Everybody knows the old E. M. Forster distinction between story and plot: “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. Fair enough, but what Forster failed to foresee was the emergence of a third category, the Quentin Tarantino plot, which goes something like this: “The king died while having sex on the hood of a lime-green Corvette, and the queen died of contaminated crack borrowed from the court jester, with whom she was enjoying a conversation about the relative merits of Tab and Diet Pepsi as they sat and surveyed the bleeding remains of the lords and ladies whom she had just blown away with a stolen .45 in a fit of grief.” It is hard to know what Forster would have made of Tarantino’s new movie, “Pulp Fiction.” I suspect he would have run gibbering into his study, locked the door, and hidden behind the bookshelves. Not just because of the bloodshed—all that brain matter suddenly appearing on the outsides of people’s skulls, instead of working quietly within, where it belongs—but because of the equal violence done to narrative form.
“Pulp Fiction” contains at least three plots, but it’s not a portmanteau movie, like “Dead of Night” or “Tales of Manhattan”; the whole purpose of the different threads is to cross-weave, tangle up with each other, and fray at the ends. The first involves Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), a pair of tough guys sent to fetch a briefcase from some preppy crooks and deliver the appropriate punishment. There may be some gunfire involved, but that doesn’t bother Vince; what bothers Vince is that his boss, Marsellus (Ving Rhames), is going out of town and leaving his young wife, Mia (Uma Thurman), in Vince’s care and protection. Events prove that he was right to worry. The second strand involves Butch (Bruce Willis), a boxer paid by Marsellus to lose a fight. Not only does he not lose—he actually kills his opponent, and then prepares to flee with his girlfriend, Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros). The final strand returns us to Vince and Jules, who now have a new problem, a car full of blood. This calls for serious valeting, so they bring in The Wolf (Harvey Keitel), who makes the problem disappear. Then everyone goes off to have breakfast.
The film sounds simple enough; but the various components seldom behave as they should, and there are roles for Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Eric Stoltz, and Rosanna Arquette that are almost too complicated to explain. For Tarantino, chronology exists to be messed around with, to be looped and spliced. A main character dies, but before we can mourn his passing we find ourselves flipping back to a time when he was still in one piece. Tarantino is playing an old Godard game, plugging our emotions just as we’re about to let them flow. It may be a cold and cunning way to cut a movie, but it’s urged on by a serious desire to stop any schmalz creeping through the cracks in the script. Elsewhere, though, he seems to be playing around for no reason at all, revelling in the sheer dictatorial power of the filmmaker, and forgetting that there are people out in the theatre who want to get on with the show. Butch, the boxer, has a lucky watch that he treasures, a family heirloom; most directors would want us to take that on trust, but Tarantino has to shut the entire plot down for a while in order to prove it. We have to sit through a childhood flashback and a deadpan cameo from Christopher Walken, who explains that Butch’s father stashed the watch up his ass for five years. It’s a joke, but hardly a good joke; and, having written it, Tarantino has to shoehorn the damn thing into his picture whether it fits or not. The enfant terrible of Hollywood can sometimes be a real kid.
The architecture of “Pulp Fiction” may look skewed and strained, but the decoration is a lot of fun. I loved the little curls of suspense that kept us waiting for fresh characters, the details pondered by the camera in advance of a full-face shot: the feet of Uma Thurman, the Band-Aid on the back of Ving Rhames’s neck, and the smooth tuxedo of Harvey Keitel, who appears, rather stylishly, to be throwing a party at eight-thirty in the morning. The whole movie, all two and a half hours, is studded with teases and alibis: hit men stop to argue when they should be getting on with the job, and thus raise the level of threat; even the plots are more like subplots, seamy sidelines into which Tarantino is poking his nose—somewhere, you tell yourself, up above this gutter life the main event is going on. It’s a bizarre trick; imagine erasing the hero from “King Lear,” leaving nothing but squabbling brothers and sisters and an old guy strapped to a chair, scared of losing his eyes. Tarantino is ready to romp in vile jelly; you can hear him snickering at his own brand of Petit Guignol, and inviting us to join in. When Butch needs a weapon, he picks up a hammer, then a baseball bat, then a chainsaw, and finally, to his vast satisfaction, a curved Japanese sword; and when Mia needs a jab of adrenaline through the sternum, the horror is held at bay as long as possible, while Vince brandishes a needle that looks like a prop from “Moby-Dick.”
But these are the preludes to violence; as Marsellus so delightfully promises, “I’m gonna get medieval on your ass.” What about the stuff itself? “Pulp Fiction” arrives with a reputation for being almost unwatchable, which is a publicist’s scheme for getting everyone to watch it. At the risk of being a killjoy, I have to say that Tarantino is not quite the Pied Piper of mayhem—the joykill, so to speak—that he wants to be. Like “Reservoir Dogs,” the new picture feels more violent than it actually is. You could say the same of “The Big Heat”; but Lang’s movie was a moral furnace, stoked with such guilt and vengefulness that nobody could come near the action without getting burned. Tarantino functions in a moral vacuum where the brutality is mostly verbal, where sticks and stones can break my bones but words can really hurt me. (The most violent movie he could make would have no violence at all, just talk: gangsta rap meets Ivy Compton-Burnett.) People queue up to attack a passing idea, the punier and more trivial the better: hamburgers, milkshakes, great coffee—all of them fast food for thought. The effect should be mock-heroic, but it pushes beyond that; think of Andy Warhol, who realized that if you blew a plain image up to absurd proportions, or reproduced it often enough, you were not sneering at its ordinariness but somehow gilding it with a glamour and pathos of its own. Tarantino is less an ironist than a chronic fetishist; he has cooked up a world where hamburgers matter, and nothing else.
Despite its title, the movie owes far more to the Pop artists of the fifties and sixties than to the pulp writers of previous decades. The brackish streams of mood and motive that flowed beneath the work of James M. Cain and David Goodis may not have run deep, but they never ran dry; and the low-lit Los Angeles of Chandler is continents away from the garish, spasmodic town of Tarantino’s fancy. Their only common currency is the knowledge that life is cheap; as Chandler wrote, “It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization.” But Chandler smiled at the joke, his rueful prose no broader than Bogart’s smile; Tarantino laughs out loud. The idea of putting a man of honor on the mean streets, if only for dramatic contrast, would never occur to him. That is why, for all the wild things that happen on them, the streets of “Pulp Fiction” stay as flat as a map.
If anyone holds this movie together, it isn’t Tarantino—it’s John Travolta. He strolls through it without a wink of vanity, having long since relinquished the oily posing of “Saturday Night Fever” in favor of the first law of cool: Don’t try to be cool. The very title, “Pulp Fiction,” sounds like a description of his face—luscious but squashy, easily bruised, the look of a former pretty boy who can still inspire tall tales. While Tarantino clamors for our attention, Travolta knows that he has it and isn’t going to lose it in a hurry. He can afford to rumple and fatten his character, turning Vince into a slob and a patsy, driving the picture beyond the regulation hipness of “Reservoir Dogs” into a shabbier territory, where a man is known not just by his suit or his ruthlessness but by his hits of bliss and his flashes of panic, the big mistakes he can make as he tries to correct the little ones. What stays with you after “Pulp Fiction” has ended (and amazingly little does stay with you) is the closeup of Vince’s slow, drugged smile as he drives through the darkness to meet Mia, or the rather endearing shots of him sitting on the toilet reading “Modesty Blaise.” Travolta has the nerve, in the midst of what feels like an action movie, to remind us of the pleasures of inactivity, the deep need to hang out.
My favorite scene comes at Jack Rabbit Slim’s. This is Tarantino heaven, a movie-prop diner where you can order a Douglas Sirk steak from a Buddy Holly look-alike. Vince is eating with Mia, and trying hard not to fall for her. When she asks him to dance, he refuses, then yields. You brace yourself for a big Travolta moment. Will he nip to the men’s room and come back in a white suit and black shirt? Will he roll his hands and point at the glitter ball? No way; the two of them take to the floor and quietly twist, while the camera stands to one side, snatches a couple of closeups, then fades them out halfway through. It’s a triumph of discretion, the only one in the movie, and you can’t help feeling that Travolta and Thurman have calmed the director down. Tarantino is an artist mad for affect, terrified that his audience may be bored or moved (the same thing, as far as he’s concerned). But his actors are ahead of the game; people like Samuel L. Jackson and Maria de Medeiros, and even a nicely troubled Bruce Willis, fight to flesh the movie out with warm-blooded gestures of feeling. That is what makes “Pulp Fiction” such an intriguing spectacle: not the acrylic brightness of its design, or even the funny filth of its patter, but the tension between the manic skills of its inventor and the refusal of his subjects to be treated like cartoons. It may well be that in thirty years the Tarantino landscape will look as bleached and dated as Antonioni’s; that the blank morality and wicked accoutrements of “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs”—leather and chains, Madonna talk, sodomy in a dark corner—will have no more purchase on our imagination than do the rolling nudes and long, soporific takes of “Red Desert.” If the work does survive and prosper, it will owe a lot to the performers who flocked to Tarantino and confronted his ceaseless energy with their own. You catch a hint of the conflict to come, I think, in the climactic speech of “Pulp Fiction,” magnificently delivered by Jackson. “You’re the weak, and I’m the tyranny of evil men,” he declaims. “But I’m trying, Ringo, I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd.” Will Quentin Tarantino try as hard? My guess is that he’ll be too busy roasting the lambs. ♦
