If there’s a sign that the Stacker list is based more on casual moviegoer input than the AFI list, maybe it comes from the fact that when I did the AFI Countdown in 2018, again starting from the bottom and working my way to #1, Quentin Tarantino’s lone entry was in the 90s for the AFI and in the top ten for Stacker. It’s the same film too: Pulp Fiction, still the only film I saw at a midnight screening when it opened. I really loved this film then, and I still love it today, but in light of what I just said on the Citizen Kane entry about film bros and the like, I think I know where I want to take this entry, particularly since my first time writing this one up was one of my less-structured entries as I was largely gushing over the film.
I mean, if I read Tarantino’s work correctly, he strikes me as something of a film bro himself. No wonder I dig his work as much as I do.
Tarantino is a writer/director whose work has, arguably, both matured and not over the course of his career. I know he’s said he plans to quit after he’s made ten films, that he has so far made nine, and he was sorely tempted to stop after the great Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. His reasoning isn’t entirely unsound: he believes that after a certain point in time, an aged director’s best work is far behind them, and he’d rather not end his career on a stinker. He’s not entirely wrong, either. Off the top of my head, think of how much better Hitchcock would have looked if he’d stopped with Frenzy instead of the forgettable Family Plot. If Clint Eastwood were to drop dead tomorrow, his last film would be Cry Macho, a film I gave a very generous grade to in part because I grade Eastwood on a very generous curve. I had to look up Woody Allen’s most recent, something called Coup de chance that I didn’t know existed, but that may be because it’s in French, and what I saw of the critical reception isn’t all that encouraging, but my general take on Allen is he only makes one good film out of every three or four these days anyway. Francis Ford Coppola has something called Megalopolis that might see the light of day at some point, but his previous film was something called Twixt that came out in 2011.
But then there are others that haven’t quite seen that sort of slump. Steven Spielberg’s latest, The Fabelmans, got a well-deserved Best Picture nomination while Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon probably will. Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, may have been a bit divisive for audiences, but it would have been more surprising if a Kubrick film wasn’t. About all I will say for certain is you can call Eyes Wide Shut many things, but I would have a hard time thinking it was bad or the worst Kubrick ever made. I know both Spielberg and Scorsese plan to keep working, but these three directors do seem to suggest that getting old is not a barrier to producing good work. Regardless, I can respect Tarantino for sticking to his principals if, indeed, his next film is his last.
Besides, terrible final films are hardly limited to directors. I think the world of cinema lovers would have preferred Peter Sellers’s last film had been the phenomenal Being There and not that Fu Manchu thing he made, and for all that Raul Julia seemed to be enjoying himself on the set of Street Fighter, it’s still Street Fighter.
But let’s set all that aside and look at Pulp Fiction itself. Tarantino has a very distinctive directorial style, one that I find always crackles with a bit of energy as his characters drop swear words, racial epithets, and pop culture references every other word. His work often features some scenes of great violence, but that’s not all he uses. I’d actually argue his more recent work has somehow become both more and less mature as he gains experience. I can’t see Tarantino coming up with a character like Inglourious Basterds‘s Hans Landa around the time he made Pulp Fiction nor see him meditate on old style Hollywood like he did in Once Upon a Time, but then he pumps Hitler full of all kinds of lead for the former and hits a Manson family member with a flamethrower in the latter.
The point is that Tarantino is something of an acquired taste. People either really enjoy his work or they don’t, and it’s the violence and harsh language that spews from his character’s mouths in something occasionally like obscene poetry that puts people off. But there is something going on here, and as I noted the last time, Pulp Fiction is almost a hard film to pin down in terms of when its set. There are enough clues to suggest it’s set in the 90s, but the soundtrack has nothing that was then new, the majority of pop culture references are from decades earlier, and the fashion of the characters isn’t for a minute what I would consider cool. John Travolta’s Vincent Vega looks like he needs a shower for the entire film, and Sam Jackson’s Jules Winnfield’s hair is just, well, something. But the loose time period is hardly the only real mystery going on. What’s in that briefcase? Why does Ving Rhames’s Marsellus Wallace have a band-aid on the back of his neck? And that’s not counting in-film mysteries like how Jules and Vincent managed not to get blown away by that guy that was hiding in the other room or why Marsellus tossed Tony Rocky Horror out a fourth-story window.
But the mysteries aren’t really the point. The point is mostly to allow the audience to hang out with some rather colorful people for two and a half hours. These aren’t the kinds of people that you’d probably want to spend time with in real life, but in a film? Sure! Despite Tarantino’s reputation, this isn’t an overly violent film, and most of the violence arguably happens off-screen. Sure, we see Bruce Willis’s Butch slice a guy with a samurai sword, but we don’t see the sword touch flesh. We see guns go off but rarely see people actually get shot so much as we see the results of someone getting shot. Even in the famous case of Phil LaMarr’s Marvin, we see his head explode through the back of a car window, but we don’t see the bullet hitting him. Essentially, Tarantino is shooting (no pun intended) for a feel or tone more than anything else, and while I could say that previous entry’s director Orson Welles was a great innovator for his first film, Tarantino is more of a great synthesizer. If his work looks like it’s hard to pin down a time period for, it’s because he’s basically putting together all the films he loves as a film fan, but his tastes are a lot more eclectic. I mean, I just got a book by Tarantino titled Cinema Speculation that is about, among other things, the writer/director’s fondness for 70s cinema.
By the by, I know Tarantino has since Kill Bill pivoted more to period pieces, but his sort of outside-of-time settings that make up his earliest films, complete as they are with soundtracks that always sound at least vaguely familiar, it occurs to me that the only director whose work comes close to being “that way” despite the slew of imitators that came out of Pulp Fiction‘s success might be someone whose work is in many ways the exact opposite of Tarantino’s, and that’s Wes Anderson.
I think, in the end, if you want to understand what was cool about the 90s, there are two films to look into. Pulp Fiction is the grimy, somewhat grungy sort of thing where everyone was at least trying to be edgy while looking back at the past and seeing what we wanted to keep while The Matrix was that slick, smooth thing we all wanted the future to be minus the paranoia coming from computers controlling everything. I wouldn’t necessarily want to really encounter Neo any more than I would Vincent and Jules, but on some level, I think those two films defined an era that may be a bit overlooked these days as it wasn’t the coked up 80s or the post 9/11 21st century. We just had our own thing going on back then. Pulp Fiction fascinated me back then and still does today for very different reasons. And even as a somewhat naive college student, I knew Uma Thurman really shouldn’t have mistaken Vincent’s drug-of-choice for her own. These really aren’t the sort of people you want to associate yourself with.
Then again, given the option, I think I wouldn’t mind hanging out with Harvey Keitel’s Winston Wolf. He seemed like a guy with some interesting stories to tell.
NEXT: The one big weakness to many a Tarantino film is when the director casts himself in a role. That’s not a problem at all for the next entry as Charlie Chaplin was a welcome presence in front of and behind the camera, something I’ll be seeing once again when I revisit 1931’s City Lights.
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