Pulp Fiction

POISONVILLE

Not unlike 2022, a fever of contempt was so rampant in our two-bit culture back in 1994 that a derivative shocker mocker like Pulp Fiction was applauded as the year’s best. Other than the deepening malaise of willful degradation, and an apparent need to revel in it on every level, personifying a scary decline of critical and social skills, is there, after thirty years, a way to make sense of Quentin Tarantino’s success? Sure to incite some, yes: the straight cools condescend to a likely invert for giving in, for becoming one of them—a dunderhead mired in blood, violence, anarchic temperament. And the critics are afraid to offend the mob or the moviemaker. But Pulp Fiction wasn’t and still isn’t hip nihilism—it’s not a tantalizing device to mock conventions, or re-think them. Quite the opposite: it’s a giant suck up to the boobgeoise of E!. With the repulsive Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Tarantino turns into the butch John Waters. A tribute to a genre Hammett refined and maybe only Raymond Chandler has come close to surpassing, Pulp Fiction, a picture I wanted to like as I go for mock and recalcitrance, the lifeblood of middle finger flicks, and for a while John Travolta is cautious joy: drug-fogged, his Vincent as hit man is the embodiment of apathy—a spaced-out warning of brain cells dying from a lack of nourishment. Yet, was the larger part of audiences whooping it up doing so out of the fear of being uncool, afraid to admit their negative reactions were closer to what they’re really feeling? Pulp Fiction isn’t the quasi-stylistic, thumb-your-nose thrill ride it wanted to be as much as it is an Ex-Laxer shitting out pop veneration to the sociopathology of our talk show jive. When Deliverance gets plopped in, the updated sexual sadism isn’t only too obvious, it’s also a betrayal to Tarantino’s own twisted appetites as he serves up the wrong victim. Many viewers were back then anxiously responding to the faked tension of the souped-up honky-funky dialogue, waiting for the director to make 90s fresh what’s stale from old Hollywood but then comes Travolta’s “reprise,” which sends the picture into a dive of monotony, with perhaps half of us becoming a collective “wax museum with a pulse.” After Willis rides off on his motorcycle with his waify Edith Piaf, my date leaned over to ask “Is that all there is?” and I whispered, “Don’t think so. Harvey Keitel hasn’t showed up nude yet.” When Keitel appears, fully clothed, the movie fully expires. Tarantino thinks he’s pulling the rug from under the mockster mode of the species of the damned he loves. But he’s dumbed-down pulp’s fun, the genre’s success due in part to the blurriness not even the writers, actors and directors can see through; a larger part of the success is the goings-on are so insistently amoral everything becomes immoral pleasure—like watching Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis get it in Double Indemnity. Underneath the rot is the sleazy satisfaction of reading or watching institutions, traditions, morals get overturned, enjoying how the good and the bad intertwine, with common sense going topsy-turvy. Originally, Chinatown had John Huston getting plugged; knowing it’s what the audience is preparing for, Polanski reverses expectations. Horribly sneaky, so iniquitously right. The Grifters has a climax so incestuously charged we’re nearly gasping, in a state of shock as we watch Anjelica Huston obscenely scoop up the money. (And where the credits needed to start rolling; instead, Frears tacks on a final of nothingness lessening the impact of Anjelica’s last act.) What seems to happen in Pulp Fiction is Tarantino resurrects Travolta as an audience-pleaser. Fractured out of continuity, de-effectualizing pulp’s mangy canons, what it suggests is bad boy Tarantino screwed up: his mock turned out to be a simpleton’s idea of shock effects. He forgot the golden rule in breaking the rules—mock has to have a real jolt; he can’t even match the comicly rigged sine qua non outrages on the Jerry Springer slamfests or Waters’ odoriferous sendup of noiry retribution in Polyester. (Tarantino’s re-working of jump cuts and skewed continuity works better in Reservoir Dogs if only as a breather from the excessively longish scenes.) The reprise also stretches the fabric of noir’s dysfunctional logic too far. Had Tarantino really wanted to turn convention upside down, Bruce Willis would have been a victim, and the menacing Marcellus out to get him for reneging on fixing a boxing match would be the one to save Willis from his fate. And technology becomes fraud—though most likely a mistake (just one among many well-cataloged on the newsgroups)—when Thurman turns off her pad’s alarm system, it really should have been blasting as in the next scene a living room door has been left open. Travolta crashing a convertible into Eric Stotlz’s house doesn’t arouse the neighbors? Loads of praise were forthcoming over Samuel L. Jackson’s harpy Jules, who, in a saner world, would be branded an “incorrecto” moron for believing dogs eat their own feces, much like pigs. He and Travolta look like Hard Copy witness rejects who end up on Richard Bey for a meal ticket. Tarantino manages to provide one joyful moment: Travolta, fleshy, greased to the max and remaining our most irrecusably watchable male dancer, does a stony Twist.

Hammett took pulp fiction to an art form—to Poisonville, the nick-named city as setting for his 1929 novel Red Harvest. Millions of us have been hooked ever since—enjoyably enslaved to the defiance and animosity toward “the system,” to the nonchalant crimes, murders and injustices as ways of screwing authority. There’s a powerful need to feel this way—to keep from going bonkers from all the dos, don’ts, nos, absolute nots and accompanying hypocrisies. We were, of course, extending the finger long before 1994: the most spectacular national dismissal of authority came during the Prohibition, about which we could apply what we learned from our mistakes to drugs. (Instead, we’re attempting to go back—to a GQP philosophy, through which morality is espoused by opportunistic defamers, busybodies, crybabies, liars, cheaters, haters, insurrectionists.) This may be why Pulp Fiction gets some audiences worked up—they know the system is defunct of rationale and accountability: when Travolta’s gun accidentally goes off and kills a captive, there were/are roars from many as they see bits of the victim’s brains splattered on Jackson’s hair. It’s succumbing to the madness, a way of shrugging off our own responsibilities in having helped make the nation as sick as it is, like the way the bloody masks of Bill and Hillary were the huge Poisonville hits of the 1994 Halloween season. Three decades later, not much has changed: right wing Christers and no-brain whites find Twitler the kind of Pulpit Fiction around which they can burn their crosses of hate. There’s no going back to the daffy dayz of Hairspray.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com