The thing that annoyed me about the film even before I’d seen it was the dialogue. It was patently wrong, a repeat of the Reservoir Dogs debacle. Going to kill someone is nerve-wracking, if only because they might try to kill you themselves. It is not where you talk about what a Big Mac is called in France. You don’t stand outside a door with a gun in your hand and discuss foot rubs. I used to work in the law courts, then write about cops and lawyers, listen to their stories about crooks. It has no resemblance to anything I know or believe in. It’s ironic that Chopper, an Australian film about a very successful criminal, with a documentary realism about the random and sudden nature of violence and murder, has been seen by 100th of the audience of Pulp Fiction. But the disturbing thing about the adulation for Pulp Fiction is that it shows an absolute ignorance of the nature of story-telling. Ironic, given that fans rave about the film’s innovation. Pulp Fiction is a film that Quentin Tarantino could only have got away with after the surprise success of Reservoir Dogs. It is four stories, two of which have are unconnected with the others except with a shoehorn. Weakest is the story where he looks after Uma Thurman. Leaving aside the idea that a gangster would send only one man to look after a married woman (always two, one to chaperone the other, even when just delivering money to the wife of a man in prison), the behaviour of Travolta is totally out of character. When Uma Thurman O.D.’s, he would have left her, and either lied to Marsellus or left town. Criminals are not big on personal responsibility. The Travolta element in the Bruce Willis story is even more arbitrary. His death is not a stroke of genius, it’s a stroke of desperation. The only connection that the Bruce Willis story has with the others is that it is resolved by his killing the man sent to kill him. When examining something novel you should always lean more towards luck than genius. There’s a story about a group of old westerners telling tall stories in a saloon. Finally a quiet man on the edge of the group tells a story about being an Injun Fighter, pursued by Apaches. He dodges into a canyon but the Indians follow him. The canyon is a dead end. He runs out of bullets. His horse is shot, but with its dieing convulsion it hurls him out of the saddle and he grabs the root of a bush, 20 feet up the cliff face by a ledge. But the roots give way. He slides back down among the redskins. The story-teller pauses. ‘Go on, go on’, says his breathless audience. The quiet man thinks for a moment, then says ‘Well, gentlemen….’ He pauses again ‘….I guess they killed me.’ Sometimes a writer writes himself into a corner so tight that the Indians kill him. The only thing to do then is to look your audience in the eye and say that’s what you intended all along, and you are a genius. I repeat: the story of Pulp Fiction is the story of Samuel L Jackson’s redemption. It is thin, as thin as homeopathic soup. There are no sub-plots, only two unconnected stories made to fit by having John Travolta in them. The Uma Thurman strand can be dropped in the middle, but if you’ve got to have Travolta in the Bruce Willis story, where does it fit? If it’s at the beginning then it’s the main story, which it isn’t. If it’s at the end, it’s an anti-climax. Well, gentlemen, I guess, after many sleepless nights and much wrestling with the plot, the Indians killed me. Aren’t I a genius? Gosh, Mr. Tarantino, now we film buffs have something we can compare to post-structuralist Italian fiction. We must be intellectuals, too. The death of John Travolta in the middle of the film is writing sloppiness, not intellectual daring. It’s a crap film. The best film Travolta was involved with was ‘Modesty’, shown on British TV a few weeks ago. Again it has a really old plot (the chief’s ‘daughter’ bloodily avenges her ‘father’s’ death) but it used a central European tale with the glossy production values of Hollywood, and put the back-story in the film. This was a genuinely novel innovation, which unhappily didn’t work – it was just too far from the narrative expectation. A pity. I can’t help thinking that I’ve spent more time considering the plot of Pulp Fiction than Quentin Tarantino ever did, when what really gripes me is the utterly unreal dialogue, endlessly quoted. And, by the way, has anyone checked: what do the French call a Big Mac?
