It’s easy to take an iconic movie for granted. On the rare occasion when a film’s reputation or pop cultural impact extends beyond its own limits, it’s almost inevitable, in fact, for the movie itself to lose some of its shine. That would seem to be particularly true of Quentin Tarantino‘s Pulp Fiction, a film that has cast a longer shadow over the past 30 years of movie history than almost any other. Its scenes are still quoted on a regular basis and its imagery continues to be endlessly imitated.
While its cultural imprint may be too big for even it, Pulp Fiction still has the power to seem just as magical now as it did in 1994. Whether you decide to watch it again with someone who has never seen it before or you consciously try to look past what you already know about it on a spur-of-the-moment rewatch, you invariably find nothing but pure exhilaration waiting for you. That’s because Pulp Fiction remains, even after all these years, one of the most brazen crime comedies in film history.
It is a film made with an almost unholy confidence by a director who has repeatedly demonstrated his ability to manage and surpass his audiences’ expectations. In Pulp Fiction, he not only did that better than he ever has since, but more skillfully than most directors have in their entire careers.
A wild, absurd world
The first thing you have to acknowledge about Pulp Fiction is that it — like many of Quentin Tarantino’s movies — adheres to its own, cockeyed logic. Not only does the film follow a time-jumping, nonlinear structure that boggled viewers’ minds when it was released in 1994, but it also exists in a version of Los Angeles in which diner-robbing lovers, Deliverance-esque hillbillies, Bible-quoting hitmen, and death-obsessed cabbies seem to lurk around every corner. Pulp Fiction‘s L.A. is just as sun-soaked as you’d expect, and there are enough diners and donut shops scattered throughout it for it to still seem somewhat recognizable, but beneath its surface lies a world of crime movie clichés and astonishing perversions the likes of which had never before been wrangled together in one film.
The movie’s reality is both familiar and not, which is just another way of saying that it blends real life and the world of trashy fiction together so voraciously that it leaves you reeling. In a lesser film, Pulp Fiction‘s caricature-filled West Coast metropolis would be evidence of its own creative incoherence, but it proves to be the perfect backdrop for the crime comedy’s windy, endlessly subversive story. Its marquee scenes are so well-known now that it’s easy to forget just how genuinely surprising many of Pulp Fiction‘s biggest twists actually are. Its most noteworthy are no doubt Tarantino’s swift upending of Mia (Uma Thurman) and Vincent’s (John Travolta) will-they-or-won’t-they romantic tension by sending the former into a life-threatening drug overdose and his unexpected trapping of Marsellus (Ving Rhames) and Butch (Bruce Willis) in a sex dungeon located beneath a San Fernando Valley pawn shop.
Too many left turns to count
But Pulp Fiction is overflowing with subversions both tiny and big. Tarantino even pulls the rug out from under you during the film’s opening credits by literally switching the radio station partway through from one song to another. In a less talented director’s hands, these decisions might come across as desperate or grating. However, in Pulp Fiction, they perfectly align with — and reinforce — the film’s deliberately unpredictable plotting and structure. At the drop of a hat, a song can change, a flirtatious date can become a drug-crazed rescue mission, a chase can morph into a perverted hostage situation, and a seemingly simple car ride can be interrupted by a man’s head getting blown off. This is not a film that cares about letting you settle into a familiar rhythm. The only groove that matters is Tarantino’s.
In this sense, Pulp Fiction manages to walk one of the trickiest tightropes in cinema. It simultaneously feels like it was constantly made with its viewers in mind and solely for the amusement of its director. The movie is an unabashed amalgamation of a wide array of influences and touchstones, including Deliverance, The Wild Bunch, Band of Outsiders, Psycho, Shaft, and countless others, and yet Tarantino’s singular voice and eye are all over it. These are ultimately just some of the contradictions that make Pulp Fiction such an enduringly compelling and entertaining piece of work. It is cohesive and yet wildly sprawling, clear pastiche and yet invigoratingly original, in constant direct dialogue with film history and yet completely unconcerned with the established rules and sensibilities of the past.
It is all of these things at once, as well as so much more, and to say that it had an immediate mark on cinema itself would be an understatement.
A shot in the arm (or chest)
In May 1994, Pulp Fiction shocked the world by winning the coveted Palme d’Or — perhaps the most prestigious prize in all of filmmaking — at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. Months later, it was released in theaters and rocketed past its $8 million budget by grossing over $200 million at the box office. It went on to receive multiple Oscar nominations, as well as one win for Tarantino and Roger Avary’s screenplay. John Travolta’s career was revived by his performance in it, and Samuel L. Jackson became a bona fide movie star because of it. All of these achievements, as impressive as they are, pale in comparison to the film’s cultural impact.
The movie fundamentally changed what both studios and moviegoers alike expected from the “independent” cinema scene — proving that even films with lower budgets and distinct voices could resonate in a mainstream way. It inevitably spawned countless imitators, most of which failed to recapture even a tenth of Pulp Fiction‘s magic. Even more importantly, the film changed what viewers thought a movie could do. It proved that nothing was off limits — that no twist is too outlandish or surprising if handled correctly. In the 30 years since then, no movie has really managed to simultaneously shock, enthrall, provoke, and entertain viewers as electrifyingly as it did.
Maybe that’s because Tarantino is a filmmaker with a preternatural understanding of not only how to manipulate audience expectations, but also reliably exceed them. Maybe it’s just because no one has figured out as enticing or uncanny a formula as Tarantino did. Either way, Pulp Fiction‘s immensity is no less impressive now than it was 30 years ago. It is a movie that refuses to let you get your hands around it, but wrestles full control of you instead. It’s not meant to be conquered, but conquered by, and it’ll likely continue to do so for the next three decades and beyond.
Pulp Fiction is streaming now on Pluto TV, Amazon Prime Video, and Paramount+.
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