The UK tabloids blamed Child’s Play 3 for the 1993 murder of the infant James Bulger; the country was busy reliving its video-nasties hysteria. Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature, Reservoir Dogs, found itself at the center of the ongoing controversy. It was a violent film that showed the consequences of violent action. Anyone who thought it glorified violence clearly had a moral compass that didn’t point north. Many acclaimed the film as the best debut since Citizen Kane. Nothing in early-1990s UK pop-culture came within light years of its cathartic impact.
For many, the promise of Reservoir Dogs made Quentin Tarantino, the video store geek, cinema’s saviour. As his second feature was nearing release, fandom held its collective breath. Yet there were rumors. Second-film syndrome rumors. The advanced reports coming from industry insiders said disappointment. One-hit-wonder. Flash-in-the-pan. All that QT-hype was for nothing.
Then there were the GATT talks. The French wanted state-imposed limits on the number of American films swamping their domestic releases. In the debate, Steven Spielberg brazenly claimed such release quotas limited his artistic freedom, conveniently forgetting how Jurassic Park had set box office records. Against this backdrop, Pulp Fiction came to Cannes. The smart money was on Three Colours Red for the Palme d’Or.
The jury awarded the top prize to Pulp Fiction. Many suggested this provocative act was strategic, a palliative to the American industry over GATT and not strictly a commentary on the film’s quality. The Tarantino narrative was reborn. Pulp Fiction was the first indie film to cross $100 million at the box office—eventually grossing over $200 million—on a $8.5 million budget.
I bought a bundled Pulp Fiction soundtrack CD and screenplay that year. I saw it four times in a cinema. I joined Blockbuster just to rent the VHS. Such familiarity exposed its amateurish shortcomings. Today, I find it an impossible film to watch. Any assessment of the film depends on what you’re comparing it to. Take Reservoir Dogs—framed, shot, edited and sound-designed to perfection. Find a single flaw in its construction, I’ll wait.
It’s tense, claustrophobic and painful to watch. It’s a tragic honor-among-thieves buddy movie based on betrayal. Mr. White’s growl of anguish as Orange admits who he really is—you feel his pain.
In comparison, Pulp Fiction is a significant step down in realization. It might be “cool,” but popularity doesn’t hide shoddy filmmaking. Take the production design and the lighting in the apartment scene at the beginning. It screams “set.” it looks like a student film where everyone wanted to be a director, and nobody attended the lighting class. The film was low-budget, but any number of tricks exist in a competent filmmaker’s arsenal for overcoming that—compensate by shooting tight, spotlighting an actor against darkness, shooting a high depth of field, or throwing a blue tint on the background. Where was the DP? It’s all so unimaginatively realized.
Don’t start me on the jump-cut in the “Zed’s dead” scene or the bad dialogue edits in the diner finale.
Compare that to the tight framing and the compositions of Dogs. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was made by a different man—better results on a much lower budget. Pulp Fiction is a classic example of “just stand somewhere in an exposed-for-daylight frame, it’ll be great!” lazy filmmaking. Tardy visual rhythm.
Jackie Brown has the same problem: no visual panache and no emotional punch. His two post-Dogs movies have a journeyman realization. I think QT knew it too. There has to be a reason why he turned to Robert Richardson, the best DP in the business, for his subsequent movies.
I hold very few movies in the pantheon in higher regard than Natural Born Killers. Like many, I was suffering Oliver Stone fatigue by the mid-1990s—too much Wall Street, too much Vietnam, and way too much Talk Radio. Then I saw scenes from the NBK prison riot on a late-night review show. The palpable kinetic energy of the film was obvious even on my portable TV. Stone put us in the middle of a glorious nightmare: satire, incest sitcoms, animation, differing film stocks, color design and Leonard Cohen. Now that’s the triumphalist cinema against which everything else should be measured.
Compare the visual execution of Pulp Fiction to True Romance. That film had a much higher budget, but it also had Tony Scott’s visual flare. The films share a similar urban setting and a not dissimilar plot, yet note how much more creatively Scott’s film lights, shoots and composes. Much is made of QT’s use of music and his soundtracks—compare the in-your-face use of music in Pulp Fiction to the much subtler use of music to underscore and match the action in True Romance, in either the “Chantilly Lace” sequence, the James Gandolfini scene or the climatic shootout. Scott’s film is far superior on every technical level.
Compare Pulp Fiction to the color design, the cinematic ending and the visual rhythm of Three Colours Red. Compare the screenplays and ask which has more cinematic potential.
QT’s post-Dogs pre-Richardson movies just feel amateurish. Consider the visual style and the mastery of cinematic language shown by Kieslowski, Stone and Scott. They make Pulp Fiction look like the result of an adult cinema literacy class. Nor is the fault in QT’s writing—compare how other seasoned professionals realized his early scripts. After spending years bad-mouthing NBK, there’s a reason he had Stone’s DP shoot Kill Bill in their frenetic style.
Tarantino’s fanbase is divided between people who remember the excitement and the raw power of Reservoir Dogs and those who only signed up after Pulp Fiction—those for whom cinema history begins in 1994.
This shift to popular acclaim is easy to account for—it offered the general audience an entry-level experience into the controversy of its day. It pushed the Friends crowd just a little beyond its comfort zone and made them feel edgy. How cool, ironic and alternative they thought they were by liking this middle-of-the-road mainstream box office hit with its 1990s TV show visual aesthetic. They’ll never know the crushing disappointment that comes with each new film he releases. If the Welles comparison for Reservoir Dogs is justified, then Pulp Fiction is Tarantino’s Annie Hall—a watered-down take for the mainstream.
I say all of this as someone who wanted Pulp Fiction to be the greatest film of all time. I had a dodgy VHS of Reservoir Dogs copied from a 12-inch laser disk with a break where the disc changed sides. I watched it until VHS became obsolete. I wore a pair of red sunglasses at university that my best friend referred to as “the killers.”
Tarantino is perhaps the best example of a successful film career based on brand recognition, Spike Lee the other obvious example. Each successive movie is marketed as much on the narrative surrounding the man as the film. Pulp Fiction is a Big Kahuna burger—superficial style and no substance. What does Pulp Fiction offer that matches the emotional impact of Reservoir Dogs, True Romance or Natural Born Killers? I look at Pulp Fiction and see a movie that could’ve been hacked out by Ron Howard.
The pre-Cannes rumors were right; Pulp Fiction is an example of second-film syndrome, one that failed to deliver on the talent its predecessor showed. Its popular success is mistaken for quality.
Three Colours Red deserved the Palme d’Or. Pulp Fiction just foreshadowed the mediocrity to come.