Pulp Fiction: Hurawatch

Pulp Fiction: Hurawatch

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Quentin Tarantino is a modern Jerry Lee Lewis in that he is an explosive entertainer who will destroy the piano as long as everyone is having a good time. His latest release, “Pulp Fiction,” is a comedy that incorporates blood, violence, sex, drug use, quirky fetishes, and even watching lifeless corpses get disposed of. Additionally, there are leather freaks and a generationally cursed wristwatch.

He is known to be an inventive storyteller which might be the reason for every one of his films being interesting in some aspect. However it is possible for him to create a boring movie: “Pulp Fiction” feels more like a combination of the worst aspects of every film ever made. Tarantino is known for being reckless due to him losing control while creating art and is dangerously unthoughtful. That reckless abandon is what brings the flesh to the bones in Tarantino’s films: the thrill of a director who has the freedom to run loose in a sprawling amusement park.

Not only is the screenplay by Tarantino and Roger Avary laughable in its fanzine approach to writing, but also quadrouple plaguerizes the noses of ‘zombie writers’ who take drab screenwriting courses built around hit movies. Just like 'Citizen Kane', Pulp Fiction was crafted in a highly fragmented manner which allows it to be rewatched a dozen times without being able to memorably sequentially recalling every viewing. It intricately weaves multiple character story arcs who exist in an intricately woven world a deafening doomsday soundtrack filled with crime, desperation, triple undercover deception, and intrigue. The title speaks for itself. Just like those soulless pulp magazines - 'Thrilling Wonder Stories' and 'Official Detective', Pulp Fiction fictionalizes a setting devoid of average joes and mundane days filled with staggering emphatic sentences cascading down metaphorical fire escapes and an ominous dumpster of death.

John Travolta takes the role of Vincent Vega, a hit man with mid level ranking in the organized crime world. He is in partnership with Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), who on their way to deal with a bunch of Yuppie drug dealers, engage in “forbidden” conversations like why does France have a French version of Quarter Pounder. Their innocence is comparable to Huck and Jim imagining how the world’s people can communicate while the duo floats down the Mississippi.

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Travolta’s career is a sequence of difficult assignments. He is given some challenges that he can not seem to overcome through direct violence, such as cleaning up after himself. With his character, shoes and wardrobe not exactly in spick and span condition (One imagining the buckled heels, trousers, and his disordered car), a caring friend in the form of Harvey Keitel’s Mr. Wolf makes out for such character traits.

The funny and outrageous part of the Gunfighter Chronicles is a scene with Travolta and Uma Thurman. She is the wife of the mob boss (Ving Rhames), who tells Travolta to take her out for the night. He arrives getting high and with pretentious courtesy which Buster Keaton would be jealous of, answers an intercom. They visit Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a 50s style restaurant where Waiter Buddy Holly and host Ed Sullivan serve their customers, and they end up in a twist contest. That’s before she overdoses and Stoltz, syringe filled with the adrenaline, yelling at Travolta, “YOU brought her here, YOU stick in the needle! When I bring an O.D. to YOUR house, I’LL stick in the needle!” plays the part of the overzealous doctor. Bruce Willis and Maria de Medeiros were cast as the other couple: He’s a boxer named Butch Coolidge who was supposed to throw a fight but does the exact opposite. She’s his sweet, gullible girlfriend completely in the dark as to why they must leave “right away” without delay. But first, he has to make the dangerous trip back to his apartment to retrieve the priceless family heirloom, which is a wristwatch.

This watch recounts its history in a flashback when Walken tells Butch the story of how his great-grandfather's watch, a “Private Doughboy Orion Coolidge”, was passed down through generations. Walken’s monologues provides the most comical laughter in the movie.

The strategy of the film is to put the characters in precarious situations and allow them to dig themselves out into even messier ones. This is how the boxer and the mob boss become captives of strange leather-clad sadists, in the basement of a gunshop. Or how the opening characters, a couple of stick-up artists played by Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer, manage to find themselves in the most complicated situations. Most of the movie’s action comes from ‘crisis control.’

The originality of the creative dialogues is as striking as the inventive situations. Most films nowadays have generic and practical conversations as speech: Characters only say what is absolute to get to the next part of the plot. But in “Pulp Fiction,” the characters seem to be infatuated with language, with the love of words. The dialogue Tarantino and Avary crafted is at times crazily enjoyable and that’s the beauty of it. Furthermore, it means that not every character sounds the same: Travolta is laconic, Jackson is precise, Plummer and Roth are lovey-dovey dipshits, Keitel speaks in the shorthand of a hell-bent professional, and Thurman padded her resume as a moll by watching soap operas.

One of the parts of the folk stories is that Tarantino, before he became famous, worked as a salesman in a video rental shop. The inspiration for “Pulp Fiction,” in my opinion, is not real life; it is old movies.  It's like a trip through the lurid images that lie coiled and suffocated in all those boxes in the Blockbuster video store. Tarantino once said the old pulp mags were tacky, thrown-away stuff for workers designed to be rolled up and shoved into a back pocket. Sure, you would love to wait till lunch so you can reread them.