“But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd.”

Think of how many times you use pop culture references in your regular life. You may be making a joke, updating people, or simply discussing why you know it.  In life today, TV shows, movies, pop stars, and other cultural icons dominate much of our regular speech. In Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 magnum opus, Pulp Fiction, he uses dialogue driven through these references to help us learn our characters and understand the world.

Pulp Fiction works like no other film. It seems to be genre-less, acting as a comedy, thriller, action flick, and serious drama, possibly all in the same scene. The film covers many themes including redemption, nihilism, pop culture, power, and temptation. We never learn who these characters are except through the dialogue. And the dialogue is not only memorable, but it teaches you who these people are without even mentioning a single thing that would appear on a biography. The adrenaline rush that this film delivers at moments is almost as intense as the opening D-day battle in Saving Private Ryan. And at the end of the film, you can’t help but smile at the genius behind the film.

What drives the film is dialogue. I could quote this film for an hour. But it’s not that the dialogue is memorable. It means something at every point. When Jules and Vincent discuss the random musings of their lives before a job, it’s all  setup for the rest of the film. The harmless discussion of the “Royale with cheese,” becomes frightening when they are scaring their victims. The importance of a foot massage becomes useful when Vincent tries to learn a little of Mia’s past. And all right before they go in to do business, Jules remarks, “Let’s get in character.” It’s almost as Tarantino knows so much about gangsters that he is revealing what is behind the façade of these men. These are the same people and they talk about the same stuff that almost everybody does everyday. They just happen to kill for a living.

When I started this essay with mentioning the use of pop culture, it’s because that the use of it is almost essential to this film. Many people today almost can define their lives by pop culture, and Tarantino uses that as a reflection of his characters. The world that these people live in is based off what they’ve seen on TV and heard on the radio since 1950. Tarantino sees the use of talking about what interests us because it seems so normal to everyday life. People don’t always talk in monologues or important speeches because that is not an average day for most. These are simply a glimpse into what more or less must be a two-day adventure around LA that is more or less average (probably leaning toward the less average as we discover).

Part of what makes Pulp Fiction so curious is what we see characters in both everyday life and then in out of this world situations. It’s as if we see the duality of every character. Consider Butch. In the scene with the taxi driver, we see his real brutal side. He is strong, mean, and doesn’t really care to hear about her life (“This is America honey,” he remakrs, “Names don’t mean s**t”). But once we get to his hideout with his girlfriend, you can see Butch remove the façade and become the big but lovable man that she is attracted to. This is exactly what Tarantino wants to show. We all have these dual sides. Just as Jules has to “get into character,” so does every other character. Marcellus, when outside his gangster paradise where he is calm and collected, becomes a furious man without a single sense of care for what others think. Tarantino knows what each man or woman would act like in every single situation possible, and uses that to joke with his audience.

The dialogue that characters discuss in Pulp Fiction is somehow always constantly intriguing. These characters are full of random facts, great jokes, curious stories, and what not. It’s interesting because in any other movie, this would be the senseless dialogue that has no purpose but to show a character talking.  Tarantino uses this dialogue as the crux of his film. Tarantino is defying genre by so much that homage becomes his genre, and it’s completely original. He knows how to twist a situation so vehemently its brutally hilarious. Consider the famous Christopher Walken monologue. Walken only appears in that single scene (and the film’s only flashback) in which he begins delivering a more or less boring tale about a watch to the son of an army friend. It’s all simple and relatively usual, until he drops the bomb. There’s something about this scene that gets the audience every time and its in Walken’s delivery. It’s so calculated, so practiced, and so casual that Walken doesn’t even notice the problem with what he said, but the audience can’t help but laugh.

Many detractors of Pulp Fiction cite the violence featured in the film as a problem. But if you notice what he does with violence, its never what you remember from the movie. Take the moment where a character accidentally meets his death. You don’t remember how brutally violent the death was, but instead the comedic sequence at a strange neighbor’s house that followed. Tarantino rarely focuses truly on the violence of situations. They are simply catalysts for either jokes or other situations form redemption and learning experiences.

What Pulp Fiction does deliver on instead of violence is tension. There are certain adrenaline rushes with the film that send shivers every single time. There’s the famous needle in the heart, the discovery of the gun, the basement with Zed, and a few more. What Tarantino can do (and probably better than any other director of the 1990s) is force you to be frightened in a situation with characters you barely know. It doesn’t rely on music, like other directors would. In the famous stabbing needle sequence, he slowly shoots shots faster and faster, focusing closer and closer (possibly a homage to Sergio Leone), until we get the big action shot. And we never even see the needle go in! We cut immediately to the reactions of the characters. This could be considered the quintessential Tarantino directing moment.

Half of Tarantino’s film would fall apart if the actors weren’t as convincing in their parts. The director made not a single bad casting choice and the ensemble is perfect. On the top is John Travolta, who almost resurrected his career with a brilliant performance as Vincent. The entire dinner sequence (in which Vincent is on heroin) is played perfectly by Travolta as you can see both the fine moral line he is trying to play, but also the drugs skewing his sight. His counterpart is the wonderful Uma Thurman, in a gleaming breakout performance as Mia Wallace. She is sexy and innocent, but she can play her own ground. When she wants to do the dance contest, you see Thurman suddenly remove the façade that she had given her character. Marcellus is played by one of the greatest bad-ass men in Hollywood: Ving Rhames, who gets to deliver some of the best lines in the film (“Ima’ get medieval on your ass”). Bruce Willis is perfect as Butch, playing that smart strong character that you may first recognize as the same Willis from Die Hard, and then you see his other side. There are also about ten other great performances from amazing character actors including Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Eric Stoltz, Rosanna Arquette,  Tarantino himself, Maria de Medeiros, Peter Greene, Walken, and Harvey Kietel. These people for me will be first remembered for their role in this movie before their entire careers.

But I didn’t even mention the best performance in the film: Samuel L Jackson. Jackson was robbed in 1995 at the Oscars (though it was given to a very deserving Martin Landau). As Jules, Jackson commands the screen like no other. He is likeable, funny, but when it comes down to work, he is a scary, scary man. His delivery of the famous Ezekiel 25:17 turns the Bible into a weapon. When he shoots Brett’s friend in the apartment, his next line isn’t “Your next,” but instead, “I’m sorry did I break your concentration?” Samuel knows how to handle himself in every scene, and plays it just right. The moment for Jules in the movie is the end (or is it the beginning?) where Jules talks to Ringo. Just as he transforms himself from his usually calm self in the job earlier that day, we see Jules in his most quintessential self at the diner moment: collected and certain about his life, and when he speaks, you want to hear every single word he says.

The soundtrack that covers Pulp Fiction also set a new standard for music in movies. Tarantino doesn’t use a single “pop” song of the time, instead relying on classics from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. But in doing this, he finds the songs that heighten the mood like pop songs of the time couldn’t. The music moment that defines Pulp Fiction is “You Never Can Tell” by Chuck Berry, which plays during the dance contest at the restaurant. Why this works so well is it proceeds the conversation between Vincent and Mia. What happens is that Tarantino somehow with his staging of the scene, makes the song and dance an extension of their conversation. With great songs like “Misrlou”, “Jungle Boogie,” “Girl, You’ll be a Woman Soon,” “Surf Rider,” and “Son of a Preacher Man,” the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction immediately will link the song to the memorable scene.

Though many films have used not used a chronological story before (Citizen Kane and Annie Hall quickly come to mind), but the way Pulp Fiction (and Tarantino’s debut effort Reservoir Dogs) uses it, revolutionized the method. By putting the scenes in the order he presents them, there’s an underlying mystery of finding the connections. When things start to come together near the end, there’s a sense of achievement of discovering how everything is linked (especially because Tarantino never spells it out for the audience), adding another pleasure to this film. Today, it seems that non-linear storylines is a necessity and it has been used extremely well in flicks in The Usual Suspects and Memento, but it is always important to remember where it all came from. 

Pulp Fiction may have been Tarantino’s best film, but that’s not to say that the director has only made on great film. In fact, every single film in his six-film filmography has a special element to it. Tarantino loves to homage, but he also loves to take forgotten genres, work inside their boundaries, and produce something completely original. Whether it has been heist flicks (Reservoir Dogs), blaxploitation (Jackie Brown), kung fu classic (Kill Bill: Volume I), westerns (Kill Bill: Volume II), or car chase movies (Death Proof, Tarantino’s contribution to Grindhouse), Tarantino has stepped outside the usual ways of filmmaking to really push the boundaries of cinema. What genre is Pulp Fiction? It has none. It’s simple the work of a master combining elements from every single movie from 1950 to 1994.

When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 1994, Pulp Fiction exploded when nobody saw it coming. By resurrecting the careers of many and introducing us to many new ones, Pulp Fiction became an actor’s lesson. But in the end, this is a Tarantino masterpiece. His dialogue, his directing skills, and his overall fun he has with this project is evident in every single scene. Howard Hawks said that a good movie should have three good scenes and no bad scene. Pulp Fiction has quite a few more good scenes than three, but not a single bad one. There’s always an element of surprise when I sit down in the middle of the movie. There’s always a new joy I find in this film, even after seeing it possibly more than any other movie I have ever watched. During dinner, Vincent makes this comment about Mia’s Five Dollar Milkshake: “I don't know if it's worth five dollars but it's pretty f***ing good.” I don’t know how much Pulp Fiction is worth to me, but I’d say its pretty f***ing good.