An Ideology Critique of Pulp Fiction Based on Commodity Fetishism - Movie Review Example

COMMODITY FETISHISM Introduction One of Karl Marx’s most compelling insights is his concept of commodity fetishism. It refers to the problem of interpreting in appropriate social terms the real though superficial relationships in the market place. This is because of the advent of the money economy which reduces bonds and relationships constituting traditional communities, “so that money becomes the real community” (Harvey, 1989: 100). Thus, impersonal and objective relations with others, replaces personal relationships. According to Mike Wayne (2003), commodity fetishism generates the phenomena of splitting, inversion, immanence and repression. Significantly, these dynamics form the framework of both subjects and popular cultural forms. Commodity fetishism is not merely a notion or illusion. It refers to the functioning of capitalism as a system, and explains why media representation has ideological power. The 1994 Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or award-winning film Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, USA, 1994) consists of a trio of stories revolving around the “violent misadventures of a collection of outlaws – right out of the pages of pulp fiction” (Marlow, 2001: 90). Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism explains the ideological concepts in the film. Thesis Statement: The purpose of this paper is to provide an ideology critique of the film Pulp Fiction written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, 1994. The critique will be based on Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. Discussion Extensive changes have occurred in cultural, political and economic practices since around 1972. These changes are related to the new major ways in which time and space are experienced by individuals. Postmodernism is related to the culture of the advanced capitalist societies, with a changing sensibility and a shift in the structure of feeling, in practices, and discourse formations. This leads to new assumptions, experiences and propositions, as evident in cultural manifestations and the media including films (Harvey, 1989). Developed by modernist culture, “the postmodern is characterized by experiments in time, space and perception” (Wayne, 2005: 108); it is now increasingly integrated with popular genres, as in Pulp Fiction and other films such as The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995), and Sliding Doors (Peter Howitt, 1998). An Ideology Critique of ‘Pulp Fiction’ Based on Commodity Fetishism Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction is “one of the best examples of the mysterious subtext of the curio shop in contemporary narratives” (Goh, 2002: 19). The film has been highly popular, winning critical acclaim, and has been described as engrossing, captivating viewers’ interest through through a well-paced sequence of scenes. In narrative structure it is non-linear, weaving its three constituent stories with a shifting focus on different time periods and spaces (Gleiberman, 2000). Harvey (1989) supports Karl Marx’s theory that there is a strong connection between the emergence of postmodernist cultural forms, the increasingly flexible modes of capital accumulation, and capitalism with a new approach to compressing time and space. Within the larger frame of the film’s story, is the central narrative that draws attention to the cultural anxiety regarding the shop. The middle story The Gold Watch relates to an object: the watch which is mesmerising and exerts power over the actions of people, thereby bringing the protagonists of the story to the dark pawnshop at its centre. Marx’s Theory of Commodity Fetishism Marxism accounts for contemporary mentalities and forms of cultural expression, as related to changes in society’s economic infrastructure, transformations in the nature of work, changes in class consciousness, the vast impact of new technologies, and various social movements starting with the women’s liberation movement, and then the gay and lesbian campaign, and drives supporting the blacks, ecology and world peace (Selden & Widdowson, 1993). Marx’s theory of alienation is found in the economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844, and forms the starting point for the ideology critique of the film Pulp Fiction. Karl Marx’s theory of alienation is related to commodity fetishism. The conditions of life, labour or exploitation, the states of mind, the emotions or frustration of those involved in the production of commodities, remain unknown to individuals during the market exchange of objects: money and the commodity. Multinational capital and electronic and digital media fragment and dislocate experiential and represented space. This creates a culture in which nearly everyone is consistently alienated from a direct sense of self, and is less conscious of existence than its image. In this culture, the science fiction alien and Other who had ealier been threatening, become our familiar, close relations, and even our own selves. Both in mainstream, big-budget, blockbuster science fiction cinema, and in marginal, low-budget, and independent science fiction films, a new approach to portray space and time was evident. Space was a surface for display of materiality or commodities, while time became more leisurely, and at the same time dynamized “as a series of concatenated events rather than linearly pressured to stream forward by the teleology of plot” (Bould, 2007: 236). Films like Liquid Sky (Slava Tsukerman, 1983) and Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984) celebrated the estrangement and alienation in all existence. They welcomed complex urban space, crowded and trashed-out; while appreciating the time-closure of the future for all the unexpected juxtapositions such closure permitted. Marx’s meta-theory of commodity fetishism explains how under conditions of capitalist modernization, individuals are objectively dependent on others whose lives and aspirations remain obscure and hidden. Marx’s concept attempts to destroy the fetishistic mask, to understand the social relations that lie beneath it. Thus, commodity fetishism opposes postmodernists’ perspective of “impenetrability of the other” as indifference towards underlying social meanings. Postmodernism is considered by Baudrillard, Freud, and Marx, to signal a reinterpretation of money as the proper object of desire. Additionally, postmodernist culture is portrayed as an “excremental culture” since the focus is on the medium of money rather than on the message of social labour, “an emphasis on fiction rather than function, on signs rather than things, on aesthetics rather than ethics” (Harvey, 1989: 101). In Pulp Fiction, the objectification of the human, the degeneration of social relations and how object relations dominate over human relations, are illuminated as an alternative logic in the narrative, running alongside the archetypal story of human identity and moral choice. The gold watch is the object-symbol for this alternative narrative level, and “the pawnshop is the site and symbol for its circular patterns and repetive degenerations” (Goh, 2000: 21). Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism includes the analysis of money and exchange value. Through commodity fetishism, human labour is transposed into the resulting product, and is an independent and significant property of the products themselves. According to Eagleton (1983), the inability to see products holistically is at the root of social alienation and exploitation. Capitalism abstracts social products from the labouring bodies that produce them, and identifies the active and permeable borderline between Self and the Other in films with alien encounters (Bould, 2007). Osborne (2005) reiterates that with the globalization of capitalism since 1989, Karl Marx’s analyses of the outcomes of commodification and its related fetishism, are increasingly relevant in contemporary society, as compared to earlier times. In late capitalism, there was a convergence of art and commodity. Thus, fetishism belongs also to the aesthetic category, and the process of commodity fetishism is an imaginary one. Hence, the fictively created commodity has an independent reality, and the alienated human mind accepts the objective independence of its own imaginatively created reality. Since both art and commodity are seen as profoundly unreal, the “autonomy and brute self-identity of the postmodernist artefact” (Selden & Widdowson, 1993: 187) results from “its thorough integration into an economic system, where such autonomy in the form of commodity fetish is the order of the day”. Jameson (1991) states that postmodern films sometimes evoke a nostalgia for the late 1960s and early 1970s, as evidenced in Pulp Fiction. Mike Wayne’s Account of Commodity Fetishism According to Wayne (2003), contemporary commodity fetishism inherent in capitalism, is evident in culture and society. This concept is illuminated in Pulp Fiction besides other films such as The Others (Alejandro Amenabar, 2001), The Devil’s Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001) and Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998). Marxism is an important critical methodology for explaining films, television, the internet as well as the print media. The previous trend to marginalize Marxism was based on the theoretical and political approaches of recent years. However, in the present time, there is a return to Marx and Marxism for understanding various aspects of the contemporary world. Both spatial deflation as well as inflation form part of cinematic techniques employed. Spatial inflation may be an excess scenography so rich, intricate and complex, that it may neutralize the film’s pace, or impact and may even affect its narrative flow and clarity. An emphasis is placed on a particular type of emptied terrestrial space, that is free of clutter obscuring the view of a potential cultural opening (Bould, 2007). The Dark City blends together the concept of the modern metropolis with a futuristic view of the city declining into dereliction. The film is reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s urban paintings with the mean streets, film noir’s alienating nocturnal maze, and the melting Wall Street of The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939). The subway sequence reflects the realistic American cinema of the 1970s when this significant medium began to depict the “routines and violence of urgan life” (Wayne, 2003: 216). Commodity fetishism is less a theory of ideology, than a theory which explains why ideological production is effective. Ideological production constitutes concepts and values which systematically legitimize the dominant social relations. Marxist literature is to some extent ambiguous on this issue. Commodity fetishism generates the phenomena of immanence, splitting, inversion and repression. “These constitute a differentiated unity of effects when the commodity becomes the subject and the subject becomes a commodity” (Wayne, 2003: 219). Further, these dynamics structure both subjects and popular cultural forms. But the effect of reifying or concretizing the concept of commodity fetishism is extensive, transcending real relationships to form bonds based on the exchange of commodities. Immanence relates to the inherent nature of remaining within the social relationships formed by the market place. In Pulp Fiction, the bizarreness of the story and the overall film is emphasized by the hegemony of the object, the gold watch. Thus, Koons’ long and unknowingly ironic narrative changes paternal love into control, and sentimental, intense attachment to the fetish, the watch, into obsession. The power of the object is more clearly evident when Butch is on the run for his life, but decides to go back to the apartment for the watch, thereby risking his life. Further, Tarantino’s narrative involves coincidence, fatalism, consequence and choice or the lack of choice. The pseudo choices do not affirm the dignity of human behaviour, but on the other hand, result in objectifying the human sphere. The cruel game of “eenie-meenie” played by Zed, to decide on whether Butch or Marsellus should be killed, leads to the violent fetishisation of Butch and Marsellus, with their being tied up and gagged as in sado-masochistic play. This fits their new roles “as packaged objects of desire, to be consumed and discarded by Maynard and Zed” (Goh, 2000: 22). This violent fetishization is repeated with ‘the Gimp’, another victim of the pawnshop who is kept confined in a box, dressed in fetish leathers, his human features completely removed, and his mouth zippered up. Disavowal is the suspension of disbelief, and pathological disavowal is based on fetishism, and “involves a fundamental contradiction in the spectator’s beliefs, what Freud called the splitting of the ego” (Buckland, 2000: 93) in which there are both conscious and unconscious sets of beliefs. Thus, Zed and Maynard’s violent objectification of the Gimp, Marsellus and Butch, disabling them from moving or speaking, placing them in garish packaging in the form of boxes, and placing them as if they were furniture or domestic objects, is towards the final consumerist treatment of the object, for disposal. Conclusion This paper has provided an ideology critique of the film Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) based on Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. Films are one of the predominant cultural forms in contemporary society. One of the common factors between Marx and films is that both relate to the masses (Wayne, 2005). Further, Marxism is interwoven in film theory and practice. Thus the Marxist theory of commodity fetishness and consequent alienation form the framework for both subjects and popular cultural forms such as films. These key concepts enable an understanding of the medium of film, as based on a capitalist culture. In Pulp Fiction, the concepts of commodity fetishness, alienation, disavowal and disposal are extensively evident in the narrative of the story and the presentation of the film. Thus, the Marxist film writer and director, Quentin Tarantino has created the film with a new and exciting approach. Bibliography Bould, Mark. (2007). On the Boundary between Oneself and the Other: Aliens and Language in the Films AVP, Dark City, the Brother from Another Planet, and Possible Worlds. Yearbook of English Studies, 37 (2): pp.234-256. Buckland, Warren. (2000). The cognitive semiotics of film. London: Cambridge University Press. Eagleton, Terry. (1983). Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Gleiberman, Owen. (2000). Review of ‘Pulp Fiction’. Fortunecity. Retrieved on 10th August, 2010 from: http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/tarantino/701/bestmoviereview.html Goh, R.B.H. (2002). Shop-Soiled Worlds: Retailing Narratives, Typologies, and Commodity Culture. Social Semiotics, 12 (1): pp.5-25. Harvey, David. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity, The United Kingdom: Blackwell. Homer, Sean. (2005). Cinema and Fetishism: The Disavowal of a Concept. Historical Materialism, 13 (1): pp.85-116. Jameson, Frederic. (1991). Nostalgia for the Present, in Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press, pp.279-296. Marlow, Jean. (2001). Audition Speeches for Men. London: Routledge. Osborne, Peter. (2005). Commodity: Fetish and Hieroglyph, in How To Read Marx. London: Granta Publishers, pp.9-21. Selden, R. & Widdowson, P. (1993). A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. The United States of America: The University Press of Kentucky. Wayne, Mike, (2005). Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives. London: Pluto Press. Wayne, Mike. (2003). The World Made Spectral, in Marxism and Media Studies: Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends. London: Pluto Press, pp.183-219. Filmography Liquid Sky. 1983. Slava Tsukerman. Cinevista Distributors. Pulp Fiction. 1994. Quentin Tarantino. Buena Vista International Distributors. Repo Man. 1984. Alex Cox. Universal Pictures Distributors. Sliding Doors. 1998. Peter Howitt. Alliance Atlantis Communications. The Dark City. 1998. Alex Proyas. New Line Cinema Distributors. The Devil’s Backbone. 2001. Guillermo del Toro. TVA International. The Others. 2001. Alejandro Amenabar. Dimension Films Distributors. The Roaring Twenties. 1939. Raoul Walsh. Warner Brothers Pictures. The Usual Suspects. 1995. Bryan Singer. Polygram Filmed Entertainment. Read More