#Jules pulp fiction movie#

It was central to Reservoir Dogs that we know the gangsters robbed diamonds, but in Pulp Fiction we never need to know what’s in the briefcase. There are convenient coincidences, questionable decision-making, and that non-linear storyline that everyone seems to harp on about, but all centred around a rambling plot that jumps from one place to another for no apparent reason. The narrative is only incidental to their everyday lives, rather than their journeys being defined by it. Plot is not the point of Pulp Fiction, it is people. It’s why he manages to de- and then re-historicise the Second World War with Inglourious Basterds, (more controversially) slavery in America with Django Unchained, and Hollywood with Once Upon in Hollywood. This was Tarantino opening the doors to his home, but keeping us in the dark after we walk in and forcing us to follow his voice to get to the light.

Our rules wouldn’t apply there, nor would our understanding of what plot, structure, dialogue, any of it was supposed to be. And Tarantino has since built an entire career out of etching out characters more than plot.īefore Marvel and DC battled it out to see whose cinematic universe would Martin Scorsese disparagingly acknowledge first, Tarantino already began meticulously constructing his own world. Pulp Fiction is at its essence a story about not very much except its characters.

You vibe with Jules Winnfield (a masterful Samuel L Jackson) because of the passion with which he speaks about burgers, not because of the aloofness with which he can murder. Yes, they dress up and behave like gangsters, boxers, kingpins, and drug addicts, but as a viewer you relate to them, or at least feel like you do, because of the sheer humanity they all seem to carry with themselves. And Tarantino has since built an entire career out of etching out characters more than plot. Not gangsters, boxers, kingpins, drug-addicts – just people. The film cushioned its scenes of extreme and gruesome violence, typical of gangster films, with long drawn-out scenes of people just being people, atypical of any film at all. This symbol of cinema cool, the urban gangster on the streets of New York/Brooklyn/LA/Miami, mostly seen with a cigarette between his lips and a general look of calm on his face, was pictured in Pulp Fiction taking casual dumps and discussing the pros and cons of foot massages. So to see John Travolta in an ugly T-shirt, reading a magazine in a snug toilet room a few moments after inadvertently blowing someone’s brains out onto the back of a car, and right before he himself is shot to death, was funny, sure, but strangely enough, also revolutionary.

#Jules pulp fiction movie#

Safe to say, I had never seen a movie gangster take a shit before watching it gloriously unfold in Quentin Tarantino ’s bonafide masterpiece Pulp Fiction. But the depiction of gangsters specifically has been limited by only an experimentation in the kind of violence they inflict upon one another, or the dialogues they exchange. C inema allows for the imagination to run wild, to travel far with its flights of fancy and take you to places you’ve never even conceived of before.