It was a workday lunch hour. A very long workday lunch hour, considering “Pulp Fiction” runs to almost three hours. The movie was a sensation, and the city was abuzz. The chatter had even reached the offices of the trade journal Home Textiles Today, where I worked. A bunch of us sneaked out to a Chelsea movie theater.
Thankfully, there wasn’t much doing in home textiles at that moment. Maybe there was, and it was ignored. But after the movie, back at our desks and in awe of what we had seen, we had to chat about John Travolta. Uma Thurman. A Royale with cheese. The Needle. The Gimp. The Dance. And Samuel Jackson, even Eric Stoltz.
For many people, “Pulp Fiction” is that kind of movie — you remember it, and when and how you first saw it.
“Like a shot of adrenaline to the heart, ‘Pulp Fiction’ changed the movie landscape when it opened on Oct. 14, 1994,” says Matthew Chernov at Variety.
“More than any pop landmark since ‘Star Wars’ and Steven Spielberg’s early dazzlers, it got a generation of wannabe filmmakers and budding cine-heads jazzed to the teeth by redefining art as cool fun and cool fun as art,” writes Tom Carson at GQ.
The film snatched the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and earned seven Academy Award nominations, not to mention many millions of dollars at the box office, and its appeal remains undiminished, as Sarah Crompton says at The Telegraph: “It looks simultaneously modern and timeless,” she notes, adding that it still stands as Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece “because in it he used all of his fascination with movies to fashion an entirely new tale, one weighted with morality and insight.”
Critics have hailed its distinctive blend of retro cool, its Oscar-winning screenplay (by Mr. Tarantino and Roger Avary) with unconventional plotting and sharp dialogue, and its seminal soundtrack. But perhaps its greatest accomplishment, explains Chris Osterndorf at The Daily Dot, “is that it feels as relevant now as it does the day it was released. Though the Internet fosters nostalgia, the staying power of ‘Pulp Fiction’ goes beyond that. For 20 years, it has refused to be ignored, surviving an increasingly crowded marketplace, and an industry that has been completely reshaped by the web, to become perhaps the most enduring film of its generation.”
In 1994, there were very few naysayers — but not none. For example, Stanley Kauffmann wrote at The New Republic, “what’s most bothersome about ‘Pulp Fiction’ is its success,” adding: “The way that this picture has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. ‘Pulp Fiction’ nourishes, abets, cultural slumming.”
Indeed, as Nathan Reese notes at Complex, the movie challenged many notions of what a “prestige” movie was and could be: “This was the year that ‘Forrest Gump’ was an Oscar darling. ‘Pulp Fiction’ may have been one of the most memorable Cannes premieres of all time and an instant Gen-X rallying point, but Robert Zemeckis’ three-hour opus was the movie of the year.” He adds, “Quentin Tarantino was hip, but he wasn’t quite mainstream.”
Many observers point out that in “Pulp Fiction,” Mr. Tarantino displayed a staggering knowledge of movie history and an appreciation of the medium’s capacity for artistry. The editors at What Culture! note the reach of his knowledge “into films you’ve never heard of: obscure foreign gems, the exploitative, trashy, unappreciated, bizarre, campy, utterly eccentric and critically derided.”
“His flicks are reworkings of scenes and genres,” they add, “constructed using elements of other movies. This isn’t rip-off, it’s re-imagining, and nobody does it quite like Tarantino. Like a hip-hop artist, he borrows and samples to create something fresh and exciting.”
Many critics, including Mr. Chernov at Variety, highlight the screenplay and its distinctive structure: “The plot of ‘Pulp Fiction’ is presented out of sequence, with overlapping episodes circling back on themselves, forcing the audience to piece it all together chronologically. Playfully built around three primary storylines, each identified with onscreen inter-titles, the ingenious structure keeps the viewer continually off balance, adding an extra layer of suspense to the already nerve-wracking material.”
Writing at his blog, the film scholar David Bordwell also admires the plot’s construction: “Every narrative film is made out of parts. Normally they just whisk by us, but sometimes our attention is called to them as parts. Occasionally, we sense that the whole movie is made out of large-scale chunks.
“For many viewers, I suspect, ‘Pulp Fiction’ was their introduction to strategies of block construction in movies. Those of us studying film history had seen it in various guises before, but seldom so cleverly and explicitly worked out as in Tarantino’s film.”
But the film might have its biggest impact, Mr. Carson at GQ says, on another medium: “Where would the past decade’s cable dramas be without ‘Pulp Fiction’s’ innovations? That’s where you find Tarantino’s jigsaw-puzzle storytelling put to genuinely apt and inventive use, from ‘Breaking Bad’s’ cryptic but tantalizing flash-forwards to ‘The Sopranos’’ jones for narrative circularity.”
Nevertheless, Matthew Clayfield at the Australian news outlet SBS says that perhaps “Pulp Fiction” set too high a bar and that Mr. Tarantino has not realized his full potential. “At no point have Tarantino’s films of the past 15 years transcended their pulp origins,” he writes. “Nor has his wall-to-wall quotation ever cohered into something morally or thematically greater than the sum of his stylistic hat-tips.”
He marks the follow-up to “Pulp Fiction,” “Jackie Brown,” as “easily his most adult film and represents the darker, more interesting direction he could have taken, which he ultimately abandoned in favour of the adolescent, morally simplistic entertainments that have followed.”
Jordan Crucchiola at Underwire (Wired) disagrees: “As we nitpick the seemingly alchemic circumstances, we arrive at the most 2014 of conclusions: Why did ‘Pulp Fiction’ become an absolute classic? Because, Quentin Tarantino.
“‘Pulp Fiction’ set the bar for cinema cool and redefined independent filmmaking because Tarantino is the most complete and perfect filmmaker working today. It’s that simple. From ‘Reservoir Dogs’ in 1992 to ‘Django Unchained’ in 2012, he’s never missed his mark or compromised his voice.”
He adds, “Tarantino movie is an event. They only come around once every few years, but when they arrive, you can bet your house they’ll be crafted and styled beyond any perceptible level of minutiae,” and concludes: “Tarantino made being indie cool as hell and bankable for stars and a viable business strategy for studios. Whatever happens now is just an echo of the song we first heard 20 years ago, and haven’t stopped playing since.”
