A Study in Scatology

Rating: 7/10 (12 February 2014)

President Regan once was quoted as saying you can't argue with success and the Honorable Elijah Muhammud was represented by Spike Lee as telling Malcolm X to keep his mouth shut about a man who has won the love of the people. This seems like sound advice to me, but the time has come at last to give my two cents about a film known as PULP FICTION. There are those who hate it and those who love it and those who shrug their shoulders not knowing quite what to make of it. I freely admit I belong to the third category. I don't revere it, I don't condemn it; and the way Quentin Tarantino bookends the movie with the beginning scene is kind of clever and interesting. But I sure don't see what all the hoopla is about. The stuff packed in between the two slices of narrative bread is not god awful or gems of shimmering brilliance, it's just standard shock-o-rama to me. I didn't mind watching it and would not mind watching it again except for all this undue emphasis on how important it is to Film Culture. I hope you will forgive me for not seeing it that way.
PULP FICTION is a cultural curiosity to me. Sort of like the ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. I can think of half a dozen films I can more easily and wholeheartedly embrace and which more naturally duplicate my thoughts and feelings and deeply felt ideas. When I first saw PULP FICTION, I was hoping at the end of the roundup there would be some kind of moral resonance to the whole thing, but it was simply too shallow to produce that kind of effect. It's more like a hodgepodge of cultural references, nearly all of which veer in the direction of the scatological. Some of the references hit an emotional chord and some don't in my mind.
I remember seeing LET IT BE with my friend Scott in Black Lake, Michigan. This was a documentary about the Beatles. I found the picture exhilarating because of how it recorded the incubatory introversion of the creative process the band went through before experiencing the celebratory extroversion of live performance. Scott did not think there were enough exciting parts to hold his interest. I also remember seeing Fellini's AMARCORD with Louie Whitehead and realizing while mentally comparing it to about a hundred films in a few seconds how remarkable it was that it did not focus on Sex and Violence to carry the story forward. That being so, Louie was kind of dissatisfied with it and I confessed I did not think as highly of AMARCORD as I did of Fellini's THE CLOWNS. All I can say is that different people of necessity have different tastes and sensibilities.
My dissatisfaction with PULP FICTION is that unlike Kurosawa's film HIGH AND LOW there is no 'high and low'! All the characters are lowlifes, but represented as strong and resourceful while the so-called 'straight types' like the college students are represented as ineffectual and weak. PULP FICTION completes the moral and cultural inversion first presented by Francis Ford Coppola's THE GODFATHER, but this time played even more for laughs. I just don't see much value in all of this.
I suppose if Ned Beatty could be sodomized in DELIVERANCE, owing to equal opportunity Ving Rhames could be sodomized in PULP FICTION, but the truth is I would rather see him play someone like A.G. Gaston, than someone like Al Capone. I enjoyed watching Bruce Willis chose between a chain-saw and a katana before rescuing Rhames' character from the pommel horse, but even he comes across as a character of dubious honor.
Perhaps, I should not quibble about the Whore with the Heart of Gold now being joined by the Hit-man with the Heart of Gold. It is just that Divine Intervention for hired killers is too perverse and cruel a Cosmic Joke for me.
Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta play fascinating characters as Jules and Vincent, but they seem more like supporting characters than leads. My problem with PULP FICTION is that there did not seem to be any character, except for a few moments with Bruce Willis, I could wholeheartedly relate to and embrace. All of them, one way or another, seemed to be stained with sleaze or wallowing in it. Uma Thurman gives a creditable performance as the wife of Marsellus Wallace and Christopher Walken's off-color story is hilarious, but it all comes across as a world you want to handle in a glove or a puzzle box so as not to get any of it on you. Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer (bearing the name of a character in one of my three-act plays, by the way) depart a Mexican standoff against Jules and Vincent with their lives and all their ill-gotten gains, but are they really any the wiser? Leaving, they come across as an ersatz version of Adam and Eve exiting the Garden of Evil rather than Eden.
Much has been made of the non-linearity of the narrative structure and no doubt something can be learned from Tarantino's musical handling of his scenes. This leads me to conclude you can get people to believe and accept anything just by making the images flow in harmony with the musical score. Once again, it seems to me I have seen non-linearity handled better in other pieces, most notably and recently in RUN, LOLA, RUN, but Tarantino does a good job with it here. It is just when it comes time to deliver the moral of the story, PULP FICTION seems to come up with insufficient funds.