Photo: “Uma Thurman playing Mia in Pulp Fiction (1994)” by Davide Moroni is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
By Alice McIntyre
On Oct. 13 of 1994, one Demian Parker reviewed what he called “the motherfucking movie of the decade,” Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, in the pages of the Cooper Point Journal.
25 years later, we’d like to retract that statement. Pulp Fiction sucks.
A lot of people fucking adore this movie, to the point of Pulp Fiction posters being a college dorm trope. You know the type: the “soft boy” between the ages of 18 and 30 who wears circular glasses, rolls his own cigarettes, bases his personality around Doc Martens and Trainspotting, mansplains to you while on ketamine, or all of the above and more. I believe that type of person likes the film because it’s a reflection of themselves—an edgy, faux-deep exterior hiding a whole lot of absolutely nothing.
Don’t get me wrong, that exterior is nice. Pulp Fiction is nothing if not pretty to look at. The film creates an enticing atmosphere of “cool” through its soundtrack, cinematography, and dialogue. Copious use of racial slurs give the film Tarantino’s typical “bad boy” bullshit veneer, which appeals to some. Pulp Fiction, like The Room or Troll 2, proves that a movie doesn’t have to be good to be memorable.
I am of the opinion that the purpose of art is to illuminate a social or individual reality. Pulp Fiction utterly fails to do this. It is an entire film composed of motif-without-meaning and empty homage. Take, for example, the recitation of Ezekiel 25:17 (which is in reality an amalgam of several bible passages) by the character Jules (Samuel L. Jackson). Jules himself in one of the movie’s final scenes admits that he does not know what the passage means, only that it sounds cool. He then delivers his attempt at interpreting the phrase, which is ultimately inconclusive. In the end, the twice-delivered monologue is just a nearly word-for-word callback to the 1976 action film The Bodyguard starring Sonny Chiba.
Pulp Fiction recalls, not consciously but in form, what the late critical theorist Mark Fisher called hauntology, the sense that contemporary culture is “haunted” by lost futures. Tarantino calls back to the past both in deployed aesthetic (the Godfather-esque “proper” gangster) and in employed technique (borrowing from Jean-Luc Godard, among others) to create something which at the time seemed breathtakingly new. In reality it is nothing beyond image: The film is vapid in the true etymological sense. Just as much as internet culture in the 21st century has been defined by its nostalgia for previous decades, Pulp Fiction is Tarantino’s personal callback to his own sense of “cool.”
Pulp Fiction was certainly exciting in many ways when it first came out. Now, unfortunately, the jism of post-Tarantino “artistic” masturbation is all over the place in pop culture. Innumerable TV shows have parodied it, multiple filmmakers cite Tarantino as an influence, and myriad rip-offs have been made. The cycle, like The Human Centipede, will forever continue.
To be clear, I don’t think Pulp Fiction is unenjoyable. Despite everything, I like the movie. But I like it for the same reason I like Taco Bell: it’s bad in a way which pleases me. When I say that Pulp Fiction sucks, I am indicating that it fails, in my view, to be film, the use of the motion picture as an art form. Pulp Fiction is not a film just as a Crunchwrap Supreme is not Mexican food.
Verdict: 3/10
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