Perspectives; Postmodernism in 'Pulp Fiction' (1994)

Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film ‘Pulp fiction’ follows the intertwined stories of several criminals in the underground of Los-Angeles. It’s often regarded as one of, if not the best film directed by Tarantino, thanks in part to its irregular narrative structure and challenging themes. Its also been widely recognised as a strong example of a growing post-modernist mindset in cinema, and of Tarantino’s post-modernist mindset when it comes to writing film. However, ‘postmodernism’, being a somewhat vague and debated term, is often difficult to definitively identify in a piece of artwork. This review will look at some of the arguments that have been made to justify Pulp Fiction’s place in the postmodernist movement.

Postmodernism does not have a definitive definition, but when described it is often defined in its relation to ‘Modernism’, a philosophical and artistic movement that ran throughout the 20^th century, which intended to boil down complex and wildly varying cultural interpretations of art, philosophy, and design, into their pure forms, by stripping away the distorting lenses of different cultures. Postmodernism is often said to be a rejection of the Modernist ideal that the value art can be measured by its purity, and argues that since the Modernist ideal of purity is simply yet another cultural lens, art can only be defined by its relationship to other art.

“…modernist film explores the nature of cinematic representation and the medium of film itself. (2) Along these lines modernism also emphasizes the concept of the avant-garde and the idea of artistic progress, for example, toward the goal of “pure” cinema that perfectly expresses the nature of cinema itself” (McAteer, 2015:241)

John McAteer describes here the mindset of the Modernist director. An emphasis on forward progress and the seeking of ‘pure cinema’; the belief that the artistic value of a film can be measured based upon the purity in which a director uses the medium to express meaning. In other words, the fewer cultural filters between emotions in the directors mind and what appears on screen, the 'purer' the expression of meaning.

Where Modernism in film is about measuring the quality of a film against nothing other than the medium itself, Tarantino is said to reject this philosophy in his abundance of references to other films.

“Pulp Fiction is a triumph of self-conscious allusion in which innumerable elements are taken from Tarantino’s vast repository of film, television and music knowledge: think of the 1950s diner, the glowing briefcase lifted from Kiss Me Deadly, the Modesty Blaise novel read by John Travolta’s character, and the passage from Ezekiel recited by Samuel L Jackson’s character, which Tarantino swiped, not from the Bible, but from the opening of a Japanese martial arts movie, Karate Kiba. Tarantino’s detractors contend that his films have nothing to do with real life: every moment in them has been filtered through someone else’s imagination – which is why he was so beloved in that most backward-looking of decades, the 1990s.” (Barber, 2014)

In an article for the Independent, Nicholas Barber notes how willing Tarantino is to welcome pieces of other artists imaginations into his own films, and specifically Pulp Fiction. For a modernist, the presence of so many jumbled elements of different tropes, archetypes and clichés from other artist’s minds might be said to detract from the pure and clear derivation of meaning from the director to the film. However, Tarantino seems to prefer embracing the in-escapable influence of 20^th Century Hollywood on his art, and presents it front and center through direct references to other films.

“All of Tarantino’s films are about the movies. They all take place in a world Tarantino supposedly calls the “movie-movie world.” 1 They don’t take place in the real world or the imaginary world of Hollywood films; they take place in a cartoon world in which Hollywood clichés are exaggerated so far they take on a reality of their own. Not only do Tarantino’s films take place in such a world, they are about that world. They are self-reflective celebrations of exaggerated movie clichés. In this, they are quintessentially postmodern.” (McAteer, 2015:240)

Here, McAteer describes how Tarantino goes even further, and embraces the distorting lens of the Hollywood film industry and celebrates a self-reflection of his films own absurdity. Self-reflection is a central philosophy of the post-modernist movement; the realisation and understanding of one's own cultural lens through which the reality of any story is inevitably distorted.

It seems that the postmodernist themes of Pulp-fiction are expressed partly through a self-awareness of it’s own influences, and a celebration of the arguably ‘corny’ tropes and clichés of 20^th Century Hollywood as a legitimate ‘style’ and a lens as good as any other through which to present the story of a group of Los-Angeles misfits.

References;

McAteer, J. (2015) Tarantino and Theology, GreyMatter Books

Barber, N. (2014) ‘Pulp Fiction: 20 years on’ In: Independent [online] At: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/pulp-fiction-20-years-on-9383705.html