Desperately seeking hipness

Rating: 8/10 (19 July 1999)

"You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in Paris?" It's inane, but it's entertaining and it sure seems witty when they're saying it, especially when you learn that this conversation is occurring on the way to knock off a group of possibly armed drug dealers. This is the casual manner in which you would like to talk with your friends and co-workers just before the big event goes down. This is dialogue that makes you feel hip just listening to it.
Forget the salvation and redemption bit, this movie is all about making you feel hip. You feel hip when you get to listen in on the clever repartee, hip when you can be titillated by the gratuitous violence but still act blasé about it, hip when the sudden time jump doesn't bother you in the least. This movie makes you feel more hip then any other which has been made in quite a long time.
Look beneath the hip surface, however, and you're left with little more than violence as entertainment. Violence in movies works best when used as a necessary device to support the plot, characters, and message. Tarantino reverses this relationship, creating plot and characters purely to support an entertaining sequence of violent situations. Each act of violence has its own specific purpose - make us laugh, make us jump, make us cheer, give us a vicarious thrill - and Tarantino is extremely skilled at making this work. This is the greatest strength of "Pulp Fiction", but ultimately its greatest weakness as well.
The out-of-sequence scene demonstrates the extent to which the creation of entertaining violence was the driving force of the production. No doubt this was originally intended to be seen in its proper sequence but had to be removed because not only does it add nothing to the plot and character development, it actually bogs things down and gets in the way. Not wanting to lose his biggest laughs, however, Tarantino simply sticks it on the end and has the added bonus of now having a non-traditional narrative simple enough to not confuse his audience but sufficient to make them feel hip for being able to "appreciate" it.
Is being hip enough? Not to be a classic, at least not in this case. Almost any hip movie is going to be firmly rooted in its own time period, but "Pulp Fiction" has lost it much more quickly than others. Although very entertaining and memorable in the initial viewing, its appeal fades quickly. When the hipness is gone, there's nothing left but violence, which doesn't make for a very pleasant viewing experience. Hip classics such as "Ocean's Eleven" and "Goldfinger" stay classics because they still give us fun and adventure even after the hipness has turned to camp. "Pulp Fiction" just gets ugly with time. Guns, drugs, and a couple hillbillies right out of "Deliverance" aren't enough to make a classic film.