Bring Out The Gimp

Rating: Null/10 (18 August 2011)

"Tarantino seems to be too concerned with other films. I mean, about appropriating other movies, like a blender. I think it's really funny at the time I'm seeing it, but then, I don't know, there's a void there. Some of the references are flat, just pop culture." - Harmony Korine
"It's like watching a schoolboy's fantasy of violence and sex, which normally Tarantino would be ******* alone to in his bedroom while his mother is making him baked beans downstairs. Only this time he's got Harvey Weinstein behind him and it's on a million screens." - Nick Broomfield
"Thirty years ago it would have been widely accepted that objective knowledge about society and history was an asset for a filmmaker. Today, such an attitude is considered a hindrance. This is a temporary state of affairs, but a costly and destructive one. Art, including bad art, has consequences." - David Walsh
Quentin Tarantino directs "Pulp Fiction", a shamelessly lurid homage to early B-movies, printed pulp fiction (the dime-store tales of the 1940s-50s, and later pulp imitators - sometimes called "new pulp" - like Elmore Leonard and Charles Bukowski, whose own "Pulp" was released in 1994), Robert Aldrich ("Kiss Me Deadly"), "Farewell My Lovely", "Pickup on South Street" and Godard ("Band of Outsiders", "Vivre sa Vie", "Alphaville"). Nods to "It's a Wonderful Life", "Truck Turner" (the same comic monologues), "Karate Kiba" (Jackson's religious monologues repeated verbatim), "On The Waterfront", "The Colour of Money" ("character" vs "having character" conversation), "The Parent Trap" (Uma drawing an animated square on screen, also from "The Three Little Bops"), "Repo Man" (glowing briefcase; see also Aldrich), "Charley Varrick" (lifted lines, as well as the torture scene), "Psycho", "Lili" (everything about the Fabienne character), "Easy Rider", "God of Gamblers" (violence whenever Travolta goes to the bathroom), "Three Days of the Condor" (Vincent's death), "Shoot the Piano Player", "Jules and Jim", "The Panic in Needle Park" (the whole overdose fiasco), "Policewoman" (stylized credit sequence), and "The Night Of The Hunter" come next, all shoehorned before or after an extended sequence in a movie-themed restaurant in which all of Tarantino's references sit back, chill out and relax.
The film is dense with allusions (Uma's two dances are taken directly from "Band of Outsiders" and "Vivre sa Vie", as is her haircut), cribbed shots and referenced dialogue, Tarantino packing the film to the brim with nods to esoteric art films, mainstream fare, trashy exploitation films and television programmes ("Kung Fu", "Captain Kangaro", "Happy Days", "Cops"). Characters likewise either work on TV shows ("Force Five"), knowingly repeat lines from movies ("Zardoz", "Guns of Navarone" etc) and documentaries (Scorsese's "American Boy" is the source of Lance's needle instructions) or are themselves named after songs ("Flock of Seagulls"), movies or movie characters (eg Tony "Rocky Horror" named after the "Rocky Horror Picture Show", "English Bob" after a character in "Unforgiven" and Keitel's "The Wolf" based on a similar character in "Victor the Cleaner"). Posters of countless films are likewise littered throughout, as well as references to film directors (a "Douglas Sirk steak" - aka a steak with "All That Heaven Allows"). Some of the allusions are brief (boxer Bruce Willis' comes home after a fight and yells his girl's name like Stallone does in "Rocky"), whilst some are deliberately extended and toyed with.
Some actors in the film even acknowledge their own roles in other films, Christopher Walken's character just coming back from "Deer Hunter's" Nam, Travolta's echoing his role in "Saturday Night Fever" and Ving Rhames' Marsellus Wallace delivering a monologue exactly like his character in "Casualties of War". Rhames' gimp suit encounter even echoes another gimp suit encounter in "The People Under The Stairs", also with Rhames. Cinematic pop cultural references even bleed into print references (Travolta reading "Modesty Blaise" etc), while the film's self-consciously fake process shots recall Dick Richards' noirs. Even the famous "Quarter Pounder" monologue is cribbed, and much of the character ramblings recall Jean Paul Belmondo in "Breathless".
The film is structured as a series of short stories – all loosely connected and deliberately trashy – but within these stories are themselves characters who constantly take time out to tell equally digressive short stories. In this way the film is a tale about people telling tales, and so plays like a celebration of oration, of yapping, of a hundred and twenty years of seedy storytelling. Ironically, the film's best short story is that in which the characters decide to "say nothing". To shut up.
Under postmodernism, art is inherently self absorbed, self-reflexive, de-structured, de-centred, fragmented, parasitic and churned out by artists whose media-saturated landscapes become "all that there is to reality". Such artists live in a kind of cocoon, seeking only to replicate past pleasures. This is a cinema of artifacts and furnishings. Of attitude, copied poses and interchangeable and indistinguishable references. Here, life is only an extension of media, everything is false and all that matters are gestures and role playing. And like other postmodern films, Tarantino's aesthetic is a seductive kind of hyper-stylisation, everything not only in quotes and supremely self conscious, but celebratory of self consciousness.
"Pulp Fiction" is entertaining (and its narrative has a breezy, liberative quality), much better written than its imitators and one passage in particular, which plays with the classic cliché of "the bodyguard and the bosses wife", is graceful, low key and romantic. Much of the film is surprisingly inhumane, though, a kind of jokey 1970s exploitation movie in which people are either doped up, stabbed by needles, raping black men or coldly slaughtering teens while making grand speeches. Because the film exists in a certain moral vacuum ("It's just a film", "It's supposed to be trash", "It's pulp ****ing fiction!"), stuff like anal rape and murder are all played for snickers and kicks.
8/10 - The "Repo Man" of the 90s?