movie", referring to the magazine largely responsible for popularizing hardboiled detective fiction. "[I]t kind of went somewhere else".[170] Geoffrey O'Brien sees the result as connected "rather powerfully to a parallel pulp tradition: the tales of terror and the uncanny practiced by such writers as Cornell Woolrich [and] Fredric Brown ... Both dealt heavily in the realm of improbable coincidences and cruel cosmic jokes, a realm that Pulp Fiction makes its own."[171] In particular, O'Brien finds a strong affinity between the intricate plot mechanics and twists of Brown's novels and the recursive, interweaving structure of Pulp Fiction.[172] Philip French describes the film's narrative as a "circular movement or Möbius strip of a kind Resnais and Robbe-Grillet would admire".[173] James Mottram regards crime novelist Elmore Leonard, whose influence Tarantino has acknowledged, as the film's primary literary antecedent. He suggests that Leonard's "rich dialogue" is reflected in Tarantino's "popular-culture-strewn jive"; he also points to the acute, extremely dark sense of humor Leonard applies to the realm of violence as a source of inspiration.[174]

Film scholar/historian Robert Kolker sees the "flourishes, the apparent witty banality of the dialogue, the goofy fracturing of temporality [as] a patina over a pastiche. The pastiche ... is essentially of two films that Tarantino can't seem to get out of his mind: Mean Streets [1973; directed by Martin Scorsese, who loved Pulp Fiction and the way the film was told[175]] and The Killing [1956; directed by Stanley Kubrick]."[176] He contrasts Pulp Fiction with postmodern Hollywood predecessors Hudson Hawk (1991; starring Willis) and Last Action Hero (1993; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger) that "took the joke too far ... simply mocked or suggested that they were smarter than the audience" and flopped.[177] Todd McCarthy writes that the film's "striking widescreen compositions often contain objects in extreme close-up as well as vivid contrasts, sometimes bringing to mind the visual strategies of Sergio Leone", an acknowledged hero of Tarantino's.[94] To Martin Rubin, the "expansive, brightly colored widescreen visuals" evoke comedy directors such as Frank Tashlin and Blake Edwards.[178]

The movie's host of pop culture allusions, ranging from the famous image of Marilyn Monroe's skirt flying up over a subway grating to Jules addressing a soon-to-be victim as "Flock of Seagulls" because of his haircut,[179] have led many critics to discuss it within the framework of postmodernism. Describing the film in 2005 as Tarantino's "postmodern masterpiece ... to date", David Walker writes that it "is marked by its playful reverence for the 1950s ... and its constantly teasing and often deferential references to other films". He characterizes its convoluted narrative technique as "postmodern tricksiness".[180] Calling the film a "terminally hip postmodern collage", Foster Hirsch finds Pulp Fiction far from a masterpiece: "authoritative, influential, and meaningless". Set "in a world that could exist only in the movies", it is "a succulent guilty pleasure, beautifully made junk food for cinéastes".[181] O'Brien, dismissing attempts to associate the movie with film noir, argues that "Pulp Fiction is more a guided tour of an infernal theme park decorated with cultural detritus, Buddy Holly and Mamie Van Doren, fragments of blaxploitation and Roger Corman and Shogun Assassin, music out of a twenty-four-hour oldies station for which all the decades since the fifties exist simultaneously."[138] Catherine Constable takes the moment in which a needle filled with adrenalin is plunged into the comatose Mia's heart as exemplary. She proposes that it "can be seen as effecting her resurrection from the dead, simultaneously recalling and undermining the Gothic convention of the vampire's stake. On this model, the referencing of previous aesthetic forms and styles moves beyond ... empty pastiche, sustaining an 'inventive and affirmative' mode of postmodernism."[182]

Mark T. Conard asks, "[W]hat is the film about?" and answers, "American nihilism."[183] Hirsch suggests, "If the film is actually about anything other than its own cleverness, it seems dedicated to the dubious thesis that hit men are part of the human family."[143] Richard Alleva argues that "Pulp Fiction has about as much to do with actual criminality or violence as Cyrano de Bergerac with the realities of seventeenth-century France or The Prisoner of Zenda with Balkan politics." He reads the movie as a form of romance whose allure is centered in the characters' nonnaturalistic discourse, "wise-guy literate, media-smart, obscenely epigrammatic".[184] In Alan Stone's view, the "absurd dialogue", like that between Vincent and Jules in the scene where the former accidentally kills Marvin, "unexpectedly transforms the meaning of the violence cliché ... Pulp Fiction unmasks the macho myth by making it laughable and deheroicizes the power trip glorified by standard Hollywood violence."[185] Stone reads the film as "politically correct. There is no nudity and no violence directed against women ... [It] celebrates interracial friendship and cultural diversity; there are strong women and strong black men, and the director swims against the current of class stereotype."[185]

Where Stone sees a celebration, Kolker finds a vacuum: "The postmodern insouciance, violence, homophobia, and racism of Pulp Fiction were perfectly acceptable because the film didn't pretend seriousness and therefore didn't mock it."[177] Calling it the "acme of postmodern nineties filmmaking", he explains, "the postmodern is about surfaces; it is flattened spatiality in which event and character are in a steady state of reminding us that they are pop-cultural figures."[186] According to Kolker:

That's why Pulp Fiction was so popular. Not because all audiences got all or any of its references to Scorsese and Kubrick, but because the narrative and spatial structure of the film never threatened to go beyond themselves into signification. The film's cycle of racist and homophobic jokes might threaten to break out into a quite nasty view of the world, but this nastiness keeps being laughed off – by the mock intensity of the action, the prowling, confronting, perverse, confined, and airless nastiness of the world Tarantino creates.[187]

Henry A. Giroux argues that Tarantino "empties violence of any critical social consequences, offering viewers only the immediacy of shock, humor, and irony-without-insight as elements of mediation. None of these elements gets beyond the seduction of voyeuristic gazing ... [t]he facile consumption of shocking images and hallucinatory delight."[188]

Regarding the violence and nihilism in the film, Pamela Demory has suggested that Pulp Fiction should be seen in light of the short stories of Flannery O'Connor,[189] which likewise feature "religious elements, banality, and violence with grotesque humor." Discussing "the connection between violence and redemption," Demory concludes that while O'Connor's purpose is to convince readers "of the powerful force of evil in the world and of our need for grace," Tarantino "seeks to demonstrate that in spite of everything we have seen in the film – all the violence, degradation, death, crime, amoral behavior – grace is still possible; there might still be a God who doesn't judge us on merits."[190]

Homage as essence

Cinema

Pulp Fiction is full of homages to other movies. "Tarantino's characters", writes Gary Groth, "inhabit a world where the entire landscape is composed of Hollywood product. Tarantino is a cinematic kleptomaniac – he literally can't help himself."[191] Two scenes in particular have prompted discussion of the film's highly intertextual style. Many have assumed that the dance sequence at Jack Rabbit Slim's was intended as a reference to Travolta's star-making performance as Tony Manero in the epochal Saturday Night Fever (1977); Tarantino, however, credits a scene in the Jean-Luc Godard film Bande à part (1964) with the inspiration. According to the filmmaker;

Everybody thinks that I wrote this scene just to have John Travolta dancing. But the scene existed before John Travolta was cast. But once he was cast, it was like, "Great. We get to see John dance. All the better."... My favorite musical sequences have always been in Godard, because they just come out of nowhere. It's so infectious, so friendly. And the fact that it's not a musical, but he's stopping the movie to have a musical sequence, makes it all the more sweet.[192]

Jerome Charyn argues that, beyond "all the better", Travolta's presence is essential to the power of the scene, and of the film:

Travolta's entire career becomes "backstory", the myth of a movie star who has fallen out of favor, but still resides in our memory as the king of disco. We keep waiting for him to shed his paunch, put on a white polyester suit, and enter the 2001 Odyssey club in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where he will dance for us and never, never stop. Daniel Day-Lewis couldn't have woken such a powerful longing in us. He isn't part of America's own mad cosmology ... Tony Manero [is] an angel sitting on Vince's shoulder ... [Vince and Mia's] actual dance may be closer to the choreography of Anna Karina's shuffle with her two bumbling gangster boyfriends in Bande à part, but even that reference is lost to us, and we're with Tony again ...[193]

Estella Tincknell notes that while the "diner setting seems to be a simulacrum of a 'fifties' restaurant ... the twist contest is a musical sequence which evokes 'the sixties,' while Travolta's dance performance inevitably references 'the seventies' and his appearance in Saturday Night Fever. ... The 'past' thus becomes a more general 'pastness' in which the stylistic signifiers of various decades are loaded in to a single moment."[194] She also argues that in this passage the film "briefly shifts from its habitually ironic discourse to one that references the conventions of the classic film musical and in doing so makes it possible for the film to inhabit an affective space that goes beyond stylistic allusion."[194]

The pivotal moment in which Marsellus crosses the street in front of Butch's car and notices him evokes the scene in which Marion Crane's boss sees her under similar circumstances in Psycho (1960).[195] Marsellus and Butch are soon held captive by Maynard and Zed, "two sadistic honkies straight out of Deliverance" (1972), directed by John Boorman.[185] Zed shares a name with Sean Connery's character in Boorman's follow-up, the science-fiction film Zardoz (1974). When Butch decides to rescue Marsellus, in Glyn White's words, "he finds a trove of items with film-hero resonances".[196] Critics have identified these weapons with a range of possible allusions:

At the conclusion of the scene, a portentous line of Marsellus's echoes one from the crime drama Charley Varrick (1973), directed by another of Tarantino's heroes, Don Siegel; the name of the character who speaks it there is Maynard.[198]

David Bell argues that far from going against the "current of class stereotype", this scene, like Deliverance, "mobilize[s] a certain construction of poor white country folk – and particularly their sexualization ... 'rustic sexual expression often takes the form of homosexual rape' in American movies."[199] Stephen Paul Miller believes the Pulp Fiction scene goes down much easier than the one it echoes: "The buggery perpetrated is not at all as shocking as it was in Deliverance ... The nineties film reduces seventies competition, horror, and taboo into an entertainingly subtle adrenaline play – a fiction, a pulp fiction."[200] Giroux reads the rape scene homage similarly: "in the end Tarantino's use of parody is about repetition, transgression, and softening the face of violence by reducing it to the property of film history."[201] In Groth's view, the crucial difference is that "in Deliverance the rape created the film's central moral dilemma whereas in Pulp Fiction it was merely 'the single weirdest day of [Butch's] life.'"[202] ("American Me did it too," Tarantino observed. "There's like three butt-fucking scenes in American Me. That's definitely the one to beat in that particular category!"[203])

Neil Fulwood focuses on Butch's weapon selection, writing, "Here, Tarantino's love of movies is at its most open and nonjudgemental, tipping a nod to the noble and the notorious, as well as sending up his own reputation as an enfant terrible of movie violence. Moreover, the scene makes a sly comment about the readiness of cinema to seize upon whatever is to hand for its moments of mayhem and murder."[197] White asserts that "the katana he finally, and significantly, selects identifies him with ... honourable heroes."[196] Conard argues that the first three items symbolize a nihilism that Butch is rejecting. The traditional Japanese sword, in contrasts, represents a culture with a well-defined moral code and thus connects Butch with a more meaningful approach to life.[204]

The biker film Nam's Angels is also shown with Fabienne characterizing it as "A motorcycle movie, I'm not sure the name."[205]

Television

Robert Miklitsch argues that "Tarantino's telephilia" may be more central to the guiding sensibility of Pulp Fiction than the filmmaker's love for rock 'n' roll and even cinema:

Talking about his generation, one that came of age in the '70s, Tarantino has commented that the "number one thing we all shared wasn't music, that was a Sixties thing. Our culture was television." A random list of the TV programs referenced in Pulp Fiction confirms his observation: Speed Racer, Clutch Cargo, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, The Avengers, The Three Stooges, The Flintstones, I Spy, Green Acres, Kung Fu, Happy Days, and last but not least, Mia's fictional pilot, Fox Force Five.[206]

"The above list, with the possible exception of The Avengers," writes Miklitsch, "suggests that Pulp Fiction has less of an elective affinity with the cinematic avant-gardism of Godard than with mainstream network programming."[207] Jonathan Rosenbaum had brought TV into his analysis of the Tarantino/Godard comparison, acknowledging that the directors were similar in wanting to cram everything they like onscreen: "But the differences between what Godard likes and what Tarantino likes and why are astronomical; it's like comparing a combined museum, library, film archive, record shop, and department store with a jukebox, a video-rental outlet, and an issue of TV Guide."[116]

Sharon Willis focuses on the way a television show (Clutch Cargo) marks the beginning of, and plays on through, the scene between young Butch and his father's comrade-in-arms. The Vietnam War veteran is played by Christopher Walken, whose presence in the role evokes his performance as a traumatized G.I. in the Vietnam War movie The Deer Hunter (1978). Willis writes that "when Captain Koons enters the living room, we see Walken in his function as an image retrieved from a repertoire of 1970s television and movie versions of ruined masculinity in search of rehabilitation ... [T]he gray light of the television presiding over the scene seems to inscribe the ghostly paternal gaze."[208] Miklitsch asserts that, for some critics, the film is a "prime example of the pernicious ooze-like influence of mass culture exemplified by their bête noire: TV."[207] Kolker might not disagree, arguing that "Pulp Fiction is a simulacrum of our daily exposure to television; its homophobes, thugs and perverts, sentimental boxers and pimp promoters move through a series of long-take tableaux: we watch, laugh, and remain with nothing to comprehend."[187]

Notable motifs

The mysterious 666 briefcase

 
Vincent "stares ... transfixed" into the glowing case, as specified in Tarantino's screenplay.[209]
 
Vincent's demeanor reinforces the allusion to the scene in Kiss Me Deadly (1955) in which Lily Carver, a.k.a. Gabrielle (Gaby Rodgers), gazes into the glowing case.[210]

The combination of the mysterious suitcase lock is 666, the "Number of the Beast". Tarantino has said there is no explanation for its contents – it is simply a MacGuffin, a pure plot device. Originally, the case was to contain diamonds, but this was seen as too mundane. For filming purposes, it contained a hidden orange light bulb that produced an otherworldly glow when the case was opened.[211] In a 2007 video interview with fellow director and friend Robert Rodriguez, Tarantino purportedly "reveals" the secret contents of the briefcase, but the film cuts out and skips the scene in the style employed in Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007), with an intertitle that reads "Missing Reel". The interview resumes with Rodriguez discussing how radically the "knowledge" of the briefcase's contents alters one's understanding of the movie.[212]

Despite Tarantino's statements, many solutions to what one scholar calls this "unexplained postmodern puzzle" have been proposed.[104] A strong similarity has often been observed with Robert Aldrich's 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly. That movie, features a glowing briefcase housing an atomic explosive.[213] In their review of Alex Cox's 1984 film Repo Man in The Daily Telegraph, Nick Cowen and Hari Patience suggest that Pulp Fiction may also owe "a debt of inspiration" to the glowing car trunk in that film.[214] In scholar Paul Gormley's view, this connection with Kiss Me Deadly, and a similar one with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), makes it possible to read the eerie glow as symbolic of violence itself.[215] The idea that the briefcase contains Marsellus's soul gained popular currency in the mid-1990s. Analyzing the notion, Roger Ebert dismissed it as "nothing more than a widely distributed urban legend given false credibility by the mystique of the Net".[216]

Jules' Bible passage

Jules ritually recites what he describes as a biblical passage, Ezekiel 25:17, before he executes someone. The passage is heard three times – in the introductory sequence in which Jules and Vincent reclaim Marsellus's briefcase from the doomed Brett; that same recitation a second time, at the beginning of "The Bonnie Situation", which overlaps the end of the earlier sequence; and in the epilogue at the diner. The first version of the passage is as follows:

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and goodwill shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know My name is the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon thee.

The second version, from the diner scene, is identical except for the final line: "And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you."

 
"And I will strike down ..."
Conclusion of the "Ezekiel 25:17" monologue and Brett's murder
Problems playing this file? See media help.

While the final two sentences of Jules's speech are similar to the actual cited passage, the first two are fabricated from various biblical phrases.[217] The text of Ezekiel 25 preceding verse 17 indicates that God's wrath is retribution for the hostility of the Philistines. In the King James Version from which Jules's speech is adapted, Ezekiel 25:17 reads in its entirety:

And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay My vengeance upon them.[218]

Tarantino's primary inspiration for the speech was the work of Japanese martial arts star Sonny Chiba. Its text and its identification as Ezekiel 25:17 derive from an almost identical creed that appears at the beginning of the Chiba movie Karate Kiba (The Bodyguard; 1976), where it is both shown as a scrolling text and read by an offscreen narrator.[219]

The version seen at the beginning of The Bodyguard (1976) is as follows:

The path of the righteous man and defender is beset on all sides by the inequity of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper, and the father of lost children. And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious anger, who poison and destroy my brothers; and they shall know that I am Chiba the Bodyguard when I shall lay my vengeance upon them!

In the 1980s television series Kage no Gundan (Shadow Warriors), Chiba's character would lecture the villain-of-the-week about how the world must be rid of evil before killing him.[220] A killer delivers a similar biblical rant in Modesty Blaise, the hardback but pulp-style novel Vincent is shown with in two scenes.[221]

Two critics who have analyzed the role of the speech find different ties between Jules's transformation and the issue of postmodernity. Gormley argues that unlike the film's other major characters – Marsellus aside – Jules is:

linked to a "thing" beyond postmodern simulation ... [T]his is perhaps most marked when he moves on from being a simulation of a Baptist preacher, spouting Ezekiel because it was "just a cool thing to say ..." In his conversion, Jules is shown to be cognizant of a place beyond this simulation, which, in this case, the film constructs as God.[222]

Adele Reinhartz writes that the "depth of Jules's transformation" is indicated by the difference in his two deliveries of the passage: "In the first, he is a majestic and awe-inspiring figure, proclaiming the prophecy with fury and self-righteousness ... In the second ... he appears to be a different sort of man altogether ... [I]n true postmodern fashion, [he] reflects on the meaning of his speech and provides several different ways that it might pertain to his current situation."[223] Similar to Gormley, Conard argues that as Jules reflects on the passage, it dawns on him "that it refers to an objective framework of value and meaning that is absent from his life"; to Conard, this contrasts with the film's prevalent representation of a nihilistic culture.[224] Rosenbaum finds much less in Jules's revelation: "[T]he spiritual awakening at the end of Pulp Fiction, which Jackson performs beautifully, is a piece of jive avowedly inspired by kung-fu movies. It may make you feel good, but it certainly doesn't leave you any wiser."[225]

The bathroom

Much of Pulp Fiction's action revolves around characters who are either in the bathroom or need to use the toilet. To a lesser extent, Tarantino's other films also feature this narrative element.[226] At Jack Rabbit Slim's, Mia goes to "powder her nose" – literally; she snorts coke in the restroom, surrounded by a bevy of women vainly primping. Butch and Fabienne play an extended scene in their motel bathroom, he in the shower, she brushing her teeth; the next morning, but just a few seconds later in screen time, she is again brushing her teeth. As Jules and Vincent confront Brett and two of his pals, a fourth man is hiding in the bathroom – his actions will lead to Jules' transformative "moment of clarity". After Marvin's absurd death, Vincent and Jules wash up in Jimmie's bathroom, where they get into a contretemps over a bloody hand towel.[146] When the diner hold-up turns into a standoff, "Honey Bunny" whines, "I gotta go pee!"[227]

As described by Peter and Will Brooker, "In three significant moments Vincent retires to the bathroom [and] returns to an utterly changed world where death is threatened."[228] The threat increases in magnitude as the narrative progresses chronologically, and is realized in the third instance:

  1. Vincent and Jules's diner breakfast and philosophical conversation is aborted by Vincent's bathroom break; an armed robbery ensues while Vincent is reading on the toilet.
  2. While Vincent is in the bathroom worrying about the possibility of going too far with Marsellus's wife, Mia mistakes his heroin for cocaine, snorts it, and overdoses.
  3. During a stakeout at Butch's apartment, Vincent emerges from the toilet with his book and is killed by Butch.

In the Brookers' analysis, "Through Vince ... we see the contemporary world as utterly contingent, transformed, disastrously, in the instant you are not looking."[228] Fraiman finds it particularly significant that Vincent is reading Modesty Blaise in two of these instances. She links this fact with the traditional derisive view of women as "the archetypal consumers of pulp":

Locating popular fiction in the bathroom, Tarantino reinforces its association with shit, already suggested by the dictionary meanings of "pulp" that preface the movie: moist, shapeless matter; also, lurid stories on cheap paper. What we have then is a series of damaging associations – pulp, women, shit – that taint not only male producers of mass-market fiction but also male consumers. Perched on the toilet with his book, Vincent is feminized by sitting instead of standing as well as by his trashy tastes; preoccupied by the anal, he is implicitly infantilized and homosexualized; and the seemingly inevitable result is being pulverized by Butch with a Czech M61 submachine gun. That this fate has to do with Vincent's reading habits is strongly suggested by a slow tilt from the book on the floor directly up to the corpse spilled into the tub.[229]

Willis reads Pulp Fiction in almost precisely the opposite direction, finding "its overarching project as a drive to turn shit into gold. This is one way of describing the project of redeeming and recycling popular culture, especially the popular culture of one's childhood, as is Tarantino's wont as well as his stated aim."[208] Despite that, argues Fraiman, "Pulp Fiction demonstrates ... that even an open pulpophile like Tarantino may continue to feel anxious and emasculated by his preferences."[227]

NFT dispute

In November 2021, Miramax filed a lawsuit against Tarantino who released seven NFTs based on uncut and unseen scenes of Pulp Fiction and including the original handwritten script “revealing secrets about the film and its creator.” Miramax claimed they own the film rights.[230] However, Tarantino disputed the lawsuit and claimed he had rights to the film script in written form.[231] The matter was later settled with Miramax’s lawyers filing a brief statement in court: "The parties have agreed to put this matter behind them and look forward to collaborating with each other on future projects, including possible NFTs."[232]

Accolades

Main article: List of accolades received by Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction won eight major awards from a total of twenty-six nominations, including a Best Original Screenplay win at the 67th Academy Awards.[93][125][128][233][234] Also, in the balloting by the National Society of Film Critics, Samuel L. Jackson was the runner-up in both the Best Actor and the Best Supporting Actor categories.[234]

American Film Institute Lists

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Walken's speech to the young Butch has been described as a "bravura performance of patriotic zeal and scatological fetishism worthy of a Kubrickian anti-hero".[39]

References

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  173. ^ French, Philip (March 26, 2006). "Pulp Fiction". The Observer. London. from the original on August 17, 2016. Retrieved December 28, 2008.
  174. ^ Mottram (2006), p. 228. See also p. 77.
  175. ^ Martin Scorsese (guest host), Roger Ebert (host) (February 26, 2000). "Martin Scorsese's Best Films of the '90s". Roger Ebert & the Movies. Season 1. Episode 26.
  176. ^ Kolker (2000), p. 249.
  177. ^ a b Kolker (2000), p. 281.
  178. ^ Rubin (1999), p. 174.
  179. ^ Tarantino (1994), pp. 24, 27; Conard (2006), p. 108.
  180. ^ Walker (2005), p. 315.
  181. ^ Hirsch (1997), pp. 360, 340.
  182. ^ Constable (2004), p. 54.
  183. ^ Conard (2006), p. 125.
  184. ^ Alleva, Richard (November 18, 1994). . Commonweal. Archived from the original on November 30, 2007. Retrieved October 8, 2007.
  185. ^ a b c Stone, Alan (April–May 1995). . Boston Review. Archived from the original on June 21, 2007. Retrieved September 18, 2007.
  186. ^ Kolker (2000), pp. 249, 250.
  187. ^ a b Kolker (2000), p. 250.
  188. ^ Giroux (1996), p. 77.
  189. ^ [Pamela H. Demory, "Violence and Transcendence in Pulp Fiction and Flannery O'Connor" in The Image of Violence in Literature, the Media, and Society: Selected Papers [from the] 1995 Conference [of the] Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, ed. and intro., Will Wright and Steven Kaplan (Pueblo, Co.: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, 1995): 187-194.]
  190. ^ [Quoted in Flannery O'Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism, ed. R. Neil Scott (Milledgeville, Georgia: Timberlane Books, 2002), p. 185]
  191. ^ Groth (1997), p. 189.
  192. ^ Enhanced Trivia Track, ch. 9, Pulp Fiction DVD (Buena Vista Home Entertainment).
  193. ^ Charyn (2006), p. 106.
  194. ^ a b Tincknell (2006), p. 140.
  195. ^ Dawson (1995), p. 178; Polan (2000), p. 19.
  196. ^ a b c d e f g White (2002), p. 342.
  197. ^ a b c d e f Fulwood (2003), p. 22.
  198. ^ Groth (1997), pp. 188–9; Dinshaw (1997), p. 186; Mottram (2006), pp. 75–76. For Tarantino's admiration of Siegel, see Dawson (1995), p. 142.
  199. ^ Bell (2000), p. 87.
  200. ^ Miller (1999), p. 76.
  201. ^ Giroux (1996), p. 78.
  202. ^ Groth (1997), p. 188.
  203. ^ Rolling Stone, November 3, 1994, p110
  204. ^ Conard (2006), pp. 125, 133.
  205. ^ "Pulp Fiction (1994, part 4 of 5)". filmsite.org.[permanent dead link]
  206. ^ Miklitsch, pp. 15, 16. Note that while the Three Stooges did have an original TV series that ran briefly in the mid-1960s, they were most familiar from their cinematic shorts that were syndicated to television.
  207. ^ a b Miklitsch, p. 16.
  208. ^ a b Willis (1997), p. 195.
  209. ^ Tarantino (1994), p. 28.
  210. ^ Gallefant (2006), p. 46.
  211. ^ "What's In the Briefcase?". Snopes.com. August 17, 2007. Archived from the original on May 18, 2018. Retrieved September 13, 2007.
  212. ^ "Rodriguez and Tarantino: Artist On Artist". MySpace.com. April 6, 2007. from the original on January 20, 2013. Retrieved September 13, 2007.
  213. ^ See, e.g., Groth (1997), p. 188; Polan (2000), p. 20; "What's in the Briefcase in Pulp Fiction?". The Straight Dope. May 31, 2000. from the original on November 20, 2008. Retrieved September 18, 2007.
  214. ^ Nick Cowen; Hari Patience (August 16, 2008). "Wheels on Film: Repo Man". The Daily Telegraph. from the original on August 13, 2018. Retrieved July 14, 2012.
  215. ^ Gormley (2005), p. 164.
  216. ^ Ebert 1997, p. 188.
  217. ^ Reinhartz (2003), p. 108.
  218. ^ "The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, 25". The Holy Bible: King James Version. from the original on January 31, 2010. Retrieved September 13, 2007.
  219. ^ Thomas (2003) notes that instead of "the Lord", this version reads "... and they shall know that I am Chiba the Bodyguard ..." (pp. 61–62). Conard (2006) claims that the text originates from the film Bodigaado Kiba (Bodyguard Kiba or The Bodyguard; 1973) and that the end phrase there is "And you will know my name is Chiba the Bodyguard ..." (p. 135, n. 4).
  220. ^ Enhanced Trivia Track, ch. 4, Pulp Fiction DVD (Buena Vista Home Entertainment).
  221. ^ Enhanced Trivia Track, ch. 25, Pulp Fiction DVD (Buena Vista Home Entertainment).
  222. ^ Gormley (2005), p. 167.
  223. ^ Reinhartz (2003), pp. 106, 107.
  224. ^ Conard (2006), p. 130.
  225. ^ Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "Allusion Profusion (Ed Wood, Pulp Fiction)", Chicago Reader, October 21, 1994. Note that the avowed inspiration is actually a TV show, Kung Fu.
  226. ^ White, Mike & Mike Thompson (Spring 1995). . Cashiers du Cinemart. Archived from the original on February 11, 2012. Retrieved December 31, 2006.
  227. ^ a b Fraiman (2003), p. 15.
  228. ^ a b Brooker and Brooker (1996), p. 239.
  229. ^ Fraiman (2003), p. 14. Fraiman's identification of the submachine gun as a Czech M61 matches the description in the screenplay: Tarantino (1994), p. 96. Visual evidence suggests that a different gun was actually used in the film, possibly a MAC-10 or similar model.
  230. ^ Diaz, Johnny (November 17, 2021). "Miramax Sues Quentin Tarantino Over Planned 'Pulp Fiction' NFTs". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on December 28, 2021. Retrieved November 17, 2021.
  231. ^ "Quentin Tarantino sued over 'Pulp Fiction' NFT plan". news.yahoo.com. from the original on November 17, 2021. Retrieved November 17, 2021.
  232. ^ Maddaus, Gene (September 9, 2022). "Quentin Tarantino Settles With Miramax Over 'Pulp Fiction' NFT Auction". Variety.
  233. ^ "Awards Search/Pulp Fiction". Hollywood Foreign Press Association. from the original on August 7, 2007. Retrieved September 12, 2007.
  234. ^ a b Maslin, Janet (January 4, 1995). ""Pulp Fiction" Gets Top Prize From National Film Critics". The New York Times. from the original on July 9, 2017. Retrieved September 27, 2007.

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External links

 
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March 13, 2023
pulp, fiction, this, article, about, film, other, uses, pulp, fiction, 1994, american, crime, film, written, directed, quentin, tarantino, conceived, with, roger, avary, starring, john, travolta, samuel, jackson, bruce, willis, roth, ving, rhames, thurman, tel. This article is about the film For other uses see Pulp fiction Pulp Fiction is a 1994 American crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino who conceived it with Roger Avary 4 Starring John Travolta Samuel L Jackson Bruce Willis Tim Roth Ving Rhames and Uma Thurman it tells several stories of crime in Los Angeles California The title refers to the pulp magazines and hardboiled crime novels popular during the mid 20th century known for their graphic violence and punchy dialogue Pulp FictionTheatrical release posterDirected byQuentin TarantinoWritten byQuentin TarantinoStory byQuentin Tarantino Roger AvaryProduced byLawrence BenderStarringJohn Travolta Samuel L Jackson Uma Thurman Harvey Keitel Tim Roth Amanda Plummer Maria de Medeiros Ving Rhames Eric Stoltz Rosanna Arquette Christopher Walken Bruce WillisCinematographyAndrzej SekulaEdited bySally MenkeProductioncompaniesA Band Apart Jersey FilmsDistributed byMiramax FilmsRelease datesMay 21 1994 1994 05 21 Cannes October 14 1994 1994 10 14 United States Running time154 minutes 1 CountryUnited StatesLanguageEnglishBudget 8 8 5 million 2 3 Box office 213 9 million 2 Tarantino wrote Pulp Fiction in 1992 and 1993 incorporating scenes that Avary originally wrote for True Romance 1993 Its plot occurs out of chronological order The film is also self referential from its opening moments beginning with a title card that gives two dictionary definitions of pulp Considerable screen time is devoted to monologues and casual conversations with eclectic dialogue revealing each character s perspectives on several subjects and the film features an ironic combination of humor and strong violence TriStar Pictures reportedly turned down the script as too demented Miramax co chairman Harvey Weinstein was enthralled however and the film became the first that Miramax fully financed Pulp Fiction won the Palme d Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and was a major critical and commercial success It was nominated for seven awards at the 67th Academy Awards including Best Picture and won Best Original Screenplay it earned Travolta Jackson and Thurman Academy Award nominations and boosted their careers Its development marketing distribution and profitability had a sweeping effect on independent cinema Pulp Fiction is widely regarded as Tarantino s masterpiece with particular praise for its screenwriting 5 The self reflexivity unconventional structure and extensive homage and pastiche have led critics to describe it as a touchstone of postmodern film It is often considered a cultural watershed influencing films and other media that adopted elements of its style The cast was also widely praised with Travolta Thurman and Jackson earning particular acclaim In 2008 Entertainment Weekly named it the best film since 1983 6 and it has appeared on many critics lists of the greatest films ever made In 2013 Pulp Fiction was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as culturally historically or aesthetically significant 7 8 9 Contents 1 Plot 1 1 Narrative structure 1 2 Summary 2 Cast 3 Production 3 1 Writing 3 2 Financing 3 3 Filming 3 4 Music 4 Reception 4 1 Release and box office 4 2 Critical response 4 3 Awards season 5 Influence 6 Critical analysis 6 1 Homage as essence 6 1 1 Cinema 6 1 2 Television 6 2 Notable motifs 6 2 1 The mysterious 666 briefcase 6 2 2 Jules Bible passage 6 2 3 The bathroom 7 NFT dispute 8 Accolades 9 See also 10 Notes 11 References 12 Bibliography 13 External linksPlotNarrative structure Pulp Fiction s narrative is told out of chronological order and follows three main interrelated stories that each have a different protagonist Vincent Vega a hitman Butch Coolidge a prizefighter and Jules Winnfield Vincent s business partner 10 The film begins with a diner hold up staged by a couple then begins to shift from one storyline to another before returning to the diner for the conclusion There are seven narrative sequences the three primary storylines are preceded by intertitles Prologue The Diner i Prelude to Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace s Wife Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace s Wife Prelude to The Gold Watch a flashback b present The Gold Watch The Bonnie Situation Epilogue The Diner ii If the seven sequences were ordered chronologically they would run 4a 2 6 1 7 3 4b 5 Sequences 1 and 7 partially overlap and are presented from different points of view as do sequences 2 and 6 According to Philip Parker the structural form is an episodic narrative with circular events adding a beginning and end and allowing references to elements of each separate episode to be made throughout the narrative 11 Other analysts describe the structure as a circular narrative 12 Summary Hitmen Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega arrive at an apartment to retrieve a briefcase for their boss gangster Marsellus Wallace from a business partner Brett After Vincent checks the contents of the briefcase Jules shoots one of Brett s associates He declaims a passage from the Bible and he and Vincent kill Brett for trying to double cross Marsellus They take the briefcase to Marsellus and wait while he bribes boxer Butch Coolidge to take a dive in his upcoming match The next day Vincent purchases heroin from his drug dealer Lance He shoots up and drives to meet Marsellus s wife Mia having agreed to escort her while Marsellus is out of town They eat at Jack Rabbit Slim s a 1950s themed restaurant and participate in a twist contest then return home While Vincent is in the bathroom Mia finds his heroin and snorts it mistaking it for cocaine She suffers an overdose Vincent rushes her to Lance s house where they revive her with an injection of adrenaline into her heart Vincent drops Mia off at her home and the two agree never to tell Marsellus about the incident Butch bets the bribe money on himself and double crosses Marsellus winning the bout but accidentally killing his opponent as well Knowing that Marsellus will send hitmen after him he prepares to flee with his girlfriend Fabienne but discovers she has forgotten to pack a gold watch passed down to him through his family Returning to his apartment to retrieve it he notices a gun on the kitchen counter and hears the toilet flush When Vincent exits the bathroom Butch shoots him dead and departs When Marsellus spots Butch stopped at a traffic light Butch rams his car into him then gets hit by an oncoming vehicle leaving both of them injured and dazed Once Marsellus regains consciousness he shoots at Butch chasing him into a pawnshop Butch gains the upper hand and is about to shoot Marsellus but the shop owner Maynard captures them at gunpoint and binds and gags them in the basement Maynard and his accomplice Zed take Marsellus into another room and begin to rape him leaving the gimp a silent figure in a bondage suit to watch over Butch Butch breaks loose and knocks the gimp unconscious Instead of fleeing he decides to save Marsellus and arms himself with a katana from the pawnshop He kills Maynard and frees Marsellus who shoots Zed in the crotch with Maynard s shotgun Marsellus informs Butch that they are even and to tell no one about the rape and to depart Los Angeles forever Butch picks up Fabienne on Zed s motorcycle and they ride away Earlier after Vincent and Jules have killed Brett in his apartment another man bursts out of the bathroom and fires at them but every shot misses after briefly checking themselves for wounds Jules and Vincent shoot him dead While driving away with Brett s associate Marvin Jules professes that their survival was a miracle which Vincent disputes Vincent accidentally shoots Marvin in the face killing him and covering Vincent Jules and the car interior in blood in broad daylight They hide the car at the home of Jules s friend Jimmie who demands they deal with the problem before his wife Bonnie comes home Marsellus sends a cleaner Winston Wolfe who directs Jules and Vincent to clean the car hide the body in the trunk dispose of their bloody clothes and take the car to a junkyard At a diner Jules tells Vincent that he plans to retire from his life of crime convinced that their miraculous survival at the apartment was a sign of divine intervention While Vincent is in the bathroom a couple Pumpkin and Honey Bunny hold up the restaurant and demand Marsellus s briefcase Jules distracts Pumpkin with its contents and then overpowers him and holds him at gunpoint Honey Bunny becomes hysterical and points her gun at Jules Vincent returns with his gun aimed at her but Jules defuses the situation He recites the biblical passage expresses ambivalence about his life of crime and allows the robbers to take his cash and leave Jules and Vincent leave the diner with the briefcase in hand CastJohn Travolta as Vincent Vega Jules partner in crime working for Marsellus Wallace Tarantino cast Travolta in Pulp Fiction because Michael Madsen who had played Vic Vega in Reservoir Dogs chose to appear in Kevin Costner s Wyatt Earp instead Madsen has since expressed regret over his decision 13 Harvey Weinstein pushed for Daniel Day Lewis in the part 14 Travolta accepted a reduced rate sources say either US 100 000 or US 140 000 but the film s success and his Academy Award nomination for Best Actor revitalized his career 15 Vincent is the brother of Vic Vega aka Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs 1992 and in 2004 Tarantino discussed an idea for a movie starring Travolta and Madsen as the Vega Brothers the concept remains unrealized 16 Samuel L Jackson as Jules Winnfield Vincent s partner in crime working for Marsellus Wallace Jackson s first audition was overshadowed by Paul Calderon Jackson had assumed the audition was merely a reading Weinstein convinced him to audition a second time and his performance of the final diner scene won over Tarantino 17 Jules was originally scripted with a giant afro 18 but Tarantino s PA mistakenly bought a Jheri curled wig Tarantino was enraged but Jackson persuaded him to keep it since the hairstyle had gained popularity through the rap group N W A 19 Film critic Owen Gleiberman took it as a tacit comic statement about the ghettoization of Black people in movies 20 Jackson received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor Calderon appears in the film as Paul a bartender at Marsellus s social club as well as Marsellus s assistant Tarantino wrote the role for Laurence Fishburne who turned it down According to Tarantino Fishburne refused it because his team did not see it as a starring role 21 Fishburne later said he turned it down because he felt the film glamorized heroin 22 Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace Wallace s wife and an aspiring actress Miramax favored Holly Hunter or Meg Ryan for the role of Mia Alfre Woodard and Meg Tilly were also considered but Tarantino wanted Thurman after their first meeting 23 24 She dominated the film s promotional material appearing on a bed with cigarette in hand She was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress Despite being launched into the celebrity A list Thurman chose not to do any big budget films until Batman amp Robin 1997 three years later 25 Harvey Keitel as Winston Wolfe A cleaner who aids Jules and Vincent Tarantino wrote the part of Wolfe for Keitel who had starred in Reservoir Dogs and was instrumental in its production In Tarantino s words Harvey had been my favorite actor since I was 16 years old 26 Keitel had played a similarly employed character in Point of No Return 1993 citation needed Tim Roth as Ringo Pumpkin A burglar and Yolanda s boyfriend Roth had starred in Reservoir Dogs alongside Keitel He had used an American accent in Reservoir Dogs but used his natural London accent in Pulp Fiction Though Tarantino had written the part with Roth in mind TriStar head Mike Medavoy preferred Johnny Depp or Christian Slater 27 Early in development Tarantino had contemplated casting Roth as Vincent and Gary Oldman as Jules rewriting the characters as two English guys 28 Amanda Plummer as Yolanda Honey Bunny Ringo s girlfriend and partner in crime Tarantino wrote the role of Yolanda for Plummer to partner her with Roth Roth had introduced Tarantino to her saying I want to work with Amanda in one of your films but she has to have a really big gun 29 Maria de Medeiros as Fabienne Butch s girlfriend Tarantino met de Medeiros a Portuguese actress while traveling with Reservoir Dogs around the European film festival circuit 30 Ving Rhames as Marsellus Wallace A crime boss and employer of Jules and Vincent Before Rhames was cast the part of Wallace was initially offered to Max Julien and Sid Haig but both turned down the role 31 32 According to Bender Rhames gave one of the best auditions I ve ever seen 24 His acclaimed performance led to him being cast in big budget features such as Mission Impossible 1996 Con Air 1997 and Out of Sight 1998 33 Eric Stoltz as Lance Vincent s drug dealer 34 Gary Oldman was the preferred choice among TriStar executives based on his portrayal of drug dealing pimp Drexl Spivey in True Romance 1993 35 36 Rosanna Arquette as Jody Lance s wife Pam Grier read for the role but Tarantino did not believe audiences would find it plausible for Lance to yell at her 37 Tarantino later cast Grier as the lead role for Jackie Brown Ellen DeGeneres also read for the part of Jody 38 Rosanna s sister Alexis then known as Robert Arquette also appears in the film as a man emerging from a bathroom to shoot at and miss Vincent and Jules who then kill him Christopher Walken as Captain Koons A USAF veteran of the Vietnam War who delivers a young Butch his father s coveted gold watch During Koons monologue which is interspersed with colorful descriptions of the Viet Cong he mentions a soldier called Winocki a Joe Winocki John Garfield is a character in the 1943 film Air Force directed by Howard Hawks one of Tarantino s favorite directors 40 Tarantino played a character named Desmond Winocki in a guest appearance on an episode of All American Girl titled Pulp Sitcom 41 Bruce Willis as Butch Coolidge An aging boxer on the run from Marsellus having double crossed him Willis was already a star but most of his recent films had been critical and box office disappointments As related by Peter Bart participating in the modestly budgeted film meant lowering his salary and risking his star status but the strategy paid off royally Pulp Fiction not only brought Willis new respect as an actor but also earned him several million dollars 42 Willis appearance and physical presence were crucial to Tarantino Bruce has the look of a 50s actor I can t think of any other star that has that look 43 Butch s look was modeled on Aldo Ray in Nightfall and his demeanor based on Ralph Meeker s portrayal of Mike Hammer in Robert Aldrich s Kiss Me Deadly 44 Chandler Lindauer plays a young Butch Bronagh Gallagher plays Jody s friend Trudi who does little but smoke a bong during the scene where Vincent revives Mia According to author Jason Bailey Quentin thought it would be funny to have this casual observer who just happened to be there All of this was born out of the experience of when you go to someone s house to buy drugs there are always people who are just there 45 Phil LaMarr portrays Marvin an associate of Jules and Vincent LaMarr auditioned for Tarantino after both had done a show for an improv group a few months prior 46 He read for the roles of Jules Winnfield and Brett before being cast as Marvin 46 Tarantino appears as Jules friend Jimmie in whose house they clean up a murder Tarantino was unsure whether to play Jimmie or Lance choosing Jimmie as he wanted to be behind the camera during Mia s overdose scene 36 Frank Whaley portrays Brett an associate of Jules and Vincent who has a briefcase requested by Marcellus Whaley met Tarantino while he was filming Reservoir Dogs at a lab in Sundance Institute He recalls we ended up meeting and spending time together and I liked him so I was really happy when he asked me to be in this movie 47 Burr Steers appears as Roger a friend of Brett s nicknamed Flock of Seagulls by Jules The scene of the confrontation between Brett and Jules went through several takes due to Steers making mistakes Steers recalled in an interview that he had found acting difficult due to the loudness of the gunshots 48 Angela Jones portrays Esmeralda Villalobos a cab driver who aids Butch s escape Her casting and character were inspired by her performance in the 1991 short film Curdled later remade as a 1996 feature film with finance from Tarantino and again starring Jones 49 Duane Whitaker Peter Greene and Stephen Hibbert play Maynard Zed and the gimp 50 According to The Daily Beast these three psycho hillbillies that rape Marsellus in Maynard s shop s basement allude to the film Deliverance 49 50 Steve Buscemi makes a cameo appearance as a waiter at Jack Rabbit Slim s dressed as Buddy Holly Buscemi who had appeared in Reservoir Dogs was originally considered for the role of Jimmie but was unable to commit 49 Kathy Griffin appears as herself 51 ProductionWriting Roger Avary wrote the first element of what would become the Pulp Fiction screenplay in the fall of 1990 Tarantino and Avary decided to write a short on the theory that it would be easier to get made than a feature But they quickly realized that nobody produces shorts so the film became a trilogy with one section by Tarantino one by Avary and one by a third director who never materialized Each eventually expanded his section into a feature length script 52 The initial inspiration was the three part horror anthology film Black Sabbath 1963 by Italian filmmaker Mario Bava The Tarantino Avary project was provisionally titled Black Mask after the seminal hardboiled crime fiction magazine 30 Tarantino s script was produced as Reservoir Dogs his directorial debut Avary created the basis for the Gold Watch storyline of Pulp Fiction 53 54 With work on Reservoir Dogs completed Tarantino returned to the notion of a trilogy film I got the idea of doing something that novelists get a chance to do but filmmakers don t telling three separate stories having characters float in and out with different weights depending on the story 55 Tarantino explains that the idea was basically to take like the oldest chestnuts that you ve ever seen when it comes to crime stories the oldest stories in the book You know Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace s Wife the oldest story about the guy s gotta go out with the big man s wife and don t touch her You know you ve seen the story a zillion times 10 I m using old forms of storytelling and then purposely having them run awry he says Part of the trick is to take these movie characters these genre characters and these genre situations and actually apply them to some of real life s rules and see how they unravel 56 In at least one case boxer Butch Coolidge Tarantino had in mind a specific character from a classic Hollywood crime story I wanted him to be basically like Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer in Aldrich s Kiss Me Deadly 1955 I wanted him to be a bully and a jerk 43 Tarantino went to work on the script for Pulp Fiction in Amsterdam in March 1992 57 possibly at the Winston Hotel in the Red Light District 58 He was joined there by Avary who contributed Pandemonium Reigns to the project and participated in its rewriting as well as the development of the new storylines that would link up with it 53 Two scenes originally written by Avary for the True Romance screenplay exclusively credited to Tarantino were incorporated into the opening of The Bonnie Situation the miraculous missed shots by the hidden gunman and the rear seat automobile killing 59 The notion of the crimeworld cleaner that became the heart of the episode was inspired by a short Curdled that Tarantino saw at a film festival He cast the lead actress Angela Jones in Pulp Fiction and later backed the filmmakers production of a feature length version of Curdled 60 The script included a couple of made up commercial brands that often featured in later Tarantino films Big Kahuna burgers a Big Kahuna soda cup appears in Reservoir Dogs and Red Apple cigarettes 61 As he worked on the script Tarantino also accompanied Reservoir Dogs around the European film festivals Released in the United States in October 1992 the picture was a critical and commercial success In January 1993 the Pulp Fiction script was complete 62 Financing Tarantino and his producer Lawrence Bender brought the script to Jersey Films Before even seeing Reservoir Dogs Jersey had attempted to sign Tarantino for his next project 63 Ultimately a development deal worth around 1 million had been struck The deal gave A Band Apart Bender and Tarantino s newly formed production company initial financing and office facilities Jersey got a share of the project and the right to shop the script to a studio 64 Jersey had a distribution and first look deal with Columbia TriStar which paid Tarantino for the right to consider exercising its option 65 In February Pulp Fiction appeared on a Variety list of films in pre production at TriStar 66 In June however the studio put the script into turnaround 65 According to a studio executive TriStar chief Mike Medavoy found it too demented 67 There were suggestions that TriStar was resistant to back a film featuring a heroin user there were also indications that the studio simply saw the project as too low budget for its desired star driven image 68 Avary who was about to start shooting his own directorial debut Killing Zoe has said that TriStar s objections were comprehensive encompassing the script s fundamental structure He characterizes the studio s position This is the worst thing ever written It makes no sense Someone s dead and then they re alive It s too long violent and unfilmable So I thought That s that 69 Bender brought the script to Miramax the formerly independent studio that had recently been acquired by Disney Harvey Weinstein co chairman of Miramax along with his brother Bob was instantly enthralled by the script and the company picked it up 70 Pulp Fiction the first Miramax project to get a green light after the Disney acquisition was budgeted at 8 5 million 3 It became the first movie that Miramax completely financed 71 Helping hold costs down was the plan Bender executed to pay all the main actors the same amount per week regardless of their industry status 72 The biggest star to sign on to the project was Bruce Willis Though he had recently appeared in several big budget flops he was still a major overseas draw On the strength of his name Miramax garnered 11 million for the film s worldwide rights virtually ensuring its profitability 73 Filming Willis evoked one 1950s actor in particular for Tarantino Aldo Ray in Jacques Tourneur s Nightfall 1956 I said let s go for that whole look 74 His boxing robe designed by Betsy Heimann exemplifies Tarantino s notion of costume as symbolic armor 75 Principal photography commenced on September 20 1993 76 The lead offscreen talent had all worked with Tarantino on Reservoir Dogs cinematographer Andrzej Sekula film editor Sally Menke production designer David Wasco and costume designer Betsy Heimann According to Tarantino W e had 8 million I wanted it to look like a 20 25 million movie I wanted it to look like an epic It s an epic in everything in invention in ambition in length in scope in everything except the price tag 77 The film he says was shot on 50 ASA film stock which is the slowest stock they make The reason we use it is that it creates an almost no grain image it s lustrous It s the closest thing we have to 50s Technicolor 78 The largest chunk of the budget 150 000 went to creating the Jack Rabbit Slim s set 79 It was built in a Culver City warehouse where it was joined by several other sets as well as the film s production offices 80 The diner sequence was shot on location in Hawthorne at the Hawthorne Grill known for its Googie architecture 81 For the costumes Tarantino took his inspiration from French director Jean Pierre Melville who believed that the clothes his characters wore were their symbolic suits of armor 75 Tarantino cast himself in a modest sized role as he had in Reservoir Dogs One of his pop totems Fruit Brute a long discontinued General Mills cereal also returned from the earlier film 82 The shoot wrapped on November 30 83 Before Pulp Fiction s premiere Tarantino convinced Avary to forfeit his agreed on cowriting credit and accept a story by credit so the line Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino could be used in advertising and onscreen 23 Music Main article Pulp Fiction soundtrack No film score was composed for Pulp Fiction Quentin Tarantino instead used an eclectic assortment of surf music rock and roll soul and pop songs Dick Dale s rendition of Misirlou plays during the opening credits Tarantino chose surf music as the basic musical style for the film but not he insists because of its association with surfing culture To me it just sounds like rock and roll even Morricone music It sounds like rock and roll spaghetti Western music 84 Tarantino planned to use a power pop song My Sharona by The Knack during the film s rape scene but ultimately discounted it 85 Some of the songs were suggested to Tarantino by his friends Chuck Kelley and Laura Lovelace who were credited as music consultants Lovelace also appeared in the film as Laura a waitress she reprises the role in Jackie Brown 86 The soundtrack album was released along with the film in 1994 The album peaked on the Billboard 200 chart at number 21 87 The single Urge Overkill s cover of the Neil Diamond song Girl You ll Be a Woman Soon reached number 59 88 Estella Tincknell describes how the particular combination of well known and obscure recordings helps establish the film as a self consciously cool text The use of the mono tracked beat heavy style of early 1960s U S underground pop mixed with classic ballads such as Dusty Springfield s Son of a Preacher Man is crucial to the film s postmodern knowingness She contrasts the soundtrack with that of Forrest Gump the highest grossing film of 1994 which also relies on period pop recordings T he version of the sixties offered by Pulp Fiction is certainly not that of the publicly recognized counter culture featured in Forrest Gump but is rather a more genuinely marginal form of sub culture based around a lifestyle surfing hanging that is resolutely apolitical The soundtrack is central she says to the film s engagement with the younger cinematically knowledgeable spectator it solicits 89 ReceptionRelease and box office Pulp Fiction premiered in May 1994 at the Cannes Film Festival The Weinsteins hit the beach like commandos bringing the picture s entire cast over 90 The film was unveiled at a midnight hour screening and caused a sensation 91 92 It won the Palme d Or the festival s top prize generating a further wave of publicity 93 The first U S review of the film was published on May 23 in industry trade magazine Variety Todd McCarthy called Pulp Fiction a spectacularly entertaining piece of pop culture a startling massive success 94 From Cannes forward Tarantino was on the road continuously promoting the film 95 Over the next few months it played in smaller festivals around Europe building buzz Nottingham Munich Taormina Locarno Norway and San Sebastian 96 Tarantino later said One thing that s cool is that by breaking up the linear structure when I watch the film with an audience it does break the audience s alpha state It s like all of a sudden I gotta watch this I gotta pay attention You can almost feel everybody moving in their seats It s actually fun to watch an audience in some ways chase after a movie 97 In late September it opened the New York Film Festival The New York Times published its review the day of the opening Janet Maslin called the film a triumphant cleverly disorienting journey through a demimonde that springs entirely from Mr Tarantino s ripe imagination a landscape of danger shock hilarity and vibrant local color He has come up with a work of such depth wit and blazing originality that it places him in the front ranks of American film makers 92 On October 14 1994 Pulp Fiction went into general release in the United States As Peter Biskind describes It was not platformed that is it did not open in a handful of theaters and roll out slowly as word of mouth built the traditional way of releasing an indie film it went wide immediately into 1 100 theaters 98 In the eyes of some cultural critics Reservoir Dogs had given Tarantino a reputation for glamorizing violence Miramax played with the issue in its marketing campaign You won t know the facts till you ve seen the fiction went one slogan 99 Pulp Fiction was the top grossing film at the US box office its first weekend with a gross of 9 311 882 edging out a Sylvester Stallone vehicle The Specialist which was in its second week and playing at more than twice as many theaters The gross claimed by Miramax was disputed by others Warner Bros initially reported an estimated gross of 8 9 million for The Specialist with Bob Weinstein then reporting a gross for Pulp Fiction of 9 1 million claiming that the film was on another 100 screens that had previously been overlooked Warners then updated their gross to 9 3 million claiming they had made a calculation error 100 Early Monday morning Miramax reported a gross of 9 3 million with Warners reporting 8 9 million for The Specialist placing Pulp Fiction first but other industry sources did not believe Miramax s numbers Variety estimated that Pulp Fiction grossed 8 6 to 9 million for the weekend 101 Against its budget of 8 5 million and about 10 million in marketing costs Pulp Fiction wound up grossing 107 93 million at the U S box office making it the first indie film to surpass 100 million Worldwide it took in nearly 213 million 102 In terms of domestic grosses it was the tenth biggest film of 1994 even though it played on substantially fewer screens than any other film in the top 20 103 Popular engagement with the film such as speculation about the contents of the precious briefcase indicates the kind of cult status that Pulp Fiction achieved almost immediately 104 As MovieMaker puts it The movie was nothing less than a national cultural phenomenon 105 Abroad as well in Britain where it opened a week after its U S release not only was the film a big hit but in book form its screenplay became the most successful in UK publishing history a top ten bestseller 106 Critical response On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 92 based on 110 reviews with an average rating of 9 20 10 The website s critical consensus reads One of the most influential films of the 1990s Pulp Fiction is a delirious post modern mix of neo noir thrills pitch black humor and pop culture touchstones 107 On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 94 out of 100 based on 24 critics indicating universal acclaim 108 Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of B on an A to F scale 109 The response of major American film reviewers was widely favorable Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times described it as so well written in a scruffy fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it the noses of those zombie writers who take screenwriting classes that teach them the formulas for hit films 110 Richard Corliss of TIME wrote It towers over the year s other movies as majestically and menacingly as a gang lord at a preschool It dares Hollywood films to be this smart about going this far If good directors accept Tarantino s implicit challenge the movie theater could again be a great place to live in 111 In Newsweek David Ansen wrote The miracle of Quentin Tarantino s Pulp Fiction is how being composed of secondhand debased parts it succeeds in gleaming like something new 112 You get intoxicated by it wrote Entertainment Weekly s Owen Gleiberman high on the rediscovery of how pleasurable a movie can be I m not sure I ve ever encountered a filmmaker who combined discipline and control with sheer wild ass joy the way that Tarantino does 20 There s a special kick that comes from watching something this thrillingly alive wrote Peter Travers of Rolling Stone Pulp Fiction is indisputably great 113 The Los Angeles Times was one of the few major news outlets to publish a negative review on the film s opening weekend Kenneth Turan wrote The writer director appears to be straining for his effects Some sequences especially one involving bondage harnesses and homosexual rape have the uncomfortable feeling of creative desperation of someone who s afraid of losing his reputation scrambling for any way to offend sensibilities 114 Some who reviewed it in the following weeks took more exception to the predominant critical reaction than to Pulp Fiction itself While not panning the film Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic felt that the way that it has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting Pulp Fiction nourishes abets cultural slumming 115 Responding to comparisons between Tarantino s film and the work of French New Wave director Jean Luc Godard especially his first most famous feature Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote The fact that Pulp Fiction is garnering more extravagant raves than Breathless ever did tells you plenty about which kind of cultural references are regarded as more fruitful namely the ones we already have and don t wish to expand 116 Observing in the National Review that n o film arrives with more advance hype John Simon was unswayed titillation cures neither hollowness nor shallowness 117 Debate about the film spread beyond the review pages with its violence often being the theme In The Washington Post Donna Britt described how she was happy not to see Pulp Fiction on a recent weekend and thus avoid discussing the rousing scene in which a gunshot sprays somebody s brains around a car interior 118 Some commentators took exception to the film s frequent use of the word nigger mentioned 18 times In the Chicago Tribune Todd Boyd argued that the word s recurrence has the ability to signify the ultimate level of hipness for white males who have historically used their perception of black masculinity as the embodiment of cool 119 In Britain James Wood writing in The Guardian set the tone for much subsequent criticism Tarantino represents the final triumph of postmodernism which is to empty the artwork of all content thus avoiding its capacity to do anything except helplessly represent our agonies Only in this age could a writer as talented as Tarantino produce artworks so vacuous so entirely stripped of any politics metaphysics or moral interest 120 Awards season Around the turn of the year Pulp Fiction was named Best Picture by the National Society of Film Critics National Board of Review Los Angeles Film Critics Association Boston Society of Film Critics Society of Texas Film Critics Southeastern Film Critics Association and Kansas City Film Critics Circle 121 Tarantino was named Best Director by all seven of those organizations as well as by the New York Film Critics Circle and Chicago Film Critics Association 122 The screenplay won several prizes with various awarding bodies ascribing credit differently At the 52nd Golden Globe Awards Tarantino named as sole recipient of the Best Screenplay honor failed to mention Avary in his acceptance speech 123 In February 1995 the film received seven Oscar nominations Best Picture Director Actor Travolta Supporting Actor Jackson Supporting Actress Thurman Original Screenplay and Film Editing Travolta Jackson and Thurman were each nominated as well for the 1st Screen Actors Guild Awards presented on February 25 but none took home the honor 124 At the Academy Awards ceremony the following month Tarantino and Avary were announced as joint winners of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay 125 The furor around the film was still going strong much of the March issue of Artforum was devoted to its critical dissection 126 Pulp Fiction garnered four honors at the Independent Spirit Awards held at the end of the month Best Feature Best Director Male Lead Jackson and Best Screenplay Tarantino 127 At the British Academy Film Awards BAFTA Tarantino and Avary shared the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay and Jackson won for Best Supporting Actor 128 The film was nominated for the Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association 129 The February 2020 issue of New York Magazine lists Pulp Fiction alongside Citizen Kane Sunset Boulevard Dr Strangelove Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid The Conversation Nashville Taxi Driver The Elephant Man In the Bedroom There Will Be Blood and Roma as The Best Movies That Lost Best Picture at the Oscars 130 InfluencePulp Fiction quickly came to be regarded as one of the most significant films of its era In 1995 in a special edition of Siskel amp Ebert devoted to Tarantino Gene Siskel argued that the work posed a major challenge to the ossification of American movies with their brutal formulas In Siskel s view the violent intensity of Pulp Fiction calls to mind other violent watershed films that were considered classics in their time and still are Hitchcock s Psycho 1960 Arthur Penn s Bonnie and Clyde 1967 and Stanley Kubrick s A Clockwork Orange 1971 Each film shook up a tired bloated movie industry and used a world of lively lowlifes to reflect how dull other movies had become And that I predict will be the ultimate honor for Pulp Fiction Like all great films it criticizes other movies 131 Ken Dancyger writes that its imitative and innovative style like that of its predecessor Reservoir Dogs represents a new phenomenon the movie whose style is created from the context of movie life rather than real life The consequence is twofold the presumption of deep knowledge on the part of the audience of those forms such as the gangster films or Westerns horror films or adventure films And that the parody or alteration of that film creates a new form a different experience for the audience 132 John Travolta Uma Thurman and Quentin Tarantino at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival for the film s 20th anniversary tribute In a widely covered speech on May 31 1995 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole attacked the American entertainment industry for peddling nightmares of depravity Pulp Fiction was soon associated with his charges concerning gratuitous violence Dole had not mentioned the film he cited two less celebrated movies based on Tarantino screenplays Natural Born Killers and True Romance 133 In September 1996 Dole did accuse Pulp Fiction which he had not seen of promoting the romance of heroin 134 Paula Rabinowitz expresses the general film industry opinion that Pulp Fiction simultaneously resurrected John Travolta and film noir 135 In Peter Biskind s description it created a guys with guns frenzy 136 The film has also been labeled as a black comedy 4 and a neo noir 137 Critic Geoffrey O Brien however argued against the classification of Pulp Fiction into the neo noir genre The old time noir passions the brooding melancholy and operatic death scenes would be altogether out of place in the crisp and brightly lit wonderland that Tarantino conjures up It is neither neo noir nor a parody of noir 138 Similarly Nicholas Christopher calls it more gangland camp than neo noir 139 and Foster Hirsch suggests that its trippy fantasy landscape characterizes it more definitively than any genre label 140 Regardless the stylistic influence of Pulp Fiction soon became apparent Less than a year after the picture s release British critic Jon Ronson attended the National Film School s end of semester screenings and assessed the impact Out of the five student movies I watched four incorporated violent shoot outs over a soundtrack of iconoclastic 70s pop hits two climaxed with all the main characters shooting each other at once and one had two hitmen discussing the idiosyncrasies of The Brady Bunch before offing their victim Not since Citizen Kane has one man appeared from relative obscurity to redefine the art of moviemaking 141 Among the first Hollywood films cited as its imitators were Destiny Turns on the Radio 1995 in which Tarantino acted 131 Things to Do in Denver When You re Dead 1995 142 and 2 Days in the Valley 1996 143 It triggered a myriad of clones writes Fiona Villella 144 Internationally according to David Desser it not only influenced a British brand of noir but extended the noir vision virtually around the world 145 Pulp Fiction s effect on film form was still reverberating in 2007 when David Denby of The New Yorker credited it with initiating the ongoing cycle of disordered cinematic narratives 146 Its impact on Hollywood was deeper still According to Variety the trajectory of Pulp Fiction from Cannes launch to commercial smash forever altered the game of so called independent cinema 147 It cemented Miramax s place as the reigning indie superpower 98 writes Biskind Pulp became the Star Wars of independents exploding expectations for what an indie film could do at the box office 148 The film s large financial return on its small budget transform ed the industry s attitude toward the lowly indies spawning a flock of me too classics divisions S mart studio executives suddenly woke up to the fact that grosses and market share which got all the press were not the same as profits Once the studios realized that they could exploit the economies of small scale they more or less gave up buying or remaking the films themselves and either bought the distributors as Disney had Miramax or started their own copy ing Miramax s marketing and distribution strategies 149 In 2001 Variety noting the increasing number of actors switching back and forth between expensive studio films and low budget independent or indie style projects suggested that the watershed moment for movie stars came with the decision by Willis one of Hollywood s highest paid performers to appear in Pulp Fiction 150 And its impact was even broader than that It has been described as a major cultural event an international phenomenon that influenced television music literature and advertising 144 151 Not long after its release it was identified as a significant focus of attention within the growing community of Internet users 152 Adding Pulp Fiction to his roster of The Great Movies in 2001 Roger Ebert called it the most influential film of the decade 153 Four years later Time s Corliss wrote much the same unquestionably the most influential American movie of the 90s 154 Several scenes and images from the film achieved iconic status in 2008 Entertainment Weekly declared You d be hard pressed by now to name a moment from Quentin Tarantino s film that isn t iconic 155 Jules and Vincent s Royale with Cheese dialogue became famous 156 It was referenced more than a decade and a half later in the Travolta vehicle From Paris with Love 157 The adrenalin shot to Mia Wallace s heart is on Premiere s list of 100 Greatest Movie Moments 158 The scene of Travolta and Thurman s characters dancing has been frequently homaged most unambiguously in the 2005 film Be Cool starring the same two actors 159 The image of Travolta and Jackson s characters standing side by side in suit and tie pointing their guns has also become widely familiar In 2007 BBC News reported that London transport workers have painted over an iconic mural by guerrilla artist Banksy The image depicted a scene from Quentin Tarantino s Pulp Fiction with Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns 160 Certain lines were adopted popularly as catchphrases in particular Marsellus s threat I m a get medieval on your ass 161 Jules s Ezekiel recitation was voted the fourth greatest movie speech of all time in a 2004 poll One of the more notable homages to Jules Biblical quote was one Jackson himself played a part in near the end of 2014 s Captain America The Winter Soldier Jackson s character Col Nick Fury presumed dead visits his own gravestone on which below Fury s name is inscribed The path of the righteous man Ezekiel 25 17 162 In 2019 it was reported that Dominic Cummings special political adviser to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson quoted Jules by telling Conservative MPs to be cool like Fonzies as political pressure built to request an extension to the date of the UK s withdrawal from the European Union 163 Pulp Fiction now appears in several critical assessments of all time great films In 2008 Entertainment Weekly named it the best film of the past quarter century 155 That same year the American Film Institute s Ten Top Ten poll ranked it number 7 all time in the gangster film genre 164 In 2007 it was voted 94th overall on the AFI s 100 Years 100 Movies list 165 In 2005 it was named one of Time s All Time 100 Movies 154 As of September 2018 it is number 54 on Metacritic s list of all time highest scores 166 The film ranks very highly in popular surveys A 2008 Empire poll combining the opinions of readers movie industry professionals and critics named Pulp Fiction the ninth best film of all time 167 In a 2006 readers poll by the British magazine Total Film it ranked as the number three film in history 168 It was voted as the fourth greatest film of all time in a nationwide poll for Britain s Channel 4 in 2001 169 Critical analysisTarantino has stated that he originally planned to do a Black Mask movie referring to the magazine largely responsible for popularizing hardboiled detective fiction I t kind of went somewhere else 170 Geoffrey O Brien sees the result as connected rather powerfully to a parallel pulp tradition the tales of terror and the uncanny practiced by such writers as Cornell Woolrich and Fredric Brown Both dealt heavily in the realm of improbable coincidences and cruel cosmic jokes a realm that Pulp Fiction makes its own 171 In particular O Brien finds a strong affinity between the intricate plot mechanics and twists of Brown s novels and the recursive interweaving structure of Pulp Fiction 172 Philip French describes the film s narrative as a circular movement or Mobius strip of a kind Resnais and Robbe Grillet would admire 173 James Mottram regards crime novelist Elmore Leonard whose influence Tarantino has acknowledged as the film s primary literary antecedent He suggests that Leonard s rich dialogue is reflected in Tarantino s popular culture strewn jive he also points to the acute extremely dark sense of humor Leonard applies to the realm of violence as a source of inspiration 174 Film scholar historian Robert Kolker sees the flourishes the apparent witty banality of the dialogue the goofy fracturing of temporality as a patina over a pastiche The pastiche is essentially of two films that Tarantino can t seem to get out of his mind Mean Streets 1973 directed by Martin Scorsese who loved Pulp Fiction and the way the film was told 175 and The Killing 1956 directed by Stanley Kubrick 176 He contrasts Pulp Fiction with postmodern Hollywood predecessors Hudson Hawk 1991 starring Willis and Last Action Hero 1993 starring Arnold Schwarzenegger that took the joke too far simply mocked or suggested that they were smarter than the audience and flopped 177 Todd McCarthy writes that the film s striking widescreen compositions often contain objects in extreme close up as well as vivid contrasts sometimes bringing to mind the visual strategies of Sergio Leone an acknowledged hero of Tarantino s 94 To Martin Rubin the expansive brightly colored widescreen visuals evoke comedy directors such as Frank Tashlin and Blake Edwards 178 The movie s host of pop culture allusions ranging from the famous image of Marilyn Monroe s skirt flying up over a subway grating to Jules addressing a soon to be victim as Flock of Seagulls because of his haircut 179 have led many critics to discuss it within the framework of postmodernism Describing the film in 2005 as Tarantino s postmodern masterpiece to date David Walker writes that it is marked by its playful reverence for the 1950s and its constantly teasing and often deferential references to other films He characterizes its convoluted narrative technique as postmodern tricksiness 180 Calling the film a terminally hip postmodern collage Foster Hirsch finds Pulp Fiction far from a masterpiece authoritative influential and meaningless Set in a world that could exist only in the movies it is a succulent guilty pleasure beautifully made junk food for cineastes 181 O Brien dismissing attempts to associate the movie with film noir argues that Pulp Fiction is more a guided tour of an infernal theme park decorated with cultural detritus Buddy Holly and Mamie Van Doren fragments of blaxploitation and Roger Corman and Shogun Assassin music out of a twenty four hour oldies station for which all the decades since the fifties exist simultaneously 138 Catherine Constable takes the moment in which a needle filled with adrenalin is plunged into the comatose Mia s heart as exemplary She proposes that it can be seen as effecting her resurrection from the dead simultaneously recalling and undermining the Gothic convention of the vampire s stake On this model the referencing of previous aesthetic forms and styles moves beyond empty pastiche sustaining an inventive and affirmative mode of postmodernism 182 Mark T Conard asks W hat is the film about and answers American nihilism 183 Hirsch suggests If the film is actually about anything other than its own cleverness it seems dedicated to the dubious thesis that hit men are part of the human family 143 Richard Alleva argues that Pulp Fiction has about as much to do with actual criminality or violence as Cyrano de Bergerac with the realities of seventeenth century France or The Prisoner of Zenda with Balkan politics He reads the movie as a form of romance whose allure is centered in the characters nonnaturalistic discourse wise guy literate media smart obscenely epigrammatic 184 In Alan Stone s view the absurd dialogue like that between Vincent and Jules in the scene where the former accidentally kills Marvin unexpectedly transforms the meaning of the violence cliche Pulp Fiction unmasks the macho myth by making it laughable and deheroicizes the power trip glorified by standard Hollywood violence 185 Stone reads the film as politically correct There is no nudity and no violence directed against women It celebrates interracial friendship and cultural diversity there are strong women and strong black men and the director swims against the current of class stereotype 185 Where Stone sees a celebration Kolker finds a vacuum The postmodern insouciance violence homophobia and racism of Pulp Fiction were perfectly acceptable because the film didn t pretend seriousness and therefore didn t mock it 177 Calling it the acme of postmodern nineties filmmaking he explains the postmodern is about surfaces it is flattened spatiality in which event and character are in a steady state of reminding us that they are pop cultural figures 186 According to Kolker That s why Pulp Fiction was so popular Not because all audiences got all or any of its references to Scorsese and Kubrick but because the narrative and spatial structure of the film never threatened to go beyond themselves into signification The film s cycle of racist and homophobic jokes might threaten to break out into a quite nasty view of the world but this nastiness keeps being laughed off by the mock intensity of the action the prowling confronting perverse confined and airless nastiness of the world Tarantino creates 187 Henry A Giroux argues that Tarantino empties violence of any critical social consequences offering viewers only the immediacy of shock humor and irony without insight as elements of mediation None of these elements gets beyond the seduction of voyeuristic gazing t he facile consumption of shocking images and hallucinatory delight 188 Regarding the violence and nihilism in the film Pamela Demory has suggested that Pulp Fiction should be seen in light of the short stories of Flannery O Connor 189 which likewise feature religious elements banality and violence with grotesque humor Discussing the connection between violence and redemption Demory concludes that while O Connor s purpose is to convince readers of the powerful force of evil in the world and of our need for grace Tarantino seeks to demonstrate that in spite of everything we have seen in the film all the violence degradation death crime amoral behavior grace is still possible there might still be a God who doesn t judge us on merits 190 Homage as essence Cinema Pulp Fiction is full of homages to other movies Tarantino s characters writes Gary Groth inhabit a world where the entire landscape is composed of Hollywood product Tarantino is a cinematic kleptomaniac he literally can t help himself 191 Two scenes in particular have prompted discussion of the film s highly intertextual style Many have assumed that the dance sequence at Jack Rabbit Slim s was intended as a reference to Travolta s star making performance as Tony Manero in the epochal Saturday Night Fever 1977 Tarantino however credits a scene in the Jean Luc Godard film Bande a part 1964 with the inspiration According to the filmmaker Everybody thinks that I wrote this scene just to have John Travolta dancing But the scene existed before John Travolta was cast But once he was cast it was like Great We get to see John dance All the better My favorite musical sequences have always been in Godard because they just come out of nowhere It s so infectious so friendly And the fact that it s not a musical but he s stopping the movie to have a musical sequence makes it all the more sweet 192 Jerome Charyn argues that beyond all the better Travolta s presence is essential to the power of the scene and of the film Travolta s entire career becomes backstory the myth of a movie star who has fallen out of favor but still resides in our memory as the king of disco We keep waiting for him to shed his paunch put on a white polyester suit and enter the 2001 Odyssey club in Bay Ridge Brooklyn where he will dance for us and never never stop Daniel Day Lewis couldn t have woken such a powerful longing in us He isn t part of America s own mad cosmology Tony Manero is an angel sitting on Vince s shoulder Vince and Mia s actual dance may be closer to the choreography of Anna Karina s shuffle with her two bumbling gangster boyfriends in Bande a part but even that reference is lost to us and we re with Tony again 193 Estella Tincknell notes that while the diner setting seems to be a simulacrum of a fifties restaurant the twist contest is a musical sequence which evokes the sixties while Travolta s dance performance inevitably references the seventies and his appearance in Saturday Night Fever The past thus becomes a more general pastness in which the stylistic signifiers of various decades are loaded in to a single moment 194 She also argues that in this passage the film briefly shifts from its habitually ironic discourse to one that references the conventions of the classic film musical and in doing so makes it possible for the film to inhabit an affective space that goes beyond stylistic allusion 194 The pivotal moment in which Marsellus crosses the street in front of Butch s car and notices him evokes the scene in which Marion Crane s boss sees her under similar circumstances in Psycho 1960 195 Marsellus and Butch are soon held captive by Maynard and Zed two sadistic honkies straight out of Deliverance 1972 directed by John Boorman 185 Zed shares a name with Sean Connery s character in Boorman s follow up the science fiction film Zardoz 1974 When Butch decides to rescue Marsellus in Glyn White s words he finds a trove of items with film hero resonances 196 Critics have identified these weapons with a range of possible allusions Hammer The Toolbox Murders 1978 197 Baseball bat Walking Tall 1973 196 The Untouchables 1987 197 Chainsaw The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 1974 196 197 Evil Dead II 1987 196 Katana samurai sword many including Seven Samurai 1954 196 197 The Yakuza 1975 196 Shogun Assassin 1980 197 At the conclusion of the scene a portentous line of Marsellus s echoes one from the crime drama Charley Varrick 1973 directed by another of Tarantino s heroes Don Siegel the name of the character who speaks it there is Maynard 198 David Bell argues that far from going against the current of class stereotype this scene like Deliverance mobilize s a certain construction of poor white country folk and particularly their sexualization rustic sexual expression often takes the form of homosexual rape in American movies 199 Stephen Paul Miller believes the Pulp Fiction scene goes down much easier than the one it echoes The buggery perpetrated is not at all as shocking as it was in Deliverance The nineties film reduces seventies competition horror and taboo into an entertainingly subtle adrenaline play a fiction a pulp fiction 200 Giroux reads the rape scene homage similarly in the end Tarantino s use of parody is about repetition transgression and softening the face of violence by reducing it to the property of film history 201 In Groth s view the crucial difference is that in Deliverance the rape created the film s central moral dilemma whereas in Pulp Fiction it was merely the single weirdest day of Butch s life 202 American Me did it too Tarantino observed There s like three butt fucking scenes in American Me That s definitely the one to beat in that particular category 203 Neil Fulwood focuses on Butch s weapon selection writing Here Tarantino s love of movies is at its most open and nonjudgemental tipping a nod to the noble and the notorious as well as sending up his own reputation as an enfant terrible of movie violence Moreover the scene makes a sly comment about the readiness of cinema to seize upon whatever is to hand for its moments of mayhem and murder 197 White asserts that the katana he finally and significantly selects identifies him with honourable heroes 196 Conard argues that the first three items symbolize a nihilism that Butch is rejecting The traditional Japanese sword in contrasts represents a culture with a well defined moral code and thus connects Butch with a more meaningful approach to life 204 The biker film Nam s Angels is also shown with Fabienne characterizing it as A motorcycle movie I m not sure the name 205 Television Robert Miklitsch argues that Tarantino s telephilia may be more central to the guiding sensibility of Pulp Fiction than the filmmaker s love for rock n roll and even cinema Talking about his generation one that came of age in the 70s Tarantino has commented that the number one thing we all shared wasn t music that was a Sixties thing Our culture was television A random list of the TV programs referenced in Pulp Fiction confirms his observation Speed Racer Clutch Cargo The Brady Bunch The Partridge Family The Avengers The Three Stooges The Flintstones I Spy Green Acres Kung Fu Happy Days and last but not least Mia s fictional pilot Fox Force Five 206 The above list with the possible exception of The Avengers writes Miklitsch suggests that Pulp Fiction has less of an elective affinity with the cinematic avant gardism of Godard than with mainstream network programming 207 Jonathan Rosenbaum had brought TV into his analysis of the Tarantino Godard comparison acknowledging that the directors were similar in wanting to cram everything they like onscreen But the differences between what Godard likes and what Tarantino likes and why are astronomical it s like comparing a combined museum library film archive record shop and department store with a jukebox a video rental outlet and an issue of TV Guide 116 Sharon Willis focuses on the way a television show Clutch Cargo marks the beginning of and plays on through the scene between young Butch and his father s comrade in arms The Vietnam War veteran is played by Christopher Walken whose presence in the role evokes his performance as a traumatized G I in the Vietnam War movie The Deer Hunter 1978 Willis writes that when Captain Koons enters the living room we see Walken in his function as an image retrieved from a repertoire of 1970s television and movie versions of ruined masculinity in search of rehabilitation T he gray light of the television presiding over the scene seems to inscribe the ghostly paternal gaze 208 Miklitsch asserts that for some critics the film is a prime example of the pernicious ooze like influence of mass culture exemplified by their bete noire TV 207 Kolker might not disagree arguing that Pulp Fiction is a simulacrum of our daily exposure to television its homophobes thugs and perverts sentimental boxers and pimp promoters move through a series of long take tableaux we watch laugh and remain with nothing to comprehend 187 Notable motifs The mysterious 666 briefcase Vincent stares transfixed into the glowing case as specified in Tarantino s screenplay 209 Vincent s demeanor reinforces the allusion to the scene in Kiss Me Deadly 1955 in which Lily Carver a k a Gabrielle Gaby Rodgers gazes into the glowing case 210 The combination of the mysterious suitcase lock is 666 the Number of the Beast Tarantino has said there is no explanation for its contents it is simply a MacGuffin a pure plot device Originally the case was to contain diamonds but this was seen as too mundane For filming purposes it contained a hidden orange light bulb that produced an otherworldly glow when the case was opened 211 In a 2007 video interview with fellow director and friend Robert Rodriguez Tarantino purportedly reveals the secret contents of the briefcase but the film cuts out and skips the scene in the style employed in Tarantino and Rodriguez s Grindhouse 2007 with an intertitle that reads Missing Reel The interview resumes with Rodriguez discussing how radically the knowledge of the briefcase s contents alters one s understanding of the movie 212 Despite Tarantino s statements many solutions to what one scholar calls this unexplained postmodern puzzle have been proposed 104 A strong similarity has often been observed with Robert Aldrich s 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly That movie features a glowing briefcase housing an atomic explosive 213 In their review of Alex Cox s 1984 film Repo Man in The Daily Telegraph Nick Cowen and Hari Patience suggest that Pulp Fiction may also owe a debt of inspiration to the glowing car trunk in that film 214 In scholar Paul Gormley s view this connection with Kiss Me Deadly and a similar one with Raiders of the Lost Ark 1981 makes it possible to read the eerie glow as symbolic of violence itself 215 The idea that the briefcase contains Marsellus s soul gained popular currency in the mid 1990s Analyzing the notion Roger Ebert dismissed it as nothing more than a widely distributed urban legend given false credibility by the mystique of the Net 216 Jules Bible passage Jules ritually recites what he describes as a biblical passage Ezekiel 25 17 before he executes someone The passage is heard three times in the introductory sequence in which Jules and Vincent reclaim Marsellus s briefcase from the doomed Brett that same recitation a second time at the beginning of The Bonnie Situation which overlaps the end of the earlier sequence and in the epilogue at the diner The first version of the passage is as follows The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men Blessed is he who in the name of charity and goodwill shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness for he is truly his brother s keeper and the finder of lost children And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy My brothers And you will know My name is the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon thee The second version from the diner scene is identical except for the final line And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you And I will strike down source source Conclusion of the Ezekiel 25 17 monologue and Brett s murder Problems playing this file See media help While the final two sentences of Jules s speech are similar to the actual cited passage the first two are fabricated from various biblical phrases 217 The text of Ezekiel 25 preceding verse 17 indicates that God s wrath is retribution for the hostility of the Philistines In the King James Version from which Jules s speech is adapted Ezekiel 25 17 reads in its entirety And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes and they shall know that I am the LORD when I shall lay My vengeance upon them 218 Tarantino s primary inspiration for the speech was the work of Japanese martial arts star Sonny Chiba Its text and its identification as Ezekiel 25 17 derive from an almost identical creed that appears at the beginning of the Chiba movie Karate Kiba The Bodyguard 1976 where it is both shown as a scrolling text and read by an offscreen narrator 219 The version seen at the beginning of The Bodyguard 1976 is as follows The path of the righteous man and defender is beset on all sides by the inequity of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men Blessed is he who in the name of charity and good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness for he is truly his brother s keeper and the father of lost children And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious anger who poison and destroy my brothers and they shall know that I am Chiba the Bodyguard when I shall lay my vengeance upon them In the 1980s television series Kage no Gundan Shadow Warriors Chiba s character would lecture the villain of the week about how the world must be rid of evil before killing him 220 A killer delivers a similar biblical rant in Modesty Blaise the hardback but pulp style novel Vincent is shown with in two scenes 221 Two critics who have analyzed the role of the speech find different ties between Jules s transformation and the issue of postmodernity Gormley argues that unlike the film s other major characters Marsellus aside Jules is linked to a thing beyond postmodern simulation T his is perhaps most marked when he moves on from being a simulation of a Baptist preacher spouting Ezekiel because it was just a cool thing to say In his conversion Jules is shown to be cognizant of a place beyond this simulation which in this case the film constructs as God 222 Adele Reinhartz writes that the depth of Jules s transformation is indicated by the difference in his two deliveries of the passage In the first he is a majestic and awe inspiring figure proclaiming the prophecy with fury and self righteousness In the second he appears to be a different sort of man altogether I n true postmodern fashion he reflects on the meaning of his speech and provides several different ways that it might pertain to his current situation 223 Similar to Gormley Conard argues that as Jules reflects on the passage it dawns on him that it refers to an objective framework of value and meaning that is absent from his life to Conard this contrasts with the film s prevalent representation of a nihilistic culture 224 Rosenbaum finds much less in Jules s revelation T he spiritual awakening at the end of Pulp Fiction which Jackson performs beautifully is a piece of jive avowedly inspired by kung fu movies It may make you feel good but it certainly doesn t leave you any wiser 225 The bathroom Much of Pulp Fiction s action revolves around characters who are either in the bathroom or need to use the toilet To a lesser extent Tarantino s other films also feature this narrative element 226 At Jack Rabbit Slim s Mia goes to powder her nose literally she snorts coke in the restroom surrounded by a bevy of women vainly primping Butch and Fabienne play an extended scene in their motel bathroom he in the shower she brushing her teeth the next morning but just a few seconds later in screen time she is again brushing her teeth As Jules and Vincent confront Brett and two of his pals a fourth man is hiding in the bathroom his actions will lead to Jules transformative moment of clarity After Marvin s absurd death Vincent and Jules wash up in Jimmie s bathroom where they get into a contretemps over a bloody hand towel 146 When the diner hold up turns into a standoff Honey Bunny whines I gotta go pee 227 As described by Peter and Will Brooker In three significant moments Vincent retires to the bathroom and returns to an utterly changed world where death is threatened 228 The threat increases in magnitude as the narrative progresses chronologically and is realized in the third instance Vincent and Jules s diner breakfast and philosophical conversation is aborted by Vincent s bathroom break an armed robbery ensues while Vincent is reading on the toilet While Vincent is in the bathroom worrying about the possibility of going too far with Marsellus s wife Mia mistakes his heroin for cocaine snorts it and overdoses During a stakeout at Butch s apartment Vincent emerges from the toilet with his book and is killed by Butch In the Brookers analysis Through Vince we see the contemporary world as utterly contingent transformed disastrously in the instant you are not looking 228 Fraiman finds it particularly significant that Vincent is reading Modesty Blaise in two of these instances She links this fact with the traditional derisive view of women as the archetypal consumers of pulp Locating popular fiction in the bathroom Tarantino reinforces its association with shit already suggested by the dictionary meanings of pulp that preface the movie moist shapeless matter also lurid stories on cheap paper What we have then is a series of damaging associations pulp women shit that taint not only male producers of mass market fiction but also male consumers Perched on the toilet with his book Vincent is feminized by sitting instead of standing as well as by his trashy tastes preoccupied by the anal he is implicitly infantilized and homosexualized and the seemingly inevitable result is being pulverized by Butch with a Czech M61 submachine gun That this fate has to do with Vincent s reading habits is strongly suggested by a slow tilt from the book on the floor directly up to the corpse spilled into the tub 229 Willis reads Pulp Fiction in almost precisely the opposite direction finding its overarching project as a drive to turn shit into gold This is one way of describing the project of redeeming and recycling popular culture especially the popular culture of one s childhood as is Tarantino s wont as well as his stated aim 208 Despite that argues Fraiman Pulp Fiction demonstrates that even an open pulpophile like Tarantino may continue to feel anxious and emasculated by his preferences 227 NFT disputeIn November 2021 Miramax filed a lawsuit against Tarantino who released seven NFTs based on uncut and unseen scenes of Pulp Fiction and including the original handwritten script revealing secrets about the film and its creator Miramax claimed they own the film rights 230 However Tarantino disputed the lawsuit and claimed he had rights to the film script in written form 231 The matter was later settled with Miramax s lawyers filing a brief statement in court The parties have agreed to put this matter behind them and look forward to collaborating with each other on future projects including possible NFTs 232 AccoladesMain article List of accolades received by Pulp Fiction Pulp Fiction won eight major awards from a total of twenty six nominations including a Best Original Screenplay win at the 67th Academy Awards 93 125 128 233 234 Also in the balloting by the National Society of Film Critics Samuel L Jackson was the runner up in both the Best Actor and the Best Supporting Actor categories 234 American Film Institute Lists AFI s 100 Years 100 Movies No 95 AFI s 100 Years 100 Heroes amp Villains Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield Nominated Villains AFI s 100 Years 100 Movie Quotes Bring out the Gimp Nominated Quote They call it a Royale with Cheese Nominated Quote AFI s 100 Years 100 Laughs Nominated AFI s 100 Years 100 Movies 10th Anniversary Edition No 94 AFI s 100 Years 100 Thrills No 53See also Film portal United States portal 1990s portalThe Killers Hemingway short story The Killers 1946 Plump Fiction Quentin Tarantino filmographyNotes Walken s speech to the young Butch has been described as a bravura performance of patriotic zeal and scatological fetishism worthy of a Kubrickian anti hero 39 References PULP FICTION British Board of Film Classification Archived from the original on May 10 2015 Retrieved November 11 2012 a b Pulp Fiction 1994 Box Office Mojo Archived from the original on April 30 2011 Retrieved May 13 2012 a b Waxman 2005 p 67 Biskind 2004 p 170 Polan 2000 p 69 Dawson 1995 pp 147 148 a b See e g King 2002 pp 185 7 Kempley Rita October 14 1994 Pulp Fiction R The Washington Post Archived from the original on July 9 2017 Retrieved September 19 2007 LaSalle Mike September 15 1995 Pulp Grabs You Like a Novel San Francisco Chronicle Archived from the original on January 12 2012 Retrieved September 20 2007 101 Greatest Screenplays Writers Guild of America West Archived from the original on March 6 2013 Retrieved November 29 2015 The New Classics Movies Entertainment Weekly June 18 2007 Archived from the original on October 3 2013 Retrieved September 29 2013 O Sullivan Michael December 18 2013 Library of Congress announces 2013 National Film Registry selections The Washington Post Archived from the original on December 18 2013 Retrieved December 18 2013 Complete National Film Registry Listing Library of Congress Archived from the original on October 31 2016 Retrieved May 8 2020 Cinema with the 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participation if any in the film s profits Haddon Cole August 7 2008 Michael Madsen Talks Hell Ride Inglorious Bastards and Sin City 2 Film com Archived from the original on October 23 2008 Retrieved November 18 2008 Dawson 1995 p 154 Enhanced Trivia Track ch 5 Pulp Fiction DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment Enhanced Trivia Track ch 3 Pulp Fiction DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment Samuel L Jackson s Pulp Fiction Jheri Curl Wig Was a Happy Accident Yahoo January 6 2016 Archived from the original on February 17 2022 Retrieved February 17 2022 a b Gleiberman Owen October 10 1994 Pulp Fiction 1994 Entertainment Weekly Archived from the original on October 15 2007 Retrieved September 20 2007 Laurence Fishburne Turned Down Samuel L Jackson s Role in Pulp Fiction The Ringer Archived from the original on August 20 2020 Retrieved August 21 2020 Jung E Alex August 19 2020 Laurence Fishburne Knows Who He Is Vulture Archived from the original on August 21 2020 Retrieved August 21 2020 a b Biskind 2004 p 170 a b Dawson 1995 p 155 Wills Dominic Uma Thurman Biography Tiscali Archived from the original on May 7 2007 Retrieved December 29 2006 Enhanced Trivia Track ch 23 Pulp Fiction DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment Charyn 2006 p 73 Bailey 2013 p 84 Dawson Jeff December 1995 Hit Man Premiere UK Tim Roth com Archived from the original on January 20 2013 Retrieved April 11 2012 a b Enhanced Trivia Track ch 14 Pulp Fiction DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment Seal Mark February 13 2013 Cinema Tarantino The Making of Pulp Fiction Vanity Fair Archived from the original on January 15 2019 Retrieved July 9 2020 Sid Haag Interview Archived from the original on November 20 2008 Retrieved July 20 2008 Brennan Sandra Ving Rhames Biography Allmovie Archived from the original on April 13 2012 Retrieved April 11 2012 Wenn September 20 2006 Cobain Turned Down Pulp Fiction Role Hollywood com Archived from the original on June 4 2012 Retrieved September 16 2007 Roberts Chris August 1999 Gary Oldman A sheep in wolf s clothing Uncut IPC Media 27 True Romance wouldn t have been Oldman s last Tarantino collaboration had TriStar execs gotten their way Oldman was the preferred choice for Lance a b 50 Things You Probably Didn t Know About Pulp Fiction ShortList October 28 2013 Archived from the original on November 5 2013 Retrieved August 26 2014 Enhanced Trivia Track ch 6 Pulp Fiction DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment See also Rabin Nathan June 25 2003 Interviews Pam Grier Onion A V Club Archived from the original on October 2 2007 Retrieved September 20 2007 Dawson 1995 p 189 Howley K 2004 Breaking Making and Killing Time in Pulp Fiction Scope An Online Journal of Film amp TV Studies p 10 France Lisa October 14 2014 Pulp Fiction 20 fun facts as the film turns 20 CNN Archived from the original on July 29 2018 Retrieved August 14 2018 Quentin Tarantino on All American Girl February 22 1995 Chronological Snobbery November 16 2007 Archived from the original on March 15 2022 Retrieved March 11 2016 Bart 2000 p 85 Willis s deal for a percentage of the box office gross was presumably on top of a base weekly salary that was identical to the other main actors per Polan 2000 p 69 Dawson 1995 p 148 a b Quoted in Dargis 1994a p 10 Tarantino Quentin Peary Gerald 2013 Quentin Tarantino Interviews Revised and Updated University Press of Mississippi pp 50 51 ISBN 9781617038747 Archived from the original on October 23 2021 Retrieved March 4 2022 via Google Books Getlen Larry October 18 2014 Inside the grisly scene that made Pulp Fiction Archived November 14 2017 at the Wayback Machine New York Post Retrieved March 15 2017 a b Harris Will June 26 2012 Phil LaMarr on Futurama and getting shot in the face for Pulp Fiction Archived March 16 2017 at the Wayback Machine The A V Club The Onion Retrieved March 15 2017 Harris Will April 9 2015 Frank Whaley on acting directing and getting yelled at by Samuel L Jackson and Oliver Stone Archived January 3 2017 at the Wayback Machine The A 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October 8 1994 Bauer Erik August 10 2013 Method Writing Interview with Quentin Tarantino Originally published in January 1998 Creative Screenwriting Interview Archived from the original on September 9 2021 Retrieved March 19 2022 Quoted in Lowry Beverly Criminals Rendered in 3 Parts Poetically The New York Times September 11 1994 Pulp Fiction The Facts 1994 promotional interview Pulp Fiction DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment Dawson 1995 p 139 Steves Rick April 14 2015 Rick Steves Amsterdam amp the Netherlands Avalon Travel ISBN 978 1 63121 067 9 Archived from the original on November 13 2020 Retrieved October 18 2020 Mottram 2006 p 71 Enhanced Trivia Track ch 13 Pulp Fiction DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment Wells Jeffrey July 12 1996 Searching for a Big Kahuna Burger SouthCoast Today Archived from the original on October 8 2009 Retrieved September 19 2007 Charyn 2006 p 65 Dawson 1995 p 147 The published version of the screenplay identifies its basis as May 1993 last draft incorporating brief revisions made in August September and October Tarantino 1994 n p Dawson 1995 p 140 Dawson 1995 p 146 Biskind 2004 says 1 million p 167 Polan 2000 says close to a million dollars p 68 Enhanced Trivia Track Pulp Fiction DVD says 900 000 ch 14 a b Dawson 1995 p 148 TriStar Pictures Slate for 1993 Variety February 5 1993 Archived from the original on June 30 2008 Retrieved September 21 2007 Biskind 2004 p 168 Polan 2000 pp 68 69 Biskind 2004 pp 167 168 Quoted in Mottram 2006 p 71 Biskind 2004 pp 168 169 Dawson 1995 p 149 Polan 2000 p 69 Dawson 1995 p 148 The New York Times reported Most of the actors received relatively small salaries along with a percentage of the profits Weinraub Bernard September 22 1994 A Film Maker and the Art of the Deal The New York Times Archived from the original on July 9 2017 Retrieved October 8 2007 Biskind 2004 p 170 Tarantino claims the overseas sales were due to his own name see Dawson 1995 p 173 Quoted in Dargis 1994a p 10 Other sources have claimed that Butch was patterned after Ray s Nightfall role Brooker and Brooker 1996 p 234 Polan 1999 p 23 Tarantino s one public statement on the topic quoted here is clearly devoted to Butch s look and not his personality a b Dargis 1994b p 17 Polan 2000 pp 69 70 Enhanced Trivia Track ch 8 Pulp Fiction DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment Dargis 1994b p 18 Polan 2000 p 69 Dawson 1995 p 159 Dawson 1995 pp 159 160 Dawson 1995 p 158 The Hawthorne Grill was torn down not long after the Pulp Fiction shoot Hoffman 2005 p 46 Dawson 1995 p 164 Dawson 1995 p 162 Edwards Gavin May 21 2014 Get the Gimp Breaking Down Pulp Fiction s Most Notorious Scene Rolling Stone Retrieved June 27 2022 Enhanced Trivia Track chs 1 2 Pulp Fiction DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment Pulp Fiction Charts amp Awards Billboard Albums AllMusic com Retrieved December 26 2006 Pulp Fiction Charts amp Awards Billboard Singles AllMusic com Retrieved September 14 2007 Tincknell 2006 p 139 Charyn 2006 p 96 Biskind 2004 p 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Movie Scenes Laverick Daniel Selling a Movie in Two Minutes The Modern Day Film Trailer Close Up Film Archived from the original on October 11 2007 Retrieved September 11 2007 Iconic Banksy Image Painted Over BBC News April 20 2007 Archived from the original on January 6 2010 Retrieved September 11 2007 Dinshaw 1997 p 116 Napalm Speech Tops Movie Poll BBC News January 2 2004 Archived from the original on July 8 2009 Retrieved September 19 2007 Duncan Conrad September 8 2019 Dominic Cummings Boris Johnson s adviser quoted Pulp Fiction by telling aides they need to be cool like Fonzies The Independent Archived from the original on September 9 2019 Retrieved September 9 2019 AFI s 10 Top 10 American Film Institute June 17 2008 Archived from the original on January 16 2013 Retrieved June 18 2008 AFI s 100 Years 100 Movies 10th Anniversary Edition American Film Institute Archived from the original on July 16 2011 Retrieved September 20 2007 Best Movies of All Time Metacritic Archived from the original on January 2 2019 Retrieved September 29 2018 The 500 Greatest Movies Of All Time Empire September 2008 Archived from the original on November 1 2013 Retrieved December 13 2008 Mueller Matt October 17 2006 Total Film Presents The Top 100 Movies Of All Time Total Film Archived from the original on September 24 2008 Retrieved September 21 2007 Star Wars Voted Best Film Ever BBC News November 26 2001 Archived from the original on March 2 2009 Retrieved September 14 2007 Quoted in O Brien 1994 p 90 O Brien 1994 pp 90 91 O Brien 1994 p 91 French Philip March 26 2006 Pulp Fiction The Observer London Archived from the original on August 17 2016 Retrieved December 28 2008 Mottram 2006 p 228 See also p 77 Martin Scorsese guest host Roger Ebert host February 26 2000 Martin Scorsese s Best Films of the 90s Roger Ebert amp the Movies Season 1 Episode 26 Kolker 2000 p 249 a b Kolker 2000 p 281 Rubin 1999 p 174 Tarantino 1994 pp 24 27 Conard 2006 p 108 Walker 2005 p 315 Hirsch 1997 pp 360 340 Constable 2004 p 54 Conard 2006 p 125 Alleva Richard November 18 1994 Pulp Fiction Commonweal Archived from the original on November 30 2007 Retrieved October 8 2007 a b c Stone Alan April May 1995 Pulp Fiction Boston Review Archived from the original on June 21 2007 Retrieved September 18 2007 Kolker 2000 pp 249 250 a b Kolker 2000 p 250 Giroux 1996 p 77 Pamela H Demory Violence and Transcendence in Pulp Fiction and Flannery O Connor in The Image of Violence in Literature the Media and Society Selected Papers from the 1995 Conference of the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery ed and intro Will Wright and Steven Kaplan Pueblo Co Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery 1995 187 194 Quoted in Flannery O Connor An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism ed R Neil Scott Milledgeville Georgia Timberlane Books 2002 p 185 Groth 1997 p 189 Enhanced Trivia Track ch 9 Pulp Fiction DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment Charyn 2006 p 106 a b Tincknell 2006 p 140 Dawson 1995 p 178 Polan 2000 p 19 a b c d e f g White 2002 p 342 a b c d e f Fulwood 2003 p 22 Groth 1997 pp 188 9 Dinshaw 1997 p 186 Mottram 2006 pp 75 76 For Tarantino s admiration of Siegel see Dawson 1995 p 142 Bell 2000 p 87 Miller 1999 p 76 Giroux 1996 p 78 Groth 1997 p 188 Rolling Stone November 3 1994 p110 Conard 2006 pp 125 133 Pulp Fiction 1994 part 4 of 5 filmsite org permanent dead link Miklitsch pp 15 16 Note that while the Three Stooges did have an original TV series that ran briefly in the mid 1960s they were most familiar from their cinematic shorts that were syndicated to television a b Miklitsch p 16 a b Willis 1997 p 195 Tarantino 1994 p 28 Gallefant 2006 p 46 What s In the Briefcase Snopes com August 17 2007 Archived from the original on May 18 2018 Retrieved September 13 2007 Rodriguez and Tarantino Artist On Artist MySpace com April 6 2007 Archived from the original on January 20 2013 Retrieved September 13 2007 See e g Groth 1997 p 188 Polan 2000 p 20 What s in the Briefcase in Pulp Fiction The Straight Dope May 31 2000 Archived from the original on November 20 2008 Retrieved September 18 2007 Nick Cowen Hari Patience August 16 2008 Wheels on Film Repo Man The Daily Telegraph Archived from the original on August 13 2018 Retrieved July 14 2012 Gormley 2005 p 164 Ebert 1997 p 188 Reinhartz 2003 p 108 The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel 25 The Holy Bible King James Version Archived from the original on January 31 2010 Retrieved September 13 2007 Thomas 2003 notes that instead of the Lord this version reads and they shall know that I am Chiba the Bodyguard pp 61 62 Conard 2006 claims that the text originates from the film Bodigaado Kiba Bodyguard Kiba or The Bodyguard 1973 and that the end phrase there is And you will know my name is Chiba the Bodyguard p 135 n 4 Enhanced Trivia Track ch 4 Pulp Fiction DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment Enhanced Trivia Track ch 25 Pulp Fiction DVD Buena Vista Home Entertainment Gormley 2005 p 167 Reinhartz 2003 pp 106 107 Conard 2006 p 130 Rosenbaum Jonathan Allusion Profusion Ed Wood Pulp Fiction Chicago Reader October 21 1994 Note that the avowed inspiration is actually a TV show Kung Fu White Mike amp Mike Thompson Spring 1995 Tarantino in a Can Cashiers du Cinemart Archived from the original on February 11 2012 Retrieved December 31 2006 a b Fraiman 2003 p 15 a b Brooker and Brooker 1996 p 239 Fraiman 2003 p 14 Fraiman s identification of the submachine gun as a Czech M61 matches the description in the screenplay Tarantino 1994 p 96 Visual evidence suggests that a different gun was actually used in the film possibly a MAC 10 or similar model Diaz Johnny November 17 2021 Miramax Sues Quentin Tarantino Over Planned Pulp Fiction NFTs The New York Times ISSN 0362 4331 Archived from the original on December 28 2021 Retrieved November 17 2021 Quentin Tarantino sued over Pulp Fiction NFT plan news yahoo com Archived from the original on November 17 2021 Retrieved November 17 2021 Maddaus Gene September 9 2022 Quentin Tarantino Settles With Miramax Over Pulp Fiction NFT Auction Variety Awards Search Pulp Fiction Hollywood Foreign Press Association Archived from the original on August 7 2007 Retrieved September 12 2007 a b Maslin Janet January 4 1995 Pulp Fiction Gets Top Prize From National Film Critics The New York Times Archived from the original on July 9 2017 Retrieved September 27 2007 BibliographyBailey Jason 2013 Pulp Fiction The Complete Story of Quentin Tarantino s Masterpiece Voyageur Press ISBN 0 7603 4479 5 Barker Martin and Thomas Austin 2000 From Antz to Titanic Reinventing Film Analysis Pluto Press ISBN 0 7453 1579 8 Bart Peter 2000 The Gross The Hits the Flops The Summer That Ate Hollywood New York St Martin s ISBN 0 312 25391 5 Bell David 2000 Eroticizing the Rural in De Centering Sexualities Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis ed David Shuttleton Diane Watt and Richard Phillips London and New York Routledge ISBN 0 415 19466 0 Biskind Peter 2004 Down and Dirty Pictures Miramax Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film New York Simon amp Schuster ISBN 0 684 86259 X Brooker Peter and Will Brooker 1996 Pulpmodernism Tarantino s Affirmative Action in Film Theory Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies ed Philip Simpson Andrew Utterson and Karen J Shepherdson London and New York Routledge ISBN 0 415 25971 1 Charyn Jerome 2006 Raised by Wolves The Turbulent Art and Times of Quentin Tarantino New York Thunder s Mouth Press ISBN 1 56025 858 6 Christopher Nicholas 2006 Somewhere in the Night Film Noir and the American City Emeryville Calif Shoemaker amp Hoard ISBN 1 59376 097 3 Conard Mark T 2006 Symbolism Meaning and Nihilism in Pulp Fiction in The Philosophy of Film Noir ed Mark T Conard Lexington University Press of Kentucky ISBN 0 8131 2377 1 Constable Catherine 2004 Postmodernism and Film in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism ed Steven Connor Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 0 521 64840 8 Dancyger Ken 2002 The Technique of Film and Video Editing History Theory and Practice 3d ed New York Focal Press ISBN 0 240 80420 1 Dargis Manohla 1994a Pulp Instincts Sight and Sound 4 no 5 May Collected in Quentin Tarantino Interviews ed Gerald Peary Jackson University Press of Mississippi 1998 ISBN 1 57806 051 6 Dargis Manohla 1994b Quentin Tarantino on Pulp Fiction Sight and Sound 4 no 11 November Davis Todd F and Kenneth Womack 1998 Shepherding the Weak The Ethics of Redemption in Quentin Tarantino s Pulp Fiction Literature Film Quarterly 26 no 1 Dawson Jeff 1995 Quentin Tarantino The Cinema of Cool New York and London Applause ISBN 1 55783 227 7 Desser David 2003 Global Noir Genre Film in the Age of Transnationalism in Film Genre Reader III ed Barry Keith Grant Austin University of Texas Press ISBN 0 292 70185 3 Dinshaw Carolyn 1997 Getting Medieval Pulp Fiction Gawain Foucault in The Book and the Body ed Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O Brien O Keeffe Notre Dame University of Notre Dame Press ISBN 0 268 00700 4 Ebert Roger 1997 Questions for the Movie Answer Man Kansas City Mo Andrews McMeel ISBN 0 8362 2894 4 Fraiman Susan 2003 Cool Men and the Second Sex New York Columbia University Press ISBN 0 231 12962 9 Fulwood Neil 2003 One Hundred Violent Films that Changed Cinema London and New York Batsford Sterling ISBN 0 7134 8819 0 Gallafent Edward 2006 Quentin Tarantino London Pearson Longman ISBN 0 582 47304 7 Giroux Henry A 1996 Fugitive Cultures Race Violence and Youth London and New York Routledge ISBN 0 415 91577 5 Gormley Paul 2005 The New Brutality Film Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema Bristol UK and Portland Ore Intellect ISBN 1 84150 119 0 Groth Gary 1997 A Dream of Perfect Reception The Movies of Quentin Tarantino in Commodify Your Dissent Salvos from The Baffler ed Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland New York W W Norton ISBN 0 393 31673 4 Hirsch Foster 1997 Afterword in Crime Movies exp ed Carlos Clarens Cambridge Mass Da Capo ISBN 0 306 80768 8 Hoffman David 2005 The Breakfast Cereal Gourmet Kansas City Mo Andrews McMeel ISBN 0 7407 5029 1 King Geoff 2002 Film Comedy London Wallflower Press ISBN 1 903364 35 3 Kolker Robert 2000 A Cinema of Loneliness Penn Stone Kubrick Scorsese Spielberg Altman 3d ed New York Oxford University Press ISBN 0 19 512350 6 Miller Stephen Paul 1999 The Seventies Now Culture As Surveillance Durham N C Duke University Press ISBN 0 8223 2166 1 Mottram James 2006 The Sundance Kids How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood New York Macmillan ISBN 0 571 22267 6 O Brien Geoffrey 1994 Quentin Tarantino s Pulp Fantastic in Castaways of the Image Planet Movies Show Business Public Spectacle Washington D C Counterpoint ISBN 1 58243 190 6 Parker Philip 2002 The Art and Science of Screenwriting 2d ed Bristol UK Intellect ISBN 1 84150 065 8 Polan Dana 2000 Pulp Fiction London BFI ISBN 0 85170 808 0 Rabinowitz Paula 2002 Black amp White amp Noir America s Pulp Modernism New York Columbia University Press ISBN 0 231 11480 X Real Michael R 1996 Exploring Media Culture A Guide Thousand Oaks Calif London and New Delhi Sage ISBN 0 8039 5877 3 Reinhartz Adele 2003 Scripture on the Silver Screen Louisville Ky Westminster John Knox Press ISBN 0 664 22359 1 Rubin Nathan 1999 Thrillers Cambridge New York and Melbourne Cambridge University Press ISBN 0 521 58839 1 Silver Alain and James Ursini 2004 Film Noir Cologne Taschen ISBN 3 8228 2261 2 Tarantino Quentin 1994 Pulp Fiction A Screenplay New York Hyperion Miramax ISBN 0 7868 8104 6 Thomas Brian 2003 VideoHound s Dragon Asian Action amp Cult Flicks Canton Mich Visible Ink Press ISBN 1 57859 141 4 Tincknell Estella 2006 The Soundtrack Movie Nostalgia and Consumption in Film s Musical Moments ed Ian Conrich and Estella Tincknell Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press ISBN 0 7486 2344 2 Walker David 2005 Tarantino Quentin in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism 2d ed ed Stuart Sim London and New York Routledge ISBN 0 415 33358 X Waxman Sharon 2005 Rebels on the Backlot Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System New York HarperCollins ISBN 0 06 054017 6 White Glyn 2002 Quentin Tarantino in Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers ed Yvonne Tasker London and New York Routledge ISBN 0 415 18973 X Willis Sharon 1997 High Contrast Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film Durham N C Duke University Press ISBN 0 8223 2041 XExternal links Wikiquote has quotations related to Pulp Fiction Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pulp Fiction 1994 Pulp Fiction essay 1 by Jami Bernard at National Film Registry Official website Pulp Fiction at the American Film Institute Catalog Pulp Fiction at IMDb Pulp Fiction at AllMovie Pulp Fiction at Box Office Mojo Pulp Fiction at Metacritic Pulp Fiction at Rotten Tomatoes Pulp Fiction bibliography via UC Berkeley Discussion of Pulp Fiction use of Ezekiel 25 17 at Bibledex com Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Pulp Fiction amp oldid 1144387950, wikipedia, wiki, 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