Pulp Fiction
Apr. 17th, 2014 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficToday in cultural education: Pulp Fiction. It was...really good. I'm surprised that I liked it. Very surprised.
I have long been not a fan of Tarantino. The man's kind of an ass, and whenever I hear stories about him as a person, they're not positive. My previous exposure to his work has been the CSI two-parter and that stint he did on Alias. Ever since Reservoir Dogs came out I've been hearing about how violent his movies were. What sealed it for me, though, was Sin City, a movie that repelled me. I know that's a Robert Rodriguez film, but Tarantino directed part of it, so I feel his involvement is an indication that this is to his taste. And while Sin City is visually stunning--I don't think any other film has so completely put a comic book on screen--and I love the soundtrack, that film felt like something that was done to me. My memories of it are a nightmarish kaleidoscope.
So yes, I've been avoiding Tarantino films for a long time. But Pulp Fiction was so huge--it came out when I was thirteen, just old enough for my classmates to get into R films, and it seems like everyone I knew watched it. "Jungle Boogie" was played at all the school dances. I even own the soundtrack. So it was time to bite the bullet and watch the thing. I figured I'd been solidly spoiled. Turns out everything I'd ever heard is only from the first hour of the movie, and the other two were a total surprise.
In Roger Ebert's review, he says that this movie feels less violent than it has any right to. He's right. It's an incredibly violent movie, but somehow doesn't feel like one. I think there are a couple of reasons. One, the violence happens in short bursts, and most of the movie is dialogue. The most sustained "action" sequence is in Bruce Willis's story (which I also felt was the nadir of the movie). For the rest of it, violence happens suddenly, then people deal with the consequences of it.
The second reason is that almost all of the main characters survive the film. And the one that dies, Vincent Vega, dies in the middle of the film as a bit character in someone else's story. A lot of films I've watched that have tried to be in the Pulp Fiction mold have ended like they thought they were Hamlet. Bodies every goddamn where. Once Upon a Time in Mexico was like that. I was enjoying the film until everyone I'd spent two hours giving a shit about had their head blown off. Pulp Fiction, instead, ends on a hopeful note.
I love Samuel L. Jackson's character--his dialogue about his "moment of clarity" is moving, but at the same time, he murders someone immediately after experiencing it. It's like he's too much in the mold of a hit man to be able to pull out of it, at least not immediately. I want to know how he gets on in his new wandering life--I expect not without a few more corpses. And I love that he turns the speech that is just straight bad-ass at the start of the film on its head at the end. "I am the tyranny of evil, but I'm trying to be a shepherd."
I also need to mention the rape. I'm not sure how to feel about that. I cared a whole lot less about that story than I did about the other two anyway (it also felt the most like Sin City). But I can't think of any other majorly popular, cultural touchstone movie that contains the rape of a man. And I can think of plenty that have the rape of a woman. I was looking at the wiki article, which mentions that there was backlash against the film, saying that Tarantino was trying too hard to be shocking, and pointing to the "homosexual rape" as the primary example. To me, this is the reaction in a reviewer I would like any time a rape is shown in a movie, but I know for this reviewer, it's clearly only that it was a man that's the problem. (Caveat: I'm not saying there should be no stories about rape, just that there's a lack of outrage at how often the rape of women is just thrown into films and TV.) I was also thinking how in this case, the rape victim took bloody revenge on the rapist, and in stories where women get raped, that rarely happens. If there is bloody revenge taken, it's taken by the victim's boyfriend. So I don't really know how to parse this particular scene, except to note its peculiarity.
The main stand-out feature of the film is, of course, the dialogue. The dialogue is unparalleled. Not just for its wit, but for how it makes all of the film's characters into three-dimensional people. I can think of few films that gave me such a clear idea of who these people are. This isn't like Oscar Wilde dialogue, where everyone sounds like the author and the dialogue exists to show how very clever that author is. Tarantino is being clever, but clever in the service of showing us who these people are beyond the events of the plot. As Ebert pointed out in his review, most dialogue in most films is purely about the plot. But Pulp Fiction you could listen to as an audiobook.
So now I find myself reevaluating my stance on Tarantino. I think it's perhaps time to give Kill Bill a chance. I still don't know about Reservoir Dogs, though. People have been telling me it's a fantastic film for a long time, but they've also been telling me just how violent it is, and I'm not quite sure I'm willing to watch that to get to the dialogue and the characters.
I have long been not a fan of Tarantino. The man's kind of an ass, and whenever I hear stories about him as a person, they're not positive. My previous exposure to his work has been the CSI two-parter and that stint he did on Alias. Ever since Reservoir Dogs came out I've been hearing about how violent his movies were. What sealed it for me, though, was Sin City, a movie that repelled me. I know that's a Robert Rodriguez film, but Tarantino directed part of it, so I feel his involvement is an indication that this is to his taste. And while Sin City is visually stunning--I don't think any other film has so completely put a comic book on screen--and I love the soundtrack, that film felt like something that was done to me. My memories of it are a nightmarish kaleidoscope.
So yes, I've been avoiding Tarantino films for a long time. But Pulp Fiction was so huge--it came out when I was thirteen, just old enough for my classmates to get into R films, and it seems like everyone I knew watched it. "Jungle Boogie" was played at all the school dances. I even own the soundtrack. So it was time to bite the bullet and watch the thing. I figured I'd been solidly spoiled. Turns out everything I'd ever heard is only from the first hour of the movie, and the other two were a total surprise.
In Roger Ebert's review, he says that this movie feels less violent than it has any right to. He's right. It's an incredibly violent movie, but somehow doesn't feel like one. I think there are a couple of reasons. One, the violence happens in short bursts, and most of the movie is dialogue. The most sustained "action" sequence is in Bruce Willis's story (which I also felt was the nadir of the movie). For the rest of it, violence happens suddenly, then people deal with the consequences of it.
The second reason is that almost all of the main characters survive the film. And the one that dies, Vincent Vega, dies in the middle of the film as a bit character in someone else's story. A lot of films I've watched that have tried to be in the Pulp Fiction mold have ended like they thought they were Hamlet. Bodies every goddamn where. Once Upon a Time in Mexico was like that. I was enjoying the film until everyone I'd spent two hours giving a shit about had their head blown off. Pulp Fiction, instead, ends on a hopeful note.
I love Samuel L. Jackson's character--his dialogue about his "moment of clarity" is moving, but at the same time, he murders someone immediately after experiencing it. It's like he's too much in the mold of a hit man to be able to pull out of it, at least not immediately. I want to know how he gets on in his new wandering life--I expect not without a few more corpses. And I love that he turns the speech that is just straight bad-ass at the start of the film on its head at the end. "I am the tyranny of evil, but I'm trying to be a shepherd."
I also need to mention the rape. I'm not sure how to feel about that. I cared a whole lot less about that story than I did about the other two anyway (it also felt the most like Sin City). But I can't think of any other majorly popular, cultural touchstone movie that contains the rape of a man. And I can think of plenty that have the rape of a woman. I was looking at the wiki article, which mentions that there was backlash against the film, saying that Tarantino was trying too hard to be shocking, and pointing to the "homosexual rape" as the primary example. To me, this is the reaction in a reviewer I would like any time a rape is shown in a movie, but I know for this reviewer, it's clearly only that it was a man that's the problem. (Caveat: I'm not saying there should be no stories about rape, just that there's a lack of outrage at how often the rape of women is just thrown into films and TV.) I was also thinking how in this case, the rape victim took bloody revenge on the rapist, and in stories where women get raped, that rarely happens. If there is bloody revenge taken, it's taken by the victim's boyfriend. So I don't really know how to parse this particular scene, except to note its peculiarity.
The main stand-out feature of the film is, of course, the dialogue. The dialogue is unparalleled. Not just for its wit, but for how it makes all of the film's characters into three-dimensional people. I can think of few films that gave me such a clear idea of who these people are. This isn't like Oscar Wilde dialogue, where everyone sounds like the author and the dialogue exists to show how very clever that author is. Tarantino is being clever, but clever in the service of showing us who these people are beyond the events of the plot. As Ebert pointed out in his review, most dialogue in most films is purely about the plot. But Pulp Fiction you could listen to as an audiobook.
So now I find myself reevaluating my stance on Tarantino. I think it's perhaps time to give Kill Bill a chance. I still don't know about Reservoir Dogs, though. People have been telling me it's a fantastic film for a long time, but they've also been telling me just how violent it is, and I'm not quite sure I'm willing to watch that to get to the dialogue and the characters.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-18 07:02 pm (UTC)