Pulp Fiction directed Reviewed by Steve Smith VISCERAL and searing, but hip and hilarious, the brilliance of Quentin Tarantino's work can't be denied. It has transformed him from an unknown pop cultural train spotter into the world's most talked about film director.
His second film Pulp Fiction has just opened to a chorus of critical hype.
This will soon be multiplied by the release of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, which Tarantino scripted. His Reservoir Dogs debut is still running after the censors refused to release it on video.
Pulp Fiction is set in the director's favourite world of the LA underclass. It tells two jumbled-up stories of three characters and their life of criminality.
Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta play two hired killers working for a domineering gangster godfather. Through the course of a number of assassinations they come to differing conclusions about their lives and the world.
In the second plot line Bruce Willis is a boxer hired by the godfather to take a dive. Instead he double crosses his boss to pull off a betting coup of his own. His evasion of retribution gives the film its dramatic conclusion.
Tarantino had a lot of expectations to fulfil with Pulp Fiction. Many (including me) shared the view that his Reservoir Dogs was the finest film to be made since the heyday of Scorsese and Coppola more than a decade ago. What am I doing here? Uma Thurman finds herself in a world of misogyny homophobia and racism He has not let us down. It's a fine film. But there are serious limitations to his aesthetic vision which could spell trouble for him when he tries to broaden his horizons beyond cops and robbers.
Pop Culture If Tarantino champions anything at all, it is a view that pop culture has so taken over our lives that it is impossible to live outside its intluence.
Our most basic interpretations are formed by it. Marxists should agree with him here we need to engage with pop culture at every level, soap operas, blockbuster films, popular fiction, sport, pop music: everything.
This is the culture of the masses, however heavily ideologically mediated it may be through the fiction factories of capitalism.
It is wrong to disregard its effects as "false consciousness". The lack of any substantial contemporary Marxist body of theory on popular culture is a result of our current minority position among the working class.
Drowning
But Tarantino doesn't just immerse himself in popular culture — he drowns in it. He doesn't write about the real world as it is lived, but as his own creations experience it through TV/video fantasy.
His scenarios are the result of his cannibalistic appetite for post-war pop culture - this is expressed in the form of an electrically charged pastiche of the highest order.
Brilliantly funny dialogue and wonderfully exaggerated characters are the outcome. But because he takes no stance of his own on it all there can be no meaning to his lurid reproductions.
Violence
Tarantino's films are also noteworthy because they run Travolta and Jackson react to popular culture. straight into i) the British moral panic about screen violence, and il) the language-centred PC obsession of the intelligentsia on both sides of the Atlantic.
His films are violent. Of this there is no doubt. But to suggest that they lead to violence is quite another matter.
The ethical centre of Reservoir Dogs is very firm. Its violence is shown to have appalling consequences.
In Pulp Fiction things start to get gratuitous — someone's head is blown off just for the sake of an extended jokey scene about the difficulties of cleaning skull tissue off car upholstery. This moral atrophy is a shame.
Tarantino's characters exist in a sub-culture of misogyny, homophobia and racism.
His method is to satirise these prejudices in a highly intelligent manner without clearly signposting his opposition. This allows (problematically) his audience to interpret the content as they please.
But this doesn't mean the opposition is not there: the language of the sub-culture is evoked by Tarantino to humiliate and expose the contradictions of its users, not as justification or encouragement.