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Samuel L Jackson sported a Jheri curl wig to play hitman Jules Winnfield

wenty years on, it isn’t any easier to try to summarise than when it first exploded in our faces. Let’s say: Samuel L Jackson has an epiphany, accidentally blows a kid’s brains out, presents a gold watch that’s been stored up his backside to the young son of his late wartime friend, Ving Rhames gets jumped on a pommel horse, rides a chopper named Grace, and learns a thing or two about snorting heroin. There’s also a mysterious briefcase that glows inside, Big Kahuna Burgers and a 1992 Acura NSX driven by . Pulp Fiction made us look at movies differently, to obsess over details and semiotics like never before, even though its writer- director seemed like a regular movie nerd; that guy we’ve all heard of who watches films non-stop on a couch in his basement.

Pulp Fiction landed a sucker punch. And it felt like an emphatic flip of the middle finger at scurrilous critics and arch intellectuals, perhaps, or just to ensure its presence was felt. This was straight-up dope packaged for dead-end cinephiles to deliberate on issues of post-modernism and the makings of neo-noir, while we were winding VHS ribbons to shreds. Pulp Fiction, for us, was the introduction to everything from De Palma to Hitchcock, Fellini to Kurosawa. It was a lava pool bubbling over with cinematic and cultural references, into which we dipped to emerge lippier, if not smarter, and somewhat wise to the arcane world of celluloid.

Heck, we believed that Samuel L Jackson’s Jules Winnfield in a greasy Jheri curl was truly spouting forth from the Bible, when most of that passage was parodying the original text of Ezekiel 25:17 and pilfering – or paying homage to, as Tarantino would have it – the opening of a 1973 Japanese film calledKarate Kiba. And we did the Batusi dance like it was Tony Manero’s signature move in – but this was also not what it seemed; the dance performed by Thurman (as Mia Wallace) and Travolta (as Vincent Vega) at Jack Rabbit Slim’s actually mirrors a scene in a noisy Paris café from Godard’s Bande à part (1964), where Anna Karina takes the floor with Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey to try out what they call “the Madison dance”. Not everyone took instantly to Pulp Fiction. In Cannes in 1994, Tarantino was booed for his Palme d’Or win. The film was pilloried by some as frivolous fanboy delirium, nonchalantly violent and cluttered with profanity and racial epithets. A “prime Words by Jaideep Sen example of the pernicious ooze-like influence of mass culture exemplified by their bête noire: TV”, was how author Robert John Travolta and Uma Thurman seem simply to be doing the Batusi Miklitsch described it in Roll Over Adorno, while Robert Kolker in dance, but are mirroring the Madison Dance from Bande à part his book A Cinema of Loneliness trashed the film as “a simulacrum

50 alphamagazine.ae October 2014 October 2014 alphamagazine.ae 51 of our daily exposure to television; its homophobes, thugs and It went up for Best Picture alongside The Shawshank Redemption, perverts, sentimental boxers and pimp promoters move through Quiz Show, Four Weddings and a Funeral and (which a series of long-take tableaux”. won), and fetched a statuette for Best Original Screenplay That said, Pulp Fiction’s disruptive impact set the stage (Tarantino and Roger Avary). for a broader transformation in movies. As literary critic James Tarantino, at the time, had only the breakaway hit Reservoir Woods wrote in The Guardian, “Only in this age could a writer as Dogs (1992) to his name, and the seed of a reputation for talented as Tarantino produce artworks so vacuous, so entirely animating and eroticising violence. He was still being referred stripped of any politics, metaphysics, or moral interest.” to as a high-school dropout and former video rental store clerk And then of course there is the matter of drugs. In interviews from suburban Los Angeles, blessed with little more than the Tarantino has recalled being urged by Miramax’s Harvey facetious idiolect of a film junkie. Travolta had been in a slump Weinstein to go “easy on the heroin scene”, presumably the since 1978’s , Willis had starred in a string of box-office scene where Vega drives a hypodermic syringe through the duds, and Thurman had suffered the ignominy of picking up breastplate of Mia Wallace after her overdose. Weinstein’s a Worst Actress Razzie nomination for Gus Van Sant’s Even concern was understandable; this was nearly two decades Cowgirls Get the Blues. before we had Walter White cooking crystal meth like it was While writing Pulp Fiction, Tarantino and Avary were eager a tray of cupcakes, Leo DiCaprio playing free and easy with to pay homage to the genre of private-eye fiction from the cocaine as Jordan Belfort, or Matthew McConaughey smuggling 1920s and 1930s, especially in the sharp dialogue and pacey, pharmaceuticals as Ron Woodroof. hard-boiled flair of stories by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler that were featured in pulp magazines like Black Mask. Pulp Fiction revived several flagging careers At the 67th in 1995, Pulp Fiction was in the They were also set on a split structure for their script, something including those of Uma Thurman and John company of such innocuous fare as Interview with the Vampire, they’d seen in the 1963 horror film,Black Sabbath (I tre volti della Travolta (far right), Little Women, The Lion King and Speed, picking up nominations paura in Italian) by the slasher-film pioneer Mario Bava, which seen here with Samuel L Jackson, Maria De for Tarantino as director, Sally Menke for editing, Travolta for revolves around three separate stories. Tarantino, however, Madeiros, Quentin Tarantino, and Bruce Willis best , and Jackson and Thurman for their supporting roles. ended up making before getting back toPulp images Corbis / Shutterstock

52 alphamagazine.ae October 2014 October 2014 alphamagazine.ae 53 such as “the Hitchhiker and the Swim”, apart from the twist. Thurman is also said to have picked a few steps from the 1929 Fiction to write the segments on Vega and Winnfield, the two film,The Pandora’s Box. gabby hitmen, and Wallace, the capricious wife of a mobster 7. , , and Daniel (Rhames). Avary penned the segment on Butch (Willis), about Day-Lewis were among the other considered for the a washed-up boxer who refuses to throw a fight and a gold role of Vincent Vega. watch that’s passed on to him as an heirloom. 8. Travolta reportedly got paid around $100,000 to play Vega. As for charm, Pulp Fiction was steeped in nostalgia for the 9. Tarantino first approached to play the Bruce golden era of Hollywood, exemplified by the sets of Jack Rabbit Willis character, Butch. Slim’s to details such as black-and-white street backgrounds 10. Jules Winnfield was originally scripted with a giant afro. flashing by through the windows in the car scenes. 11. The chopper ridden by Butch is stickered Grace, in It wasn’t until the Kill Bill movies almost a decade later that homage to 1969’s Easy Rider. Pulp Fiction’s mix of influences – from manga to spaghetti 12. Lash La Rue, as mentioned by Kietel playing The Wolf, westerns to B-grade sleaze – became Tarantino’s calling card refers to the late-cowboy star of films such asKing of the as a writer and director. Pulp Fiction, meanwhile, got strung on Bullwhip (1950). a budget of $8.5 million (Dh31 million) and, factoring about Above: Vince and Jules have some cleaning up to do after 20 film geek 13. The film’s opening credits roll to a Dick Dale rendition of accidentally blowing off a teen drug dealer’s head. Below: $10 million for marketing, collected over $213 million Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace at 50s-themed Jack Rabbit Misirlou before switching to Jungle Boogie by Kool & the Gang. worldwide. Its lurching manner and non-linear plot placed it Slim’s, the set noted for the attention to detail in its decor facts about 14. The Pulp Fiction OST peaked on the Billboard 200 chart at alongside the likes of Memento, and Zero Effect, Pulp Fiction number 21, while Urge Overkill’s cover of Neil Diamond’s even as Tarantino was being labelled “a cinematic kleptomaniac” Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon reached number 59. from a world “where the entire landscape is composed of 15. The brands Fruit Brute cereal, Big Kahuna burger and Hollywood product” by critic, editor and publisher Gary Groth. 1. At the Jack Rabbit Slim’s bar, the walls are lined with soda, and Red Apple cigarettes also feature inReservoir Dogs. Nevertheless, Pulp Fiction was soon being hailed as posters of late 1950s films such asAttack of the 50 Ft Woman, 16. The sequence of Vega driving an ODing Wallace was “a cultural watershed”, as the film that radically widened the Attack of the Crab Monsters, Daddy-O, Dragstrip Girl, Machine taken from The Driver (1978), while the shots of the road in boundaries of independent movie-making. This was also the film Gun Kelly, Motorcycle Gang, Rock All Night and Sorority Girl. the car’s rear window are said to be from Murder, My Sweet that spurred philosophical discourses on symbolism, nihilism 2. The celebrity lookalikes working at Slim’s include Buddy (1944). and metaphysical truths. Randy Laist*, an American college Holly (played by ), Donna Reed, James Dean 17. American TV shows referenced include Speed Racer, professor and author, points out that the semantic landscape of and Marilyn Monroe. The Brady Bunch, The Avengers, The Three Stooges, The Pulp Fiction had been foreseen by cultural theorist Jean 3. One of the varieties of heroin that Vega checks out is Flintstones, I Spy, Green Acres, Kung Fu and Happy Days. Baudrillard. Laist says Baudrillard had anticipated the style of named Bava, after the Italian film-maker Mario Bava. 18. In a scene where Butch picks out a suitable weapon, he aesthetic pleasure Pulp Fiction elicits from its audience when he 4. The milkshake flavours Amos and Andy and Martin and goes through a hammer, a baseball bat and a chainsaw – observed “A kind of unintentional parody hangs over Lewis refer to a black comedy duo from the early days of allusions to the films The Toolbox Murders (1978), Walking Tall everything; a tactical simulation, a consummate aesthetic American radio, and the comedians Jerry Lewis and Dean (1973) and The Untouchables (1987), and The Texas Chain Saw enjoyment, is attached to the indefinable play of reading and the Martin. Massacre (1974) – before settling on a katana samurai sword. rules of the game.” 5. The Douglas Sirk steak that Vincent orders at Slim’s is a 19. Vincent Vega is seen carrying about and reading a However the film’s merits are regarded, we’re still hunched nod to the 1950s director of films such asWritten on the Wind Modesty Blaise novel through the film. over Pulp Fiction, sussing out sources and browsing torrents and Magnificent Obsession. 20. Harvey Keitel was originally meant to be driving a of the masters of world cinema (or streaming them on ) 6. Travolta based some of his dance moves on the Batusi, as silver Porsche. based on something someone says in the film. Twenty years on, seen in Batman (1966), while Thurman has spoken of styles Vol 10, No 1 (Jan1 2013) No 10, the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Vol in Published we’re still learning from Pulp Fiction. *

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