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» Features » Maguffin » Reviews
| THE MAGUFFIN Recycled (Pulp) Fiction Kathy Hofmeyr
I must confess to being a Quentin Tarantino fan. It’s not that the man can do no wrong, but as filmmakers go he has style (if not class) in truckloads. Tarantino has managed to resurrect not only careers but genres and plotlines long thought dead. Being a fan of low-budget '70s films, he endlessly borrows the plot-points, stylistics, lines, scenes, concepts — even actors — of everything from kung-fu to western to blaxploitation flicks. He is one of those writer-directors whom film buffs adore. Although he is constantly referencing and in-joking, his films remain fresh and original and accessible to mainstream audiences as well as to academic spectators and the cult minority who squirm with pleasure at the “hidden secret messages” they feel are meant just for them. In this lies Tarantino’s genius. His films work on various levels and are almost impossible not to enjoy. Perhaps his greatest mainstream achievement, 'Pulp Fiction' is filled with heroes from bygone genres. Despite this passion for kitsch, however, Tarantino is one of the few directors to buck conventions and stereotypes — or to invert them. His universe contains no token characters, and not only because of how unremarkable the mixed marriages and unconventional partnerships he depicts are. Through a kind of reverse political correctness, by the end of the film everyone in 'Pulp Fiction' is, regardless of race, gender or creed, a “bitch”, a “nigger” or a “motherfucker” — or all three. The men are all hybrids of dispossessed '90s WAMs (white American males or, in the cases of Jules Winfield and Marsellus Wallace, BAMs) and '70s antihero stereotypes. This resurrection of the good ol’ boy finds its zenith in Vincent Vega, who is the cowboy-gangster of yesteryear, transplanted into the present. Referring to Jack Rabbit Slim’s, the nightclub where he takes Wallace's wife, Mia, as “a waxwork museum with a pulse”, Vincent doesn’t seem to realise he is the dustiest relic there. John Travolta, apparently just out of cold-storage for the film ('Blow Out' and 'Look Who’s Talking' until then the two high points of his career since the '70s), is resuscitated and shoved on to the dance-floor for an ageing, overweight return to his glory days as 'Grease's' Danny Zuko. Outside of being able to tell Mamie van Doren from Marilyn Monroe, he is as dumb as a brick — Tarantino’s pre-emptive answer to Forrest Gump. Vincent is dying to return to the golden age of heroes, the '70s roles both he and Travolta are used to playing, but Mia Wallace refuses to play along. When she dictates where they will eat dinner and then unceremoniously drags him on to the dance floor, even speaking for him (in a mockingly deep voice) when he is called upon to identify himself, he sulks. It is only when she asks him to roll her a cigarette and slyly calls him “cowboy” that he perks up, cracking a smile for the first time in the entire sequence. It is this WAM hero one-dimensionality which makes the film a classic. Cunningly camouflaged behind tough guy images, surf-rock music, shit-hot gourmet coffee, revived '70s/'Reservoir Dogs' assassin suits and the apparent inability to smile at all (except when confronted with a tasty burger or its French name), Tarantino is pointing out that these guys have lost the plot. He pokes fun at his own idols without ever alienating his audience. Other than fixing a single boxing match so that the odds run in his favour, we are never told what it is that Marsellus Wallace, the post-Shaftian Übergangster who throws men out of windows, actually does. All we know is that he has hired two deadly (and hungry), vaguely dazed and confused hitmen (at least one of whom is a hopeless drug addict who will die on the toilet) to retrieve a mysterious briefcase. While Tarantino may have been 'I am the Walrus'-ing us when he announced that the case contained Wallace’s soul, it may be that poor Marsellus simply is a lost soul. Never mind that most of the men in 'Pulp Fiction' are shit-scared of the women. Jimmy, while lecturing Jules and Vincent on the non-availability of “dead nigger storage” at his Valley home, is more afraid of his wife, Bonnie, than he is of the police or the two armed men in front of him. Jimmy (played by a whinging Tarantino) is the original househusband, standing in his dressing gown, bragging about his prowess in the kitchen. Jules, for all his cant about wandering the earth “like Caine in 'Kung Fu'”, is “pretty much a vegetarian” because his girlfriend is (which may offer a clue as to why he doesn’t eat pork, either). Butch Coolidge comes with the not-inconsiderable baggage of Bruce Willis’s former incarnations as John McClane in the 'Die Hard' films. The middle segment of the film, “The Gold Watch”, deals with Butch’s family heirloom, indicative of the WAM desperation in clinging to the macho past. It is presented to Butch in a flashback parody of the timeless veteran-tells-all scene, during which Captain Koons (the most outrageously, candidly-named character since Pussy Galore, played exquisitely by Christopher Walken) quite openly states that he and Butch’s father kept the watch “up our asses” for a collective seven years. Butch, of course, will later narrowly escape getting something quite different “up the ass”, a predicament in which he finds himself purely as a result of the ill-fated watch. This “lucky” watch clearly has held no luck for its two previous owners, both of whom died in wars (although, technically, Butch’s father died of dysentery, possibly caused and probably exacerbated by having the watch “up his ass”). All Butch has in place of a hero’s war is a boxing match followed by the most dishonourable of ends: sodomy — fate worse than death — followed probably by death itself. The watch, symbolic of Butch’s male ancestry and macho past, almost lead our hero to the worst WAM fate imaginable. Weighing in at over two and a half hours, 'Pulp Fiction' is a long film, but it seldom seems so, whether owing to the skewed non-chronological timeline, the multitude of characters or the film’s sheer enjoyableness. If you can quote lines from the movie only because you ripped the soundtrack ten years ago, watch it again — a second look may well surprise you. | | |
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