I first encountered Pulp Fiction on VHS on the eve of an English A-Level exam. Safe to say, it blew my mind with its out of kilter narrative technique, cooler than thou dialogue and moments of almost unbearable tension leavened by the darkest humour. At the time my head was full of King Lear when Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer’s ‘His Girl Friday’ dialogue plunged me into the world of Pulp Fiction.
Rapidly approaching forty, my viewings of this film must be into the several hundreds. I maintain that Pulp Fiction is the most intelligently scripted film I have encountered. It tapped into my literary sensibilities back then and I began to make comparisons between the Shakespeare plays I was studying for A-Level and the film-reference saturated dialogue and authorial control of dramatic action exhibited in Quentin Tarantino’s film.
As I sat on my parents’ sofa and tried to calm my pre-exam nerves with a form of entertainment far removed from Shakespeare, it began to dawn on me that the video I was watching might turn out to be just as culturally significant for me as any of the great texts I had been reading for the last two years. Far from calming my nerves, I found the film to be a visceral experience that made me question my assumptions about what a film could and should be.
I later read that in The Gold Watch section of the film, Tarantino wanted viewers to lose their bearings and and have the feeling that they had wandered into an wholly different movie when Butch and Marsellus descend into the hell that exists at the back of the Mason Dixon Pawn Shop. That was certainly my experience as a callow sixth former. I had seen Reservoir Dogs and thought it the coolest of the cool. This, however, was something of a different order altogether; cerebral, shocking, drenched in popular culture and possessing a vintage look that was destined never to appear dated. My sudden exposure to the world of Maynard, Zed and The Gimp left me shaken, terrified and laughing with exhausted glee as Butch and Marsellus finally turn the tables on their captors. Was this what Shakespeare’s audiences at The Globe had experienced? Something that built on generations of tradition and turned them into something new that assaulted the senses and left thise watching in no doubt that they were witnessing something that would be studies and imitated for innumerable years to come.
And yet, Pulp Fiction had been around for seven years by the time I saw it. I wonder what the eleven-year-old me would have made of Pulp Fiction had I somehow managed to see it in the cinema in 1994? Tarantino’s Mother allowed him to watch Deliverance as a youngster and it clearly didn’t do him any harm! Should there be an age limit on great art? The A-Level version of me staggered from the living room changed, changed utterly. It would clearly have been a lot for my young mind to take, like taking a bite from the Tree of Knowledge. Zed and Maynard and The Gimp may have invaded my thoughts while I tried to focus on King Lear and The Fool, but what sights and sounds from the mind of Tarantino might have haunted my Eleven Plus?
Better things for better living, but not through chemistry 