Movie Review of “Pulp
Fiction”
MOST of the characters in
“Pulp Fiction” go through hell. Some come
out the other end of it. Almost all of them receive
some kind of divine or providential chastisement. The
presence of such an extra-human force at work in this
story is hinted at with great circumspection,
notwithstanding the Old Testament thundering of Jules
(Samuel L. Jackson) when he is about to kill some young
drug dealers who have double-crossed his employer, and
his subsequent conversion when his own life is spared
by the bad aim of one of the dealers.
“I will
execute great vengeance upon them with wrathful
chastisements. Then they will know that I am the Lord,
when I lay my vengeance upon them.” (Ezekiel 25:
17)
Jules later explains
to his partner Vincent (John Travolta) that he liked to
quote this passage simply because its impressive
rhetoric helped him intimidate his victims. What he
means, in other words, is that the “Lord”
is Jules. One wonders whether he understood the context
of the verse. God is telling how he will chastise the
Philistines (and, in the immediately preceding verse,
the Edomites as well) because they had acted
vengefully, taking into their own hands what belonged
to the Lord. Tarantino certainly understands
it.
When one of the
dealers, who had been hiding in the back, comes out
shooting, and all his bullets miss the two hit men,
Jules calls it a miracle. He has a conversion
experience. Vincent calls it an accident. Jules decides
to give up “the life” and wander the land,
getting into adventures, like the hero of the old
television show “Kung Fu” (played by David
Carradine, who plays Bill in “Kill Bill”).
Vincent mocks him. It is worth noting that Jules does
indeed wander off, while Vincent is killed the
following day.
Like the Israelites
of the Old Testament, the characters in this story are
a proud and willful group. Their obsessive verbal
behavior underscores this, the frantic attempt to
maintain control. It is almost impossible for the
divine to get a word in edgewise. Ultimately, it can
speak only through accidents. One after another, the
characters who can be saved are saved despite their own
intentions, saved through the agency of mistakes (or
are they miracles?).
The restaurant heist
of Ringo and Yolanda, which starts off the movie, runs
aground, at the end of the movie, when their plan
crashes into the implacable calmness of the newly
converted Jules. They go off together, with a pile of
loot, but obviously chastised.
The reckless
coke-sniffing Mia (Uma Thurman) nearly dies of an
overdose – of heroin, which she mistook for
cocaine. We leave her in an obviously sobered frame of
mind, a chastisement rendered through the agency of an
accident.
Her husband
Marsellus (Ving Rhames) loses a pile of loot when his
plan to throw a fight collides with a different plan
the boxer has, and he seeks vengeance against the boxer
but another, more violent accident, results in his
forgiveness of the debt.
Butch, the boxer,
enters the crucible of grace through a string of
mistakes. To start with, we have his girlfriend’s
mistake in not packing Butch’s heirloom watch,
and his own mistake (as he comes to realize) in not
making it clear to her how important this watch was to
him (and to us, as an icon for a film so concerned with
the manipulation of time). These mistakes mean he has
to go back to his apartment for it, a place sure to be
staked out by Marsellus’s men, eager to pay him
back for not throwing the fight. Vincent, indeed, is
there but is sitting in the toilet (an allusion to the
constipation that is a side-effect of the heroin he
shot up the day before). More mistakes and accidents.
But they pave the way for Butch to kill the unbelieving
Vincent with his own gun when he stumbles out of the
toilet.
But Butch’s
chastisement is not over. On his way back to join his
girlfriend, thinking his troubles are over, he stops at
a crosswalk only to see Marsellus walking by in front
of him. Their eyes lock. Butch drives into him,
knocking him up onto the hood and roof of his car. A
second later, his car is rammed in the intersection.
Marsellus shoots at him but misses. Butch escapes into
a pawn shop but Marsellus follows him and they continue
their struggle. The shop owner intervenes and they
discover that they have bumbled like drunken flies into
the spider web of a pair of sodomites. Marsellus
receives some further chastisement of a grossly
invasive kind, but is rescued by Butch, who thus
nullifies his debt. The sodomites, beyond redemption,
are dispatched, like Vincent, with extreme prejudice.
Marsellus and Butch
have both been severely chastised and one senses that
some good may come of their ordeals. But this
administration of justice only takes place thanks to
the chaos that breaks up human plans and allows a
divine plan to unfold.
Another mistake that
drives the plot is the accidental shooting of Marvin in
the car, splattering its insides with his insides and
forcing Jules and Vincent to pull over in the Valley at
the home of Jimmie Dimmick (played by Tarantino
himself). With Dimmick’s wife due home shortly,
this is an emergency and it merits the summoning of
Winston “The Wolf” Wolfe (Harvey Keitel).
He arrives on the scene (dressed in evening clothes at
nine in the morning!) and he takes the slightly
hysterical hit men in hand and gets them to clean up
the interior of the car, after which he cleans them up,
hosing them down naked in the backyard of the suburban
house.
It is impossible to
miss the Biblical symbolism of this scene. The Wolf
arrives to shepherd the young sheep out of danger. The
hosing down of Vincent is simply that, but for Jules it
is a baptism.
Wolfe then drives
the car to a friendly junkyard in the Valley, where it
will be safely disposed of. He then drives off in his
own car, the lovely young Raquel on his arm, not one
hair out of place and leaving behind a cloud of dust
and amazement.
Winston is the
sheep, or rather, shepherd dressed in wolf’s
clothing (and the blatant oddity of his costume draws
our attention to the theme of costume and disguise). By
contrast, the moral nadir of the movie, the zero point,
is embodied in Zed, the sodomite-rapist, who works as a
security guard and wears that uniform: a wolf dressed
in shepherd’s clothing, just the opposite of
Wolfe.
Keitel’s
character is probably also an allusion to a character
he played in “Point of No Return” (1993),
the year before “Pulp Fiction.” Victor the
Cleaner, like Wolfe, is a mob figure brought in to
clean up emergencies, but, in this case, in the most
brutal possible way, toting acids that will dissolve
inconvenient bodies.
Zed’s
motorcycle, on which Butch makes his departure from the
scene in the pawn shop, has “Grace” painted
on its fuel tank, another theological concept that can
be discerned running through the story. Pride and
grace. Human plans and divine plans.
But the divine will
can only be glimpsed in moments of extremity, and then
only by those who have eyes to see. Was the bad aim of
the drug dealer in the apartment a miracle or a
mistake? Was the encounter between Butch and Marsellus
a coincidence or part of a divine plan allowing Butch
to do penance for his betrayal of Marsellus, and
allowing Marsellus to relinquish his desire to avenge
that betrayal? Is grace a theological concept subtly
woven into this paean to pagan pop culture, or is it
just a girl’s name? Is it a
“motorcycle” or is it a
“chopper”? (Butch and his girlfriend have
some words on this – the only time we glimpse a
trace of verbal obsession in Butch – and the
argument draws our attention to the freedom of choice
we have in our understanding of reality, and the
necessity of choice. In Catholic doctrine, grace, the
continual outpouring of God’s love, is available
to humans but is not compulsory. You can take it or
leave it, recognize it or ignore it.
This movie
reminds me in some ways of the work of Flannery
O’Connor, the young Catholic Southerner who wrote
such powerful fiction in the period right after World
War II. Like Tarantino, she is obsessed with violence,
but with none of his playfulness, a playfulness that
performs a kind of reverse of the eucharistic
sacrament, for Tarantino turns blood into wine, to
intoxicate us with his artistry. O’Connor was a
devout Catholic and her fiction offers us a gothic
window into that faith. There is nothing in “Pulp
Fiction” to suggest that its author is
proselytizing for the Catholic faith. Certain Biblical
ideas and images are buried in it, just as a multitude
of images from our present popular secular culture rise
up from it. The truth is probably that Tarantino is
exploiting theology without endorsing it, just as he is
exploiting violence without endorsing it.
But there is a
certain doubleness in the work of both O’Connor
and Tarantino. It’s interesting how popular
O’Connor is with both believers and skeptics. The
believer looks through the gothic window of her fiction
and sees the face of Catholicism (sharp and painful,
yet truthful by their lights). The skeptic looks at the
window and sees a wondrously ornamented Southern
gothicism. The title of one of her best-known works, The Violent Bear It Away, focuses our attention on this
ambiguity. The skeptic sees only the violence and feels
only the delightful frisson of its horror. The believer sees
the violence and sees also the context of the
title’s allusion: “From the days of John
the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth
violence, and the violent bear it away.” (Matthew
11:12)
The kingdom of
heaven can only be taken by storm; and violence is the
only solvent that can break down human pride and reveal
grace as a visible, audible thing. This is the subtext
of Flannery O’Connor’s work. I think
it’s also there in “Pulp Fiction” but
buried more deeply, a sub-subtext, if you will, and perhaps not
part of any conscious design by its author.
Tarantino has
dissolved both the holy and the profane as thoroughly
as he has dissolved time itself, and recast them for
use as aesthetic currency. His movie is, indeed, an
embrace of pop icons and pulp genres, but, the embrace
is so violent it breaks them down into the pulp from
which they came, a pulp he fashions into new shapes. He
is an iconoclast dressed in idolater’s clothing.
Like another ground breaker, he is entitled to say,
“Behold, I make all things new.”
