Jeremy’s Tophunder №37: Pulp Fiction

6 min readApr 30, 2020

It’s difficult for me to come up with comprehensive thoughts on a movie that blew me away when I first saw it, but 15 years later, doesn’t quite carry the same weight it did at the time.

I saw Pulp Fiction in my early years of high school, I can’t recall exactly when. My high school had a spirit day called “Make A Statement Day,” where you would take a white t-shirt and a fabric marker, and you’d write anything you’d want on it (while remaining school appropriate), and wear the shirt to school. Some folks used their shirts to make a statement about a social cause (gun control, gay marriage, etc). Some folks used their shirts to spread general positivity (“free hugs” and etc). Some people just tried to do something cool and eye-catching. That’s what I did. I wrote out the full text of Samuel L. Jackson’s Ezekiel 25:17 monologue onto the shirt.

It wasn’t that cool. I was 15.

I guess my point is, I thought Pulp Fiction was -really- cool when I was 15. I remember when I first saw it, I thought it was unlike any movie I had ever seen before, which it was. I had never seen a movie that could blend eye-popping violence and drug use with fascinatingly mundane dialogue. I remember thinking that this is the type of movie that smart, sophisticated people like, and liking it must make me smart and sophisticated.

And it’s not like I had to force myself to like it — something about the movie and the characters was (and is) just indescribably cool. It seemed like Quentin Tarantino had created a new film genre unto itself (which, in a kind of way, he had). It was immediately on my short list of favorite movies, and Samuel L. Jackson’s character was immediately on my short list of favorite movie characters.

15 years later, though, for whatever reason, I just don’t like it quite as much. Maybe it just got old. Maybe the novelty has worn off, in part because I’ve seen it so many times, and in part because I’ve seen Tarantino do better versions of the same structure and style in his later movies. It was also somehow longer than I remembered it to be — when I fired it up, I was for some reason under the impression that it runs around two hours, maybe a touch over. It’s actually north of 2:30, and some of the random, throw-away dialogue scenes about french cheeseburgers and foot massages and failed pilots and different types of breakfast food didn’t seem original and captivating like they used to. They just kind of sounded forced, and in a few spots, just kind of dumb.

But again, this is mostly just a function of seeing the movie a dozen times. The first time I saw it, I remember being so blown away that so much of the dialogue in the movie could be ultimately so meaningless. To this day, it’s one of the hallmarks of Tarantino movies that I love — characters are just making small-talk with each other of little consequence, and then suddenly something cool happens out of nowhere. I loved it the first time I saw Pulp Fiction. I love it less now, but I still appreciate how different it was.

There’s still a lot that I love about Pulp Fiction. I love the opening scene where Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer just decide to stage an impromptu robbery of the diner, capped off by one of the most iconic musical hits in movie history. The sequence in the pawn shop where Bruce Willis is looking for a weapon to ambush the guys in the basement — grabbing a hammer, then a baseball bat, then a chainsaw, and then finally a katana — always makes me laugh. I love the symmetry of disaster occurring any time John Travolta comes out of a bathroom (at the diner when he walks into the robbery in progress, then at Mia’s house after she overdoses, and finally when he’s shot to death by Butch). I love everything about Harvey Keitel’s character. I love everything about Ving Rhames’ character.

I really enjoy the final scene in the diner — I think it’s probably the best five minutes of acting Samuel L. Jackson has ever put together. His performance remains one of my favorites in any movie ever. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporing Actor, but lost to Martin Landau in Ed Wood. I’ve never seen Ed Wood, so I can’t go as far as to say that Landau’s win was undeserved, but I feel like 25+ years later, Jackson’s performance resonates a lot deeper with American popular culture than Landau’s does. Pulp Fiction remains Jackson’s only Academy Award nomination of his career, which seems crazy.

Some parts of the movie bother me, though. For one, its use of the N-word is a bit troubling. By my count, of the six people that use it in the movie, four of them are white. I understand that it’s a work of fiction, and Tarantino places the story within a world where race is probably more front-and-center than it is in other walks of life. But it bothers me how often it’s used, especially in scenes where it doesn’t seem necessary. Its usage here actually bothers me more than it does in Django Unchained (where it’s used a staggering 109 times), because at least Django was set in the antebellum south, where its usage was commonplace. Is Pulp Fiction trying to make a point that a disproportionate number of white people in Los Angeles harbor racial prejudices? It seems dubious, because the movie really doesn’t make any effort to establish any context for that point, and Tarantino doesn’t seem like the kind of writer and director that would just drop that in and not explore it more overtly. To me, it just seems like Tarantino wanted to use the N-word in his movie a few times, and that’s the point that bothers me.

I don’t think Pulp Fiction is Quentin Tarantino’s best work. In fact, I think he’s actually become a better filmmaker as he’s gotten older, at least in terms of the types of movies I enjoy. I have four Tarantino movies on my list, and three of them are from the post-Kill Bill era, which I see as kind of the cut-off point between Tarantino’s early work and his more contemporary work. I view Pulp Fiction similar to how I wrote about The Godfather a few weeks ago. It’s an iconic movie, and an incredibly well-conceived and well-made movie, but it’s not always what I’m in the mood for. There’s enough here to remind me how much I used to love it (and how much I still love it), but there’s also enough that’s just not quite there to remind me that my tastes have changed over the last 15 years. When I was in high school, Pulp Fiction would have been at or near the top of this list. It’s obviously fallen since then, but not enough to feel embarrassed about. №37 is nothing to sneeze at.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One