Before Quentin made Reservoir Dogs, he had already written two scripts, each of which he intended to direct as his first feature. The first was True Romance. The second was a much more ambitious variation on the two-young-lovers-on-the-run theme, Natural Born Killers, the story of two young lovers who drive around killing people and subsequently become celebrities.
Natural Born Killers was ahead of its time. Quentin's paradox when he first wrote it was that you need to have seen a Quentin Tarantino movie for it to make any kind of aesthetic sense, and he'd yet to make one. In terms of content, its examination and critique of the way America makes celebrities out of outlaws similarly needed things to happen that hadn't yet happened to make any kind of sense (O.J. Simpson, Paris Hilton, reality TV, and whatever other sleazy fish in the barrel wish to volunteer for target practice). Quentin's script was a thought-provoking, cynical meditation on the idea of celebrity written by someone who would become one but wasn't yet. As a script it wasn't quite filmable but would be without all that much work. But, judging from certain elements like notes on camera moves and effects and switching between a variety of different kinds of film stock, it was clear that Quentin considered it to be, if not complete, then very close to. However, because he couldn't get it made with himself attached as director, he sold the script to a pair of producers (one of whom Quentin would later feud—and slap in the face—publicly) who developed it on their own.
Unlike True Romance, where in spite of a couple cosmetic structural changes and one new ending the finished result was recognizably a “Quentin” movie (by which we mean, of course, that Roger Avary wrote considerable chunks of it), the version of Natural Born Killers that eventually hit the screen ended up being a cultural conservative's cold sweat nightmare of what a Quentin movie was like. Even the flashiest penis lariat moments in something like, say, Kill Bill still had visual clarity and legibility, and while they may have only been an homage to some thirty-five year old Asian movie that no one except Quentin and the Asian movie's editor ever saw (the director, of course, having moved on to his next), they were still specific references to some specific thing, and you could see what was happening. The Quentin-less Natural Born Killers had so such specificity or artistry (the pasticheur and collagist are artists, whether you like it or not). The reason why lays firmly at the feet of Oliver Stone.
Oliver Stone has made or had a hand in some very fine movies. He wrote Midnight Express (for which he won his first Oscar) and Brian De Palma's remake of Scarface, which is a thoroughly ridiculous entity (and, not coincidentally, one of my favorite movies of all time). As far as his efforts as a director go, the original Wall Street is quotable, JFK was a diverting act of trolling, and The Doors has its moments even if it thoroughly ignored nearly all the reasons why Jim Morrison was actually interesting. However, Platoon suffers from terminal “look at how cool and nihilistic I am” syndrome, Born on the Fourth of July lacks any kind of subtlety whatsoever and is about four days long (though Tom Cruise works his fucking ass off in it), and nothing else he ever did was really worth a shit. Well, except Any Given Sunday, which is pretty tight in spite of Al Pacino being miscast (if Al was coaching a sports team, he'd be one of those tightly wound megalomaniac Rick Pitino-type college basketball coaches) and Cameron Diaz turning in one of the most unintentionally funny performances of all time.
Which brings us to Natural Born Killers. Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, to be blunt, is two hours of Oliver Stone sucking his own dick. Any pretense of it being an examination of the media and its complicity in making celebrities out of criminals is crushed beneath a mountain of self-indulgent, decadent overkill. The two leads are miscast, though Juliette Lewis slightly less so than Woody Harrelson, who is neither scary nor sympathetic enough to succeed in either being a menacing psychopath or a hapless victim of a corrupt media culture. There are a lot of name actors in the cast, but they mostly either jump around and scream, like Tommy Lee Jones, or wander around looking like they spent all night getting fucked up with the director, like Robert Downey Jr. There is one exception, and it's an absolute doozy. The best performance and only thing of any redeemable value in the movie is Rodney Dangerfield.
In a scene (not in Quentin's original script, natch) illustrating the domestic horrors Juliette Lewis sought to escape by running away with Woody Harrelson (it hurts just to type that; why the fuck would anyone run away with Woody Harrelson . . .?) in the form and style of a TV sitcom, Rodney plays her father. Rodney unleashes the full, terrifying force of the dark side he hid with his comic persona for all those years, the pathos and torture of his lifelong battle with clinical depression, and delivers one of the most stunning performances I've ever seen. Not necessarily best, or most accomplished. Literally stunning. He openly talks about molesting his daughter, and leers at her in a way that can only be described as demonic. It is fitting, though, that the only good thing in the movie is still so ugly.
While Oliver Stone was off shrooming in the desert like a fucking jagoff and trying to break the Guinness World Record for most unnecessary cuts in a movie, Quentin was off being a mature professional (Ed. Note: if you make Quentin Tarantino look like a paragon of restraint and work ethic you have seriously, irrevocably fucked the dog). He waded through a bunch of futile attempts by Tri-Star to fuck him over and formed what would be a lasting and fruitful partnership with Miramax chairman Harvey Weinstein, who picked up Quentin's new project, Pulp Fiction, in turnaround. In one of the most impressive achievements of Quentin's career, he got into a dick-measuring contest with Harvey over the length of the picture, the turgidity and circumference of the cast, and whether it would be released uncut. And won.
Quentin had made quite the impression in Europe with Reservoir Dogs, with the entire United Kingdom walking around going “'S a fuckin good film, innit?” and a sizable group of French people blowing smoke rings at each other and saying “Je ne peux pas me rappeler un Américain américain de film aussi que celui-ci, ni un directeur américain tellement singulièrement de sa terre natale” (Ed. Note: only “a sizable group” felt this way because there's no such thing as uniformity in France). So, when Quentin had a new picture on the way, Gilles Jacob was like, “Donnez-le moi, baby,” and Pulp Fiction went to Cannes, winning the Palme D'Or. This kicked off an avalanche of critical acclaim almost as over the top as the events of the movie.
Now, Pulp Fiction was an enormously important movie in my life and in my development as a movie lover. It's a really fucking good movie, and it manages to seem fresh and new in spite of the fact that just about everything in it is taken from other movies and TV. This never bothered me as much as it did some other people, precisely because the act of assembling and arranging these borrowed elements transformed them into something wholly other. Quentin deserves a hell of a lot of credit for this picture, even if he probably should have given Roger Avary co-screenwriting credit (Quentin wanted the title card and promotional material to say “written and directed by Quentin Tarantino” for the sake of his ego, when Avary wrote the entire Bruce Willis/Maria de Medeiros/Ving Rhames/Deliverance segment, as well as a couple other memorable scenes). Pulp Fiction was by far the best American movie of 1994 (nothing else that year was within ten miles), and top 5 for the decade, no argument whatsoever. But a lot of critics weren't content to let it be awesome. It needed to be Very Important as well.
The most concise example of the critical hysteria: Quentin found himself being compared to Jean-Luc Godard. This is, to say the least, a stretch. The color pallette Quentin's DP Andrzej Sekula used is kinda sorta like a couple shots in Godard's Made in U.S.A./La Chinoise mid-60s period. Almost. Quentin did claim that the Twist scene in Pulp Fiction was inspired by the Madison scene in Bande A Part. Okay, that's two similarities. It literally took me about fifteen minutes to think of the dance connection (Ed. Note: Wikipedia is for pussies). Point being, the critics kind of overdid it.
I think the reason why is that Serious Cineaste types don't really let their hair down and loosen up all that much. Quentin's intrusion upon their consciousness was the kind of thing they had no way of knowing what to deal with. These poor intellectuals saw Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and got blindsided by these incredibly aggressive, stylish “go fuck yourself” movies and stumbled, dazed, into their libraries in their velvet smoking jackets, mumbling “Oh dear, I must find my thesaurus,” and looked up synonyms for “piquant” and found words like “awesome,” “dope,” and “rad” that only served to deepen the confusion. In this addled and slightly terrified haze, they began to ascribe all kinds of intellectual significance to Quentin's pictures that simply weren't there.
Quentin Tarantino is not an intellectual. This isn't a value judgment; “intellectual” isn't a mark of superiority, it's a state of being and a way of approaching the world. Quentin is not the type to sit around stroking his chin and musing upon the great mysteries of our time (though fuck knows he's got the chin for it if he decided to try). He is an enthusiast. He watches pictures by people like Jean-Luc Godard and goes, “Wow, that's awesome,” and he's right. They are. Watching something like Weekend and digging on that massive traffic jam tracking shot for its sheer value as entertainment is equally as valid as looking at it as a blistering visual critique of the Western capitalist lifestyle. It's all a matter of perspective.
From my perspective, Pulp Fiction came out at the absolute perfect time. I was just about to turn 16, with all the usual teenage male appreciation for violence and rude language that entails. I was also several years into a lifelong love for pulp literature, noir and neo-noir movies, and had juuuuust gotten to the point watching movies where I started getting bored of seeing the same old shit over and over again. The thing about innovation—of any sort—is that if it's too new, it's very scary to people, and Quentin had already warmed up the movie-going public with Reservoir Dogs and to a lesser extent his script for True Romance (Natural Born Killers doesn't count; fuck you, Oliver Stone). Pulp Fiction's newness, while it changed the face of American cinema and made an impact still felt today in nearly every genre of cinema we have, needed to be not so new in order to have that impact. Through the fact that it wasn't Quentin's debut and by Quentin's nature as a pasticheur and collagist, Pulp Fiction managed to be the game-changer it became.
While the things we remember most about Pulp Fiction are its long dialogue scenes full of hip talk and pop culture references, its periodic scenes of intense violence, and boldly weird non-linear structure, the thing that made it great instead of just new or cool is the characters. Every principal character in it is a multidimensional person, equal parts larger than life and ordinary fuckup.
John Travolta's character, Vincent Vega, is the most perfect for his skills of any he's ever played: a not very bright, overly emotional, but deeply loyal and dependable guy, who is that great rarity (but not, despite what civilians might think, unheard of): the functioning heroin addict. This last is a great metaphor for Travolta's addiction to making shitty movies; he started feeding the bad movie monkey on his back the second his Pulp Fiction success gave him the opportunity. (Ed. Note: the irony that he "cleaned up" in this metaphor by playing a junkie is delicious). But that's neither here nor there, his performance as Vincent Vega is one of the great pleasant surprises in movies.
Samuel L. Jackson, in an equally revelatory performance, is a fiercely charismatic, glib killer whose spiritual transformation from the avatar of “the tyranny of evil men” into someone who's “trying, real hard, to be a shepherd” only seems abrupt when you ignore the fact that, despite the fact that he follows orders and kills who Marcellus Wallace wants killed, he still questions whether the big man might have “overreacted” by tossing a once-loyal associate “into a glass motherfuckin house, fuckin up the way the nigga talks” on the basis of a rumor.
Ving Rhames, as Marcellus, is the very model of absolute power. What he says happens. Who he says dies does so promptly. And yet, he suffers extreme violation at the hands of the lunatics in the pawn shop, and only maintains his power by virtue of the fact that the one living witness to his being shown powerless will never see or speak of him again.
As that witness, Bruce Willis gives—as does almost everyone else in the cast—the best performance of his career as a boxer who is more cunning than he is intelligent, making the near-fatal mistake of thinking he can rip off The Man and live, and only through the talismanic power of a watch that saw several male ancestors through wars does he manage to escape with his life. And even, after all that he does to both recover the watch and escape with his life, he still is forced to recognize his girlfriend's disappointment at not being able to get her ideal breakfast as more important than his own troubles.
Uma Thurman, as Marcellus Wallace's wife, has less complexity to her, but no less power to her situation. Most gangster movies regard the trophy wife as exactly a trophy and no more. Her ability to fill out a swimsuit, evening gown, or lounging attire is considered to be the beginning and end of her role in the gangster's life. (Not even her skills in the bedroom are important; gangsters fuck their mistresses).Quentin asks the rare rhetorical question: “How fucking boring is it to be that person?” Mrs. Wallace is very bored indeed, turning to blow and clinging to any diversion at all like a life raft. In a deleted scene, when John Travolta shows up to take her out for a night of chaste, safe, entertainment, Uma Thurman interviews him and films it with a video camera; she's so unused to human contact that she has to ease into it with that artifice. Ultimately, the scene was cut for length—it is a little long—and because her boredom and isolation didn't really need any more emphasis, but the inner life of the boss' wife is so rarely explored that it's kind of sad: all that money, and she's still that starved for human contact.
Even though the characters are the most important thing about the movie, the most memorable thing about it is Quentin's dialogue. And, as impolitic as it is, there have been fewer funnier scenes than this one, after John Travolta accidentally shoots Marvin in the face—“I accidentally shot Marvin in the face” is pretty damn funny its own self—and Samuel L. has to call his one friend in the Valley at about seven or eight in the morning and ask him if they can hide out at his place until Marcellus can send reinforcements:
Quentin (as Jimmie, the friend): Let me just ask you one thing. When you came pulling in here, did you notice a sign out in front of my house that said “Dead Nigger Storage?”I know, I know, I know. But come on, picturing a huge blinking neon sign that says “Dead Nigger Storage” is funny. My other favorite line in the picture is, not at all coincidentally, another mildly transgressive one: when Harvey Keitel's fixer character capably guides Travolta and Samuel L. through the process of cleaning the car and they're all happy, he reminds them they're not done yet with the legendary, “Well, let's not start suckin' each other's dicks just yet.” Again, for the visual image.
Samuel L.: Jimmie, you know I ain't seen no—
Quentin: Did you notice a sign out in front of my house that said “Dead Nigger Storage?”
Samuel L. (sighs): No, I didn't.
Quentin: You know why you didn't see that sign?
Samuel L. (sighs again): Why?
Quentin: Cuz it ain't there, cuz storing dead niggers ain't my fucking business, that's why!
Usually, there's nothing quite like the first time one sees a memorable movie. With Pulp Fiction though, I feel the same exhilaration in only moderately diminished force every time I watch it. I'm a compulsive re-watcher of favorite movies (and definitely have a handful of what Quentin, himself a big re-watcher, calls “hang out movies,” that you put on to hang out with the characters in their world), but I only re-watch Pulp Fiction once every couple years. For one, I don't need to: it's burned into my memory (even the parts I misremember, I consistently misremember). For another, I don't really want to. It's a powerful enough experience every time that overdoing it is a mistake. I remember, distinctly, one time in my freshman year of college that someone insisted on watching it because I was the only person in the dorm who owned it, and I'd just watched it with someone else the other day, and it felt distinctly like having an extra portion of a great meal when already full. By the end, it just didn't taste as good, and it was a while before I could “eat” again.
The way Pulp Fiction was released was as novel, for an “independent” movie (Miramax was, by that point, owned by Disney, and Pulp Fiction was the first movie they produced rather than acquiring after completion): sensing, with the delirious critical acclaim on top of drugs and violence, commercial potential, Harvey Weinstein gave it an immediate wide release rather than doing the normal independent movie thing of putting it in a couple theaters and generating word of mouth. Word of mouth was redundant. Everyone was talking about it. Some industry people were quietly snickering at the idea of Harvey releasing Pulp Fiction the same weekend as a Sly movie (The Specialist, not one of Sly's best), but they weren't laughing when Pulp Fiction was #1 at the box office that weekend. The rest , of course, is history: the first “independent” movie to gross over $100 million, award nominations, and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Before Quentin, the last time any director was even remotely as famous as he now found himself was Francis Coppola after the second Godfather movie. And Quentin was even bigger in late 94 and early 95 than Coppola ever was. The media hung on Quentin's every word. And boy did he have plenty.
In Part Three, we see just what the fuck happened when Quentin got so big it was illegal not to call him a genius. Next chapter ain't pretty, y'all.
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