Pulp Fiction (1994)

         Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is an instant classic. Beyond the typical Tarantino flare for excess and gore, Pulp Fiction holds its own on the American Film Institute’s top 100 list through thorough stylistic scenes of conversation and silence, often coloring a character more effectively than moments of action or plot succession.

The movie opens in a diner, while “Honey Bunny” and “Pumpkin,” two convenient store robbers, having a discussion over breakfast. Typically in a movie, a scene with a sustained action like talking the camera jumps around or has the characters move to create a more dynamic and interesting scene. During the opening of Pulp Fiction, the camera hardly moves around, yet the audience is still captivated by the conversation between the robbers. The dialogue itself is quick and realistic, shaping the two criminal love birds instantly as they casually discuss robbing gas stations versus banks versus a restaurant, and with every maniacal giggle from Honey Bunny and every cigarette drag from Pumpkin. The scene is brought to an abrupt end when the two decide to rob the restaurant at that very minute and leap into action to do so.

         After the diner scene ends and the opening credits role, the next scene shows Jules and Vince, two thugs, walking into an apartment building, into the elevator, and to an apartment where they proceed to interrogate several bad business partners of their boss, Marsellus Wallace. While they walk up they gossip about a man who was thrown out of a window for allegedly giving Marsellus’ wife a foot massage. This casual and sustained conversation again paints the two’s characters, and also sets a tone of casual banter as the two walk to kill a man. Like the diner scene, the casual conversation with an overlying evil sets a clear tone for the whole movie and stylistically creates a dynamic monotony between the scenes.

         Scenes of sustained action include when Marsellus is talking to Butch, his prize fighter, about losing his next match. The entire time the camera is fixed on Butch’s face, although Marsellus is talking you never see his face. Later, when Vince takes Marcellus’  wife Mia out to dinner, there are many scenes of their sustained conversation, or the long dance scene when neither speak but respond to each other through their moves. During their dinner, Vince and Mia talk a lot about comfortable and uncomfortable silences and how when they are comfortable, you have found someone worth keeping; they share a few silences while drinking a shake and smoking. Clearly, Tarantino knows how to set a tone with stylistic scenes, sustained silence, and simple cinematic moments, leaving Pulp Fiction as one of  the greats in movie history.

By Tapley