An unintended postmodern examination of film

Rating: 10/10 (18 July 2016)

Tarantino takes us through a journey of the postmodern abyss his characters are dropped in. You might retort this by saying I don't speak English, but frankly, I think I speak the new language. That's right, the new language of postmodernism. The language of a land where every character is a victim of subjectivism, where every time we want to look at the movie we peer to nothing whole. We only get sneak peeks of the performances of the actors and the landscapes and places they find themselves in. It never becomes a coherent whole. This is a movie that clashes with peoples' sense of what a movie should be. It's precisely a movie that shouldn't be. The "incoherent" story lines and "pointless" dialogues lead us to the same place. There is barely any change we just move in a circle. And there goes another confrontation to the modernist though: time is not linear, postmodernists say.
Now, I doubt Tarantino has any idea what postmodernism is, since he's a filmmaker, not a philosopher, and I doubt you could consciously make a postmodernist film. But this is, without a doubt, the truer representation of our times: a bunch of characters lost in an urban hell, who interact with each other, something we think would be relevant to the storyline, but wasn't. There is no ulterior motive here, it's just a day in the life of a few assholes in a hellish L.A. Which looks remarkably average, not exceptionally detached from our experience.
The dialogue is one contentious point with people who are used to dialogue leading somewhere. Dialogue doesn't lead anywhere in this case. It barely moves forward, except when it needs to move forward. Otherwise it just gets stuck in the same place, like real dialogue. This is not your average Hollywood drama. Tarantino liked to do this around this time. He liked subverting clichés. Now, his filmmaking style doesn't subvert clichés, because he has made his style a cliché. We know what to expect from a Tarantino film. But when Pulp Fiction came out, everyone was astounded. What's surprising is that people still are shocked by it, and still don't understand what the film is getting at.
That's right, it's getting right at your preconceived notions of time and space. Other films along the same line are Fargo, Big Lebowski, Fight Club, anything by Iñárritu, and of course, the quintessential postmodern film, Breathless, by Jean Luc-Godard. Good art should be questioned. This movie raises a number of questions, not deep, philosophical tirades about existence, no. It raises the question of how we perceive ourselves in time and space, how we conceive of our place in the world. And like all postmodernist though, it provides no answers.