How Pulp Fiction can be read as postmodern - Essay Example

?With reference to Frederic Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” write an analysis of how Pulp Fiction (film, 1994, by Tarantino) can be read as postmodern. The film Pulp Fiction was an immediate box office success when it was released in 1994 and it was also well received by the critics, and celebrated for the way it appeared to capture exactly a certain pre-millennial angst and dislocation in Western capitalist societies. The term post-modernist, often used to refer to art and architecture, was applied to this film, and there was even a new word made specially to reflect this, namely “pulpmodernist.”1 The phrase pulp fiction refers to popular novels which are bought in large numbers by less well educated people and enjoyed for their entertainment value. The implication is that the film concerns topics of interest to this low culture, but as this essay will show, in fact the title is ironic and the film is a very intellectual presentation of issues at the heart of contemporary western culture and philosophy. Writing ten years before Tarantino made Pulp Fiction, the academic and critic Frederic Jameson identified some of the key features of postmodernism, and debated whether these were a true departure from modernism, or just a continuation of the same rebellious themes. His paper on postmodernism2 tends towards the latter view, but at the same time prophetically pinpointed the essential departures that postmodernism has made from what has gone before. Tarantino’s film does not continue the debate in an academic way, but instead presents a virtuoso visual performance of the ideas that Jameson could only dimly perceive. These ideas include pastiche, a crisis in historicity and a blurring of the distinction between high culture and low culture. One way that Tarantino uses pastiche is when he introduces very evocative settings, like for example the restaurant setting of Jackrabbit Slim’s Diner. The decor is flamboyantly 1950s style, which is not in keeping with the more modern setting of the main action in the film. The film set is exaggerated, with customers actually sitting in cars, and the waiters and waitresses dressed up as famous 1950s characters like Elvis Presley and Marylin Monroe. On another level the film plays with the cultural connections that the actor John Travolta has with the 1950s. The musical film Grease which is perhaps Travolta’s most famous film, takes place in this kind of setting. When Travolta’s character in Pulp Fiction encounters this scene, playing a much older character, and in a much more adult and violent film, it causes an ironic ripple. The audience makes an instinctive connection with what they know outside the film, and this explodes the usual time and action frame of film. In Pulp Fiction Vegas begins to dance and this again brings in a whole host of meanings related to the famous dance between Travolta and Olivia Newton John in Grease. In the later film, however, this is no innocent flirting between teenagers. The new context is a dangerous flirtation with the wife of a deadly killer, and both of the participants are adults who know the consequences of their actions. Critics have noted that this, also is ironic, quoting elements of older film styles: “The story of the flirtatious boss’s wife draws on established elements from the gangster genre, while her overdose provides an unexpected Gothic reference.”3 The trickle of dark blood from the pale body of Mia (Uma Thurma) is what recalls the Gothic horror genre. These evocative touches characterise Tarantino’s exuberant style. The scene where Vincent takes Mia to Jackrabbit Slim’s Diner and then home is therefore like a pastiche of Grease, and also of old gangster movies, and then also horror films, using exaggerated and deliberate quotation of key visual features to add new and unexpected layers of meaning to the story. This layering of images from earlier artistic works creates a pastiche with a particularly nostalgic affect. Jameson remarks that this is an extreme form of historicism and using architecture as an example, describes a “complacent eclecticism of postmodern architecture, which randomly and without principle but with gusto cannibalizes all the architectural styles of the past and combines them in overstimulating ensembles.”4 The exuberance of Tarantino in the task of directing Pulp Fiction does indeed appear to reflect these same tendencies. The images are more than fond memories, or cute little quotes, but they are rather a jumble of pieces which are tossed together. Some of the constellations are intentional, of course, since the director of a film expresses his or her vision on the material available, but many of them are happy coincidences, or crazy juxtapositions that startle the viewer. Jameson uses also the terminology of linguistics such as “intertextuality” to describe the way that films mix up past and present in a way that denies any clear linear development. In Pulp fiction the music plays an important role in injecting exactly this kind of “intertextuality” into the film. Music from Chuck Berry and Dusty Springfield evoke the innocence of the 1960s and this contrasts sharply with the extreme violence that the film portrays. Tarantino expresses a kind of crisis in historicity when he juxtaposes different scenes in a non-chronological way. An example of this occurs at the start of the film where there is a playful discussion between a couple discussing a potential robbery in a restaurant which is swiftly followed by a scene where the two hit men Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) execute some young men in their flat. The two events are connected with each other, but the audience does not know exactly how, and cannot know that there is a reversal of chronological time in this presentation of events. Non-chronological plot lines are very common in cinema, and their use adds interest and reflection to a straightforward narrative. The difference between traditional flashbacks and flashforwards, and this post-modern usage is that there is no clear indication of what is past, present and future, nor even if the events shown belong to a consistent history. Critics have identified this messing with time as a post-modern feature. Other techniques such as the use of old fashioned bold red and yellow typefaces on a plain black background recall the American comic book genre, and this is an ironic reference, perhaps to the extreme but also quite slapstick violence that occurs in the film’s action scenes. Although Pulp Fiction makes frequent use of the icons and images of popular culture, it is at the same time a carrier of some deep philosophical and cultural meanings and this places it firmly in the territory of high culture. The film is enjoyed by fans of traditional gangster films, and fans of film noir alike, and it has achieved cult status precisely because it creates a bridge between these opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. People recognized the cliches in the three subplots: the gangster with the desirable wife, the boxer who is asked to cheat in a fight, and the hit-man double act who wander from place to place committing atrocities and entertaining the audience with witty banter all the while. These cliches can be enjoyed simply as patterns which are instinctively recognized, and the way that each plot line is resolved is anticipated with relish, because viewers have been trained through previous films to expect certain outcomes. When Tarantino sets up these expectations, and then fails to meet them, this entertains the audience. An example of this is when Vincent and Jules kill three youths, but then stand in front of the fourth, who points a gun at them. In a traditional gangster film, this is the point where the villain dies horribly or when the tragic hero (or anti-hero) is sacrificed in order to make everything end in a neat and morally acceptable way. In Tarantino’s hands this turns into a comedy, because the boy aims, but misses, and then his gun misfires and the two gangsters just look at each other for a second before raising their guns slowly and in unison, before they fire at the same moment. This is stylized, parodic violence. Rhythmic guitars and a trumpet solo in the background are reminiscent of a Western, and viewers are automatically invited to think of old fashioned Westerns, and a duel between cowboys. These conventions are being used in a deliberate and obvious way, and the contrasts as well as the similarities between the classical and the postmodern versions are highlighted. Tarantino’s complex cinematography is reminiscent of Jameson’s slogan which defines postmodernism: “difference relates.”5 Things are put together which appear not to belong, and yet in a strange way a funky new entity emerges which holds apparently opposite elements together. The repetitive and relentlessly violent gun battles in Pulp Fiction, for example, are an exercise in postmodern seeing. The viewer sees the image as it unfolds on the screen, and follows all the encoded messages to take in also a whole set of stored images from other contexts at the very same time as the film itself. It is a mind-numbing spectacle for those who know only the simple good and bad, symbolized by the white hats and the black hats in the traditional western. In the world of Pulp Fiction the codes are recognizable, but they do not fit into a logical chain of meaning. The characters are all morally dubious, with both good and bad qualities, and paradoxically Vincent and Jules are simultaneously the most despicable cold murders and the most likeable characters in the film. This is reminiscent of Jameson’s definition of the postmodern collage as step away from the single and consistent focus of older aesthetic: “The postmoderist viewer, however, is called upon to do the impossible, namely to see all the screens at once, in their radical and random difference… the vivid perception of radical difference is in and of itself a new mode of grasping what used to be called relationship.”6 For Jameson, writing ten years before Pulp Fiction was released, the examples he cites are actual small screens juxtaposed together one big screen. In Tarantino’s films, the many different parallel and contrasting screens exist in the viewer’s memory. This brings us to another important element of postmodernism: the influence of structuralism. This philosophical approach removes single one to one correspondences between an image or a text and its consumer, and assumes instead a complex building encoding of ideas by the author, and decoding by the viewer, and then rebuilding of the meaning using parts of the viewer’s own experience. In a postmodern cinema hall, there are as many meanings to the film as there are people in the room. It is designed to resonate with what people bring to the film, and this ensures that the film has a deeper and more lasting effect. The viewer has to work hard to watch Pulp Fiction, because some information, such as time, dates, and the exact relationships between the different characters are is not spelled out. This active involvement of the viewer is necessary for the work of art to stand on its own. This takes the challenge thrown out by modernists to reject easy conventions and make new ones, and pushes it even further to the point where conventions become a joke. Those who understand the references, get the joke, and this creates a new kind of meaning beyond the surface meaning of the narrative. In conclusion, then, it is clear that Tarantino’s film is postmodern, and Jameson’s insightful essay stands in relation to Pulp Fiction much in the same way as a prophecy stands in relation to its fulfilment. The postmodernist Tarantino expresses in a full and technicolour form what Jameson the modernist had only partially understood in the more static arts of painting and architecture. References Brooker, P. and Brooker, W. “Pulpmodernism: Tarantino’s Affirmative Action” in P. Simpson et al. (eds) Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Constable, C. “Postmodernism and Film” in S. Connor (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (1984), pp. 53-92. Tarantino, Quentin (dir.) Pulp Fiction. Film starring John Travolta, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson. Miramax Films: 1994. Read More