Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Pulp Fiction
1994 · Quentin Tarantino · Pulp Fiction on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how long a scene stays in one room. (staging)
Tarantino lets a diner booth, a car interior or a hallway hold an entire scene. Sekula's camera sits still or drifts slightly. The talk runs well past the point where another crime film would cut away.
Payoff: The length is the method. You are asked to watch people talk, not to be hurried toward the next event.
Look at how often the camera looks up at people. (camera)
Tarantino and Sekula shoot from low angles constantly, and twice from inside an open car trunk, staring up at the men about to close it. Jackson gains size from the floor up.
Payoff: The angle grants these men scale before they open their mouths, so their talk about burgers carries weight.
Listen for old records doing the work of a score. (sound)
Dick Dale's surf guitar hits over the title card. Soul and pop from the fifties and sixties keep arriving. Nobody composed music for this film, and the songs sit under unusually clear dialogue.
Payoff: The music plants a 1990s film in a borrowed American past and keeps the speech in front of everything.
Look at the briefcase whenever somebody opens the lid. (setting)
Gold light falls on the face of whoever looks inside. You never see the contents. Tarantino keeps bringing the case back and keeps declining to show you what is in it.
Payoff: The film trains you early to enjoy holding a question instead of demanding that it be settled. In the reading: demark. The reading calls the case a demark: an object that blocks explanation and makes you interpret it instead.
Notice how flatly the actors deliver their biggest lines. (performance)
Travolta keeps Vincent slow and drifting. Jackson plays the Ezekiel speech as theater and everything else as ordinary shop talk. Thurman gives Mia small habits, like drawing a rectangle in the air.
Payoff: The cast speaks highly built dialogue as if it were chat, which is what makes the sudden violence land.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Listen to the talk and let the order stay scrambled. The film hands the meaning of a scene over to you.