Pulp Fiction · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Vincent Vega walks out of a bathroom stall and into the diner, alive, ordering nothing, while you sit there knowing — because you watched it forty minutes ago — that this man is going to take a burst of fire from Butch's hand cannon and die on a kitchen floor. Nobody in the theater objects. That's the strange thing. We accept Vincent's resurrection the way we accept a song coming back on the radio, and the whole genius of Pulp Fiction lives in that easy acceptance. Tarantino took the one thing movies had always promised to keep straight — the order of before and after — and shuffled it, and the audience not only forgave him but loved him for it.

Deleuze has a precise name for what Tarantino is doing to time. He called it the chronosign: an image where time is presented directly, in itself, instead of being the obedient measure of an action moving toward its result. In the classic movie, time is a string you follow — cause, then effect, then payoff. Pulp Fiction cuts the string. Its three chapters and bookend are deliberately out of sequence, so that 'earlier' and 'later' stop being a causal chain and become positions, rooms you can enter in any order. The finest node for this is what Deleuze called peaks of present: contradictory presents held together, before and after turned into a kind of becoming rather than a line. Vincent dead in chapter two and Vincent alive in chapter three are not a continuity error. They are two peaks of the same present, and the film asks you to hold both at once.

What makes this more than a gimmick is the second thing the structure does, which is hand the meaning of a scene over to you. The diner hold-up opens the movie and closes it — the same booth, the same Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, much of the same footage. But the second time you watch it you know what just happened to Jules: the bullets that missed, the conversion, his decision to quit. So the identical images carry an entirely different charge. The menace becomes mercy. Deleuze would call this the relation-image, or mental-image — the picture that only completes itself through relations the viewer is holding in mind. The audience is the knowing third party, and the film is built to reward that knowledge. Watch it cold and it's a tense robbery. Watch it informed and it's a man choosing not to kill. Tarantino makes you the one who supplies the difference.

Around this sits the famous briefcase, glowing gold, contents never shown. It is the purest demark in nineties cinema — an object that breaks the habit of explanation and forces interpretation precisely by refusing to mean anything fixed. Every viewer fills it. That emptiness is doing work: it trains you, early, to stop demanding that the film resolve its mysteries and start enjoying the holding of them.

And then there is Jules. For most of the film he and Vincent are agents of the action-image at full tilt — they perceive a situation (Brett has the case), and they act (they kill). Sensory-motor cinema, the crime-movie engine. But when the fourth man empties a revolver at point-blank range and every round misses, Jules stops being a hit man and becomes something else. He sits in the diner and reads the event. He decides to walk the earth. Deleuze would recognize him instantly: the seer, the voyant, the figure who no longer reacts but watches and endures and tries to interpret what has happened to him. The action-image cracks open from the inside, in the middle of a Tarantino shoot-'em-up, and a man starts asking what a thing means instead of what to do about it.

The shape of the whole, meanwhile, is what Deleuze diagnosed as the crisis of the action-image: a dispersive situation of many weakly linked characters, slack causality, ellipses, trips that transform little. Tarantino inherited that crisis from European modernism and did something nobody expected — he made it festive. The leisurely talk about foot massages and Quarter Pounders, the static booth-length takes, descend straight from Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, which proved that watching people do almost nothing could be cinema. The chapter titles and the named episodes come from Godard's Bande à part — Tarantino called his company A Band Apart, and the twist contest at Jack Rabbit Slim's quotes the Madison dance in its blocking and its sustained duration, a pure piece of cinema-of-the-body where the gest, the posture held for its own sake, matters more than any plot. The non-linear braid itself descends from Kubrick's The Killing, which had already split a heist across displaced timelines. Le Samouraï lent the ritual of the professional's preparation; Mean Streets and Shaft lent the compilation soundtrack that ironically doubles the violence.

The significance is simple to state and was enormous in effect: Pulp Fiction took the chronosign — time presented out of order, as its own subject — and made it popular. What had been the property of Resnais and the art house won the Palme d'Or, made a hundred million dollars, and taught a mainstream audience to read a scrambled timeline for pleasure. After 1994, the reordered story was everywhere. Watch it again and notice the seam where Jules goes still and the movie stops acting and starts thinking. Ask what's in the briefcase. Then ask why you don't actually want to know.