Pop Culture and the Meaningless Symbols of Pulp Fiction

We hear the music before we see the images. Kool and the Gang’s ‘Jungle Boogie’ playing over the credits as loud and as garish as the large yellow letters, denoting the names of the players, writers and producers appearing on the black screen.

The Little Differences

The music fades but continues quietly in the background as suddenly we’re viewing two men, Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L Jackson) talking in a car.

“Tell me again about the hash bars,” Jules says.

It’s a scene which has become one of the most iconic in modern cinema; a scene which has been mimicked, referenced and copied countess times in the following two decades.

It’s a scene that burns slowly. An inane conversation between two men in a car, with that very inanity being offered a power that belies the actual content of the words.

We get the sense, almost immediately, that these men are talking not so much as friends, more so, work colleagues, and that their work is likely to be of the somewhat shady variety.

The black suits and ties, Jules tight, oiled afro, the neat beard and the scowl which exists even as he…