glossary:
moxie = backbone, determination, fortitude
protean = exceedingly variable



The evolution from True Romance and Reservoir Dogs to Pulp Fiction is expresssive of a nearly astonishing talent. Tarantino's dark world of overlapping stories is iteslf and emblamatic development of the filmmaker's sense of intricate racial counterpoint. Regardless of our color, the coarse and overstated pulp vision is what anchors so many of us and, ultimately, allows common frames of reference. Our opinionated conversations are full of commitment to the failures of feeling that shape the sentimentality and false moxie of popular culture. Tarantino knows that while those elements are either comical or obnoxiously pretentious in the straight world, they become sinister in a criminal context. He supplies us with a key to how evil works in our time of arrested moral comprehension. Every wrong is justified with offhanded, narcissistic cynicism, a reflection of the flippant anarchy that gives counterfeit vitality tot he mass-market rebellion of our rock and rap world. Even so, the unpredictable arrives to produce a dissonant, gallows wit.

All of the central characters in Pulp Fiction course through a thickening smog of amorality. Their Los Angeles stories lead one into the other, usually focusing on couples, boy and girl robbers asserting their love through petty heists; a pair of seasoned hit men "getting into character" before performing the blood sport of their brutal work; the trusted thug given the job of entertaining Mr. Big's hot wife; a fighter who agrees to throw a bout but double crosses the crime boss central to all of the stories, then the fighter and the outraged boss murderously battling their way into the store, where they become sudden captives of two redneck sadists and are gleefully taken beneath their own underworld into a homemade hell. As prisoners, these two men discover that, for all their knowledge of hard knocks, murder and corruption, there are arenas of evil where they are equal in virginity tot he world's biggest squares.

So realities tumble one into the other, race into race, class into class - and make us realize, once more, how little separates us in our urban Wild West of contraband, drugs, bribery, and processional destruction. In this cosmos of unforced integration, there is a fundamental, hard bitten morality; the sole taboos are the callous unintentional, and indifferent crimes committed against the guilty as well as the innocent. Redemption is possible only through the rigors of and dangers of compassion, the essence of a loyalty that reaches down as well as up, to those who don't understand and to those who do. We also realize that capturing the actual wackiness of American life frees our most insightful artists from the contrivances of surrealism.

Black and white from the central motif, John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson, wearing black ties, black suits and white shirts - like the robbers in Reservoir Dogs - are the killers working for black Ving Rhames, the millionaire criminal whose white wife, Uma Thurman, wears her hair black and has matching nails. As Bruce Willis flees the boxing arena in a cab, the Technicolor interior is back-dropped by black-and-white street scenes from what looks like an old film. The rednecks take their prisoners into a basement of silver chains and black leather. Tarantino himself plays a middle-class friend of Jackson's whose home he and Travolta come to when they have the fierce problem of cleaning up and getting rid of a black corpse after a messy, accidental killing in their car. Tarantino's character, not wanting to rist his marriage, pushes them to do it fast and be gone before his black wife returns from their work. Harvey Keitel, a Jewish fixer in black evening clothes and white shirt, speeds to their aid. The Joycean sense of "here comes everybody" is basic.

What makes the film such an accomplishment is the clarity of the characters. None of them, even the cameos, are cartoons. They all have specific visions of the world, and most love to talk. Tarantino is one of those bent on bringing back to American film the combination of strong dialogue and open physical dimension that gave Hollywwod its greatest moments, those points at which the verbal essence and the stage craft of spoken theater were extended by the camera's freedom of position and range of scale. Tarantino's words push the drama and the comedy, reveal the characters, and give the violence a power it never has in the periodic disruptions of formula action films, where spectacle gore replaces the dramatic intensification of feeling and adolescent smirks pose as anti-establishment irony. Even when Tarantino's people are posturing, they say things that unveil their psychological roots. A real-sounding but expansively rewritten biblical quotation, for instance, prepares the way for a murderer's totally unexpected spiritual revelation.

Possibly an ensemble masterpiece, the film contains the finest performances we've seen yet from Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta. Each of them brings nuances of remarkable subtlety and rhythm to speech, gesture, and facial expressions forming superb contrasts of sensibility that collaborate for murder, detail a friendship, and range into areas as widely removed as theological disputes and discussions of international hamburger quality. Uma Thurman gives a prickly magnetism to her spiritually mildewed sex kitten, a coke-snorting-failed television star who is bored and taken by the upper-class privilege resulting from her marriage to a widely feared and wealthy criminal. During her evening out with Travolta, Tarantino sends up both Planet Hollywood and our self congratulatory faux nostalgia for pop trash. At Jack Rabbit Slim's, the pop museum and restaurant, black and white slides up again - the vanilla milk shakes are called "Martin and Lewis" the chocolate ones "Amos and Andy." Later, the pampered gun moll's mistaking one kind of dope for another allows Tarantino to do a stunning reversal of the stake in the heart of the vampire - this time to save her life.


The lumbering crime boss whose girth and heavy voice are metaphoric of his power is done to a sullen fare-thee-well by Ving Rhames (his character's name - Marsellus - obviously connects him to the Roman references made in Godfather II and to the Greco-Roman appropriations of American slavery, when such names were given to chattel). Effortlessly brilliant, Christopher Walken has a hilarious monologue about patriotism, family heirlooms, and the honoring of friendship that sparks a moral decision in Bruce Willis's fighter. Tarantino then bends a cliche over by making the dialogue's early homoerotic references to one character literal. The avuncular corruption of Harvey Keitel's Winston Wolf is another in what is an almost endless line of high points in varied styles of contemporary film acting, which includes the work of Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Eric Stoltz, Rosanna Arquette and Maria De Medeiros.

One cannot be too impressed by what Quentin Tarantino has just accomplished in this time of shrill emptiness and our submission to what has become the sanctimonious profession of ethnic alienation. As they say in the South, Tarantino seems to have been "born knowing." His Pulp Fiction brings a detailed, visceral craft to our culture and makes it clear that he means to join those in our most invincible pantheon. Even at the point of development we can see what he wants - the epic sense of racial conflict and synthesis John Ford brought to his best westerns, the His Girl Friday snap of Howard Hawks, the inventive social satire of Preston Sturges, and the deglamourizing grunge of Scorsese's finest criminal portraits. But, finally, the lyrical cynicism and wit of Pulp Fiction recall the moral dilemmas of Orson Welles and Billy Wilder. The work of both identified the American tension created by what always opposes the high democratic vitality of empathetic individualism. Our perpetual nemesis is the protean and sentimental mob, instructed by the worst of our commercial culture of greed, our cannibalizing of lacquered celebrity, and our narcissistic varieties of xenophobia.