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.
Once you have seen it
Track where each chapter actually sits in time. (structure)
The three titled chapters and the diner bookend play out of order. Vincent dies in one chapter and walks through a later one alive. Sally Menke holds it together by tone, never by captions.
Payoff: Time here is a set of rooms you can enter in any order, not a line running to a result. In the reading: chronosign. The reading calls this a chronosign: time shown directly, as its own subject, instead of a measure of the action.
Watch the same diner footage come back at the end. (cutting)
The film opens and closes in one booth with Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, much of it the same material. Nothing in the images has changed. What you know about Jules's morning has.
Payoff: The menace reads as mercy the second time. You supply that difference, not the cutting. In the reading: relation-image (mental-image). The reading calls this a relation-image: the picture completes itself only through what the viewer is holding in mind.
Watch Jackson go still after the shots miss. (performance)
Jules drops his volume and his swagger. He stops working the room and starts reading what just happened to him. Jackson keeps his hands flat on the table through the diner scene.
Payoff: A man who solved problems by acting starts trying to interpret one, and the crime movie stops moving forward.
Carry this in: Listen to the talk and let the order stay scrambled. The film hands the meaning of a scene over to you.