An According to Hoyle Miracle

The facts behind Pulp Fiction


Oh. My. God!

One way to describe the 154 minute adrenaline rush that came packaged, warts and all, as Quentin Tarantino’s second offering to cinematic audiences across the world.

Another way to describe it would be to call it the sum total of 50 years of American pop culture carefully, carelessly tossed together into a smoldering cauldron that sizzles long after the last of the fire that fuelled it has died down.

And yet another way to describe it would be to call it a tribute to the pulp tradition, those trashy fast-paced, lurid magazines with thrilling cover art that dominated 20’s and 30’s America, long before television and manufactured bestsellers relegated them to the dusty back-shelves of literary misadventure.

Whichever way you look at it, Pulp Fiction is a landmark piece of work. With its motley bunch of memorable, real characters and visceral dialogue interplay, it revived the pulp tradition for a whole new Generation X, bored with dumbed down big budget Hollywood spectacles, and thirsty for fresh approaches to cinema.


Cut to… The Chase

May, 1993. A young Quentin Tarantino is hanging out with writing bud Roger Avary in downtown Amsterdam. The two had met as Video Store clerks in Manhattan Beach, California, and had become friends who often collaborated on stories. As things panned out, Quentin went on to become the most famous writer/director of his generation, while Avary spent the tail end of the decade doing script rewrites and polishes.

It was at the Betty Boop Coffee bar in the Centrum district of Amsterdam, where much of Pulp was allegedly written. In Holland, the coffee bars doubled up as hash bars where soft drugs such as cannabis and hashish were sold over the counter. Quentin stayed for several months, and left the video rental store Cult Video with an unpaid bill of about $150. And with a trashy script that will become the yardstick for a generation of film-goers and filmmakers to match up against.


Trash (as in, The Plot)

Pulp Fiction uses a non-linear narrative to cover the exploits of 3 central characters whose lives collide in badass downtown Los Angeles. Vincent Vega (John Travolta), longtime hitman in LA gang lord Marsellus Wallace’s crew has freshly returned from a 3 year stint in Amsterdam, and now teamed up with Jules Winfield (Samuel L. Jackson). Butch Coolige (Bruce Willis), aging middleweight boxer, is looking to have one last haul before he can cop out to somewhere like the Samoan Islands with his delicate French sweetheart Fabienne. And the duo of Pumpkin/ Honey Bunny (Tim Roth/ Amanda Plummer), small-time robbers of back-of-beyond liquor stores, are now looking to graduate to the big time, and how. They’re about to rob a restaurant.

To narrate the story to the uninitiated would be an exercise in futility. What’s more interesting are the nuggets that catapult a brilliantly conceived script to the status of a cult classic. What is it about the Misirlou dance sequence at the JackRabbit’s Swing Contest that came to dominate the celluloid screen of the nineties? What is is about foot massages that can spark an engrossing intellectual debate between two gangsters on their way to a cleanup job? And if the boss’ wife OD’s on grade heroin by mistakenly snorting it up thinking it’s cocaine, is it really true that piercing her breastplate with a shot of pure adrenaline is going to work?


Let’s cook some cult tonight

The ‘cult’ factor in Pulp Fiction is not format driven. It lies in the minutiae. It’s the details that are so laugh-out-loud funny, or hard-hitting, as the case may be. Sometimes it’s situational (Vincent shooting the boy in the car accidentally), while at other times, it is deep (Jules’ reinterpretation of Ezekiel 25:17). Sometimes, it is an exaggeration (Wolf, the cleanup man is a wonderful ‘what if’ character, somebody who may or may not exist in the real world, but is a killer idea of a character). This particular style of exaggerating minutiae as key plot points has come to be known as signature Tarantino (the Like A Virgin conversation at the breakfast table from Reservoir Dogs is a good example, where seasoned pro-league gangsters about to get into a ‘job’ discuss the true meaning of Madonna’s 1984 hit single).

Layered carefully within such constructs, are a million in-jokes, cross-references, and embedded pulp factoids. To the casual viewer, these easter eggs will remain invisible to the naked eye. But to the ardent follower, every repeat viewing will be rewarded with new and interesting embeds. Examples? They abound.

The marquee where Butch boxes, advertises the following fight: "Coolidge vs Wilson" is a reference to United States Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Woodrow Wilson.

The exchange in which Mia Wallace asks Travolta's character "Can you dig it?" to which he responds "I can dig it" is a nod to Travolta's role in Saturday Night Fever.

The motorcycle movie Fabienne is watching when Butch is waking up (before he discovers that his watch is missing) is called Nam's Angels. It's about the Hell's Angels fighting the Viet Cong.

An ad for Jack Rabbit Slim's can be heard during the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs.

Jules's Biblical passage (allegedly Ezekiel 25:17) is a typically obscure Tarantino reference to Karate Kiba/Chiba the Bodyguard, a 1976 film starring Sonny Chiba, whom the director would later cast in Kill Bill. Karate Kiba opens with a nearly identical misquote, likewise attributed to Ezekiel 25:17

And a whole lot many more to list here…


Hit and still running

Pulp Fiction went on to win the 1994 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Although it was his second film (Reservoir Dogs had opened in late 1992), it practically unleashed Quentin Tarantino as a potent force in post-pop American cinema.

In retrospect, the timing of Pulp was brilliant. It happened at the right time, when the world was ready for it, and therefore it tipped over and became such a mainstream blockbuster. If you really look at it, there were too many gambles thrown in that might not have worked the way they did. Travolta was a lost cause, a seventies boy wonder, who had been all but forgotten. Uma Thurman was virtually unknown, even known as a bit part wannabe star. The rest of the cast were also throwbacks from a different generation. The music, which played such a huge role in the film’s success, was not contemporary either. They were radio hits from obscure seventies one-hit wonders.

It all just came together in one masterstroke by a truly visionary pop culturist. And the world simply lapped it up. A bevy of Hollywood have-beens owe their revival to this film. An entire genre of sound owes its revival to this film. An entire generation of pulp literature found a new market thanks to this film.

Tarantino has gone on to create some of the most memorable Hollywood pictures over the last decade or so, and has developed a major cult (some would say mainstream) following along the way. Pulp Fiction, in particular, spawned a stream of non-linear, fast-paced nuovo gangsta flicks-. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Go and Snatch are only a few examples.


An according to Hoyle miracle

A final mystery for true buffs. Speculation abounds about the exact nature of the glowing contents of Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase. The most oft-repeated theory is that it contained Marsellus Wallace’s soul. The story goes that when the Devil takes a man’s soul, it is removed from the back of the head. When we see the back of Marsellus’ head, he has a band-aid covering the exact spot. Interestingly, we see Vincent opening the briefcase using the combination number 666, which further substantiates this.

Fresh theory, anyone?