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 laughs. Vincent’s pale complexion, the lank dark hair and puffiness about the cheeks.
It’s a look of course, which harks back to the gangsters of Reservoir Dogs, director Tarantino’s previous film.
And it’s in the manner of their speech.
They’re talking about hamburgers, Vincent telling an amused Jules what they call quaterpounders in Holland. It’s light and pointless in content but there’s a clipped tone to their speech, an undercurrent of no-nonsense threat.
“What do they call Whoppers?” Jules asks
“I didn’t go into Burger King,” Vincent says, closing down that line of conversation.
Seconds later, we see them standing over the trunk of their car, loading pistols; two men now methodically preparing their tools of the trade.
Time, it would seem, to go to work.
As an audience we know that we’re being manipulated. This inane, almost silly chat in the car was our way in to the characters. We’ve engaged with them, grown — on some level — a liking for them and their weird outlook on the world.
A couple of guys whose observations on culture revolve around how different countries take their fast food.
It’s something to which we can relate with them; a something which stays with us on some level even as we grow slightly more uneasy, or possibly excited, about what’s to follow.
Morality Skewed
The banter in the scene plays an important role in the journey that we, the audience, are being taken along by the film, the film-makers and the characters. The conversation between Jules and Vincent is laced throughout with pop cultural reference and, as they move — on foot now — towards whatever dodgy appointment they are heading, this topicality remains, but the tone is growing noticeably darker.
Of course, this type of chit-chat was something of a staple to the Tarantino film universe: the Madonna speech as a prelude to a jewellery heist in Reservoir Dogs, or Clarence’s critique of Elvis before the carnage of True Romance (a Tony Scott film scripted by Tarantino).
But this scene with Jules and Vincent plays out longer and with greater resonance — setting both the tone and providing indication of where the entire movie may be heading both plot wise and in terms of its morality.
We get more of the pop cultural riffing from Jules, telling Vincent of Mia’s (their boss, Marcellus Wallace’s wife) history as an actress in a cancelled TV show (Fox Force Five).
Beyond this, we have a moment of office gossip, surrounding the plight of Tony Rocky Horror, injured at the hands of Marcellus for reasons that may or may not include his interaction with the aforementioned Mia.
The morality of the movie begins to play out through this brief dialogue; a debate over the innocence or otherwise of giving a foot massage.
In this exchange we’re exposed to the dubious, and entirely skewed priorities that exist in this world we’ve entered. We also see, as the debate gets more heated on the subject, the undercurrent of threat which exists beneath the inanity.
Vincent teases Jules to the point where his partner briefly bristles with menace — an encounter played out in reverse later in the Bonnie Situation. Furthermore, Vincent’s standpoint on the foot massage story, as we soon discover, comes not from a sense of morality as such but from his own nervousness about having to take Mia out on a date (although he claims otherwise) in a few days time — and the implications that may have, and indeed do have.
A morality that is thrown into even sharper focus moments later as the two men — getting into character, as Jules puts it — enter the apartment of Brett and his pals.
Brett’s Big Brain
Poor Brett.
From the moment the point of view shifts in the apartment, we know for absolute certain that it’s going to be bad for Brett and the other men in the room.
We’ve lived with Jules and Vincent for the opening part of the movie, been with them as they shot the breeze, gossiped and made inane, amusing banter.
And now we watch them enter the room, stony faced and full of malevolence. They may have had moral issues over foot massages, but there’s no dilemma over the violence that’s coming. Now the pop culture talk takes a devilishly sinister turn.
Brett is eating a hamburger — the cornerstone of any nutritious breakfast — from the fictional fast food outlet Big Kahuna Burger.
Jules, eyes blazing with a terrifying intensity as Vincent hangs back in the kitchen, brings up the earlier chat about the Royale with Cheese.
He asks Brett why he thinks the French use this term instead of quarterpounder. Brett, trying hard to keep it together under considerable stress, guesses the right answer. This, however, does little to aid his situation. Indeed, the exchange serves only to reinforce Jules’ overwhelming dominance.
We soon learn that Vincent and Jules are here to retrieve a briefcase that belongs to Marcellus — of which we’ll come to in a moment. We can sense the approaching climax to this long episode.
No longer is the dialogue banter — although still we laugh, albeit in a much darker vein, as Jules goads Brett with his: “Say what again, I double dare you” diatribe.
Pop culture has departed from the words as well, for the time being. Replaced by a biblical tone, Jules famous, iconic Ezekiel 25:17 passage, delivered with cold brutality, the words filling his victim with utter horror before the inevitable execution.
So what does it all mean?
Well, in a sense — it might not mean anything.
Pulp Fiction is full of symbolism, full of references. And yet throughout the movie these symbols seem to become exposed as pointless, vacuous and without any great meaning behind them.
Surely not — surely one of the great works of modern cinema, and Pulp Fiction is indeed in this category, would have greater weight in its symbolism. There is, after all, so much to ponder.
But I suspect that this vacuous nature is perhaps the point.
We are drawn to Jules and Vincent at the outset because of their chatter about burgers and pop culture, to the extent that we forgive the fact that both are pretty cold-hearted killers.
These symbols — commercial idols that inhabit our world and take the focus away, desensitise us to violence and blur our moral codes.
As an audience we are looking for symbolism in these red herrings and missing the fact that we are having a jolly time in the company of murderers and thieves.
Take for instance, Butch’s Watch.
Christopher Walken delivers the story of the watch, of how it’s been passed on through the years and the wars — the horrors it’s been involved in and the numerous rectums it’s been lodged within.
It’s a moment of cinematic genius — a moment played straight and with that jingoistic All-American military poignancy and yet laced with unbearably funny black humour.
Whilst there’s a personal symbolism to Butch and his sense of pride — which Marcellus has attacked — in the film it really serves as no more than a macguffin; an object used to set in motion the events to follow.
We get some sense of this from Butch himself, declaring of his name that in America, they have no meaning. Of course that’s not true but it fits in with the notion that by looking for deeper meaning, we can miss the actual message.
That there is a societal need to look for deeper meaning, some great explanation to our life as we ignore the things that are actually happening around us.
Again this ties in with Jules recital of the biblical verse.
That the verse is made up is one thing.
But, as he confronts Pumpkin in the diner at the end of the film, he readily admits that his use of the passage had, until that day, been used only for effect and not with any considered meaning to the words.
His philosophy thereafter, serving only reinforce its shallow nature.
Which brings us to the briefcase.
Much has been debated about what’s in the briefcase but, if we are to go with the thesis that Tarantino has filled his movie with false symbolism — that the very fact that our attention is diverted to all the cultural references, witty banter and objet du desirs and away from, or desensitising us to, the relative squalor, horror and seediness of this pulp fictional world then surely the answer to what’s in the case is a simple one.
Nothing — an empty light that offers no answer.
Indeed, doesn’t he tell us this from the very beginning of the movie as we are given a view of the dictionary definition:
Pulp (n) 1. A soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter.
A magazine or book containing lurid subject matter and being characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper.
There’s symbolism and reference in Pulp Fiction — but it’s an inward looking symbolism of an alternate world full of dubious characters, pop culture and classic old B movie tropes.
Symbols which relate not to some deeper meaning of the world but to lead us into Tarantino’s own movie world.
Twenty-five years have passed since the release of Pulp Fiction but its impact is still felt — arriving on the cinematic landscape with a leer and a dash of cool kudos.
Tarantino may have dipped too far, too often into his own self-indulgence in recent years but when you watch the near pitch-perfect scene setting of Pulp Fiction, you are reminded that when he gets it right, then he delivers an aesthetically brilliant work of art.
