It so happens that how one feels about Quentin Tarantino today readily gives away one’s political leanings. In the red-pilled corners of internet to innocuous dudebros sliding in your DMs, Tarantino cuts a striking figure. That the filmmaker declared his next and tenth project to be his final is understandably met with polarising reception in 2024.
Polarising directors of Tarantino’s stature often simmer in a host of implications: radical, innovative auteurs willing to take a principled plunge, braving all odds. This was certainly the case in 1994 when Pulp Fiction debuted in the Cannes before trickling down the foreordained shelves of cult classics. Tarantino, 61, might have moved on but the filmbros are still riding the high of Vincent and Jules’ intrepid charms.
A filmbro darling
In Tarantino’s defence, the figure of the filmbro long precedes his 1994 viewing. An insufferable young man who fashions himself a cinephile of superior taste, the filmbro mistakes his favourites for the best. He scrambles over a ladder of IMDb-endorsed macho-infused titles that, he is convinced, only a man could fully comprehend. His criterion of the best absolves him of his sheer failure to understand other lives, other truths.
Tarantino is only one name in the filmbro’s arsenal. In art’s defence, one cannot wholly blame an artist for the fandoms they breed, mainly because fans are not an artist’s progeny. A catalyst is a better analogue to describe the symbiotic tête-à-tête between the creator and the consumer. Of course, there are only decades of film and cultural theory as rejoinder to this alleged romance: the consumer creates, the creator consumes. A blurring of lines that is purely dialectical, or as the red-pilled hotspots of discourse would correct you: downright diabolical.
Is Pulp Fiction, then, wholly Tarantino’s to account for? There is the arguably gratuitous violence, an unbridled use of the n-word, a free licence to indulge homophobia. These allegations are not without merit. Yet, it seems in today’s image-ravaged digital way of life, these provocations are far less offensive. To diagnose Pulp Fiction of prejudice is in many ways akin to calling Dune an orientalist’s wet dream: true but boring. While Dune’s novelty and Timothée Chalamet’s dimpled smile can survive true but boring forms of critique, the same cannot be said for a cult classic that has had decades to marinate in praise and contempt.
So what new ground is there to break now thirty years later? For one, Tarantino is done offending because his audiences are already made. The ones offended, the ones unbothered, the ones indifferent will likely remain so. Tarantino might have become too redundant for new political sensibilities, his catalogue coopted by filmbros, but does Pulp Fiction still hold up today?
‘Royale with cheese’
Returning to the scruffy, fan-driven screenplay by Tarantino and Roger Avary is ploughing through tons of cine lore. The world of Pulp Fiction is a jigsaw puzzle of interlocking stories in a world of crime and chaos. Set against a 50s iconography, the film’s time is fractured into fast-paced misadventures interjected with languorous dialogue – and it’s the latter that both makes it a charming watch and plays host to the film’s most incendiary remarks.
John Travolta, whose claim to fame until then was dancing and doing musicals, stars as Vincent Vega, a hitman whose contretemps range from accidental killings to frantic cleanups. Alongside him is Samuel L Jackson’s Jules, pondering the mysteries of the universe and European fast food. Travolta’s bumbling yet endearing performance finds him relying on Mr Wolf (Harvey Keitel), the ultimate fixer, and Eric Stoltz’s character, who uses a medical encyclopedia for emergency situations.
Travolta’s chemistry with Uma Thurman, playing the mob boss’s wife, Mia Wallace, is electric, culminating in a night at Jack Rabbit Slim’s that spirals from a dance-off to an overdose, with Stoltz screaming instructions over a syringe of adrenaline. Bruce Willis and Maria de Medeiros add to the chaotic fun as Butch Coolidge and his naive girlfriend, escaping a botched fight and a wristwatch retrieval mission that leads to an unforgettable monologue by Christopher Walken. The film’s sticky situations escalate, leaving characters in ridiculously worsening predicaments, like Butch and the mob boss becoming captives of leather-clad freaks.
A good question to ask here is: What’s left of Pulp Fiction if twice removed from Tarantino and his liberties with violence and racial slurs? But a better question insists: What makes a cultural text worthy of redemption by reinterpretation? At stake here are tarnished legacies that demand to be taken as they come. For every Pulp Fiction, one can find a dozen better flicks with subversive politics that unsettle attempts to canonise Butch and Marsellus’ bloodied squabbles.
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