FilmMagic
Somehow, Quentin Tarantino combined “Breaking Bad” with Larry David. And he delivered “Pulp Fiction.”
“Breaking Bad” features scenes that leave you downright gobsmacked, and “Pulp” is rife with them — Mia’s overdose, Butch’s girlfriend forgetting his watch, Marvin being shot in the face and the ultimate scene of the robbery at the diner where Vincent and Jules are eating.
But like David’s creations “Seinfeld” or “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Pulp” incorporates a series of interesting, off-beat conversations: the importance of a foot massage, whether women with potbellies are sexy, if a pig (or a dog) is considered a filthy animal and if a pig (like a dog) can have enough personality to offset such a characterization.
Those conversations might be between Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent (John Travolta). Or Butch (Bruce Willis) and Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros). But you could see them being between Larry and Leon on “Curb.” Or between Jerry and George on “Seinfeld.”
Thirty years ago on Oct. 14, 1994, “Pulp Fiction” hit theaters in the US, arriving both before and after David’s heyday (“Seinfeld” debuted in 1989, “Curb” in 1999) and 14 years ahead of Vince Gilligan’s “Breaking Bad” (2008).
Tarantino’s visionary masterpiece turned three people into stars (Jackson, Uma Thurman and Tarantino himself), initiated the comeback of a fourth (Travolta) and introduced some of the most memorable scenes and dialogue of the last three decades.
“Introduced” is frankly the wrong word.
It’s more like “some of the most memorable scenes and dialogue of the last three decades exploded into cinema like Marvin’s head when Vincent blew it off.”
“Pulp Fiction” is a legacy movie. Tarantino has directed other films (“Reservoir Dogs,” “Django Unchained,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”), but there’s no question that “Pulp” is the movie with which he’s most associated.
If Tarantino is forever linked to “Pulp,” so are many other smaller-scale aspects of the movie. You hear “Royale With Cheese” and it’s an automatic connection. Big Kahuna Burger. The five-dollar milkshake. “Son of a Preacher Man.” Of course, Ezekiel 25:17.
Phrases are tied to it: “Check out the big brain on Brett!” Or “Burnt to a crisp or bloody as hell?” Or “Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.” And, of course, “Pretty please with sugar on top, clean the f–kin’ car.”
To put it simply, just the “coolness” of the film is part of its connection. Tarantino’s use of language is not just in back-and-forth dialogue and light-hearted discussions but also in unique, unconventional expressions. “I’ll be down in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” Or even “think nothing of it” instead of “you’re welcome.” And there was also the brashness of Tarantino’s writing — when Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel) is jotting down the important notes of the Marvin-shot-in-the-face mess he has to fix, he literally writes, “ONE BODY, NO HEAD.”
Who else was writing that way?
“As good as the movie is, that script was just extraordinary,” Lawrence Bender, the film’s producer, exclusively told The Post.
Added Eric Stoltz, who played drug-dealing Lance, “It was (and is) a rare treat to get a script that is so well written one wants to read it twice. Quentin’s a bit of a mad genius, and we were all grateful to be a part of his world.”
Appropriately, Tarantino and Roger Avary won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (the movie was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Travolta, Best Supporting Actor for Jackson and Best Supporting Actress for Thurman). Bender confirmed that the script felt different and groundbreaking. He referenced how most movies at that time were structured in a certain formulaic way.
Not “Pulp Fiction.” The story is told out of order, with multiple characters seemingly unrelated to each other, ultimately becoming involved.
“When Quentin wrote this, clearly it breaks every rule,” Bender said. “Rules are made to be broken.”
The song “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” by Urge Overkill (a Neil Diamond cover) kicks off perhaps the greatest 13 minutes of the film – and maybe of any movie of the last three decades.
During that stretch, the movie rips from the question of whether Vincent is going to sleep with his crime boss’ wife (Mia, played by Thurman) to whether he’s going to accidentally be responsible for her heroin overdose death to her surviving as a result of an adrenaline injection that catapults her awake.
The brilliance of the scene is not just the plot’s creativity and drama. It’s also the human relatability of the behavior (since Vincent has never had to administer an adrenaline shot, he requests a magic marker to identify Mia’s heart for plunging accuracy — as a viewer, you think, “I feel like that’s what I’d do too,” right?) mixed with the heart-stopping tension of whether it will work (the image of the needle suspended in the air before injection, with liquid dripping from its tip, is staggering).
“It was a ‘night shoot’ so we worked till 4 a.m. or so,” Stoltz told The Post, “which … helped the scene in an odd way – we were all a little messed up by the lack of sleep.”
And when Mia lives and Vincent walks her home, the exchange ends with her finally being willing to tell him the long-awaited Fox Force Five joke. Perfection.
Perhaps the most emblematic scene of Tarantino’s script, however, occurs when Butch goes to retrieve his father’s watch.
It’s because Tarantino keeps going further.
There’s incredible tension to start when Butch returns to his apartment to secure the watch. But when Butch kills Vincent and escapes from the death trap alive, audiences think that’s the end. Tarantino even presents Butch cheerfully singing “Flowers on the Wall” while driving away and triumphantly saying to himself, “That’s how you’re gonna beat ’em, Butch. Keep underestimating you.”
But then he and Marsellus (Ving Rhames) suddenly have their interaction, and it’s a whole new ballgame.
First, Butch slams into him with his car. Then you’ve got a disoriented Marsellus chasing a bloody and hobbled Butch down the street, shooting at him. They even end up in a pawn shop with a racist store owner who pulls a shotgun on Butch, knocks him out and then summons Zed, his rapist cop friend.
(Shout-out to Peter Greene – who delivers an incredible supporting character trifecta in Pulp as Zed, “The Usual Suspects” as Redfoot and “Training Day” as one of Alonzo’s crew).
And Butch escapes — but Tarantino still goes further. Because Butch opts to go back to rescue Marsellus (the enemy of my enemy is my friend), it’s just relentless escalation. Put it this way: it’d have been as if after they’d revived Mia, Vince and Mia returned home to find her house being robbed.
There’s even escalation within the escalation — when Butch is choosing his weapon to attack Marsellus’ tormentors, he first eyes a hammer. Then he shifts to a bat. Then, he opts for a chainsaw.
Then, he picks his actual choice — a samurai sword.
Again, Tarantino just keeps going further.
The movie’s opening scene establishes its tone — a couple is having a philosophical conversation about robberies; they decide they should rob diners; they immediately opt to rob that diner, but before they do, they express their love for each other, and finally they launch into the heist, capped by the infamous “any of you f–king pricks move” instructions. Then, Dick Dale’s song “Misirlou” kicks in, which sounds like a gunshot and is the perfectly appropriate sound for where we’re heading.
“Pulp Fiction’s” soundtrack also became celebrated. As Bender says of Tarantino, “He was already thinking about the music before he was writing it. It was all kind of coming out of that genius brain of his.”
Thirty years later, does “Pulp Fiction” have a defining legacy?
“I have no idea,” Stoltz said to The Post. “We’ll know in 100 years or so.”
In a 2013 Vanity Fair piece, Tarantino said, “I’m not the kind of guy that wants to put ‘Pulp Fiction’ into perspective 20 years later. One of the things I’m proudest about is I went out to make an omnibus movie, three separate stories. Then I wanted to make it so it would actually work together to tell one story. And I did that.”
The acting is stellar, and the star turns are significant. But it’s the dialogue’s uniqueness blended with the electricity and ferocity of certain scenes. Somehow, Tarantino mixed Jerry and George talking in a coffee shop booth (literally Vincent and Jules at the end of “Pulp”) with Bryan Cranston’s Walt and Aaron Paul’s Jesse having to clean up after an unplanned killing (literally Vincent and Jules with Marvin).
Essentially, that’s what the legacy of “Pulp Fiction” is — burnt to a crisp and bloody as hell.