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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 183 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
It is easy to view Pulp Fiction as a visually imaginative, entertaining film that catches the flavour of contemporary life in the American inner city as critics of my review have said (January SR). However, any artist needs to balance empathy with and distance from their characters. The problem with the film is that Tarantino is so fascinated with current urban lowlife that he fails to establish critical distance from it.
I did acknowledge in my review that the film contains brilliant dialogue. But its sharp, crackling lines are, in a sense, part of the problem. Ian Goodyer says that Tarantino’s ‘hit men are articulate and witty’. Exactly. The fact that ‘they kill with a sense of professional detachment’, or as Tony and Chris Chilvers say, ‘just doing their job, like any worker’, means that their violence becomes abstracted from the rest of their personalities and from its roots in society. Our reaction to the murders becomes dulled precisely because the characters are as attractive as they are.
Even Vincent’s heroin addiction is presented as something rather groovy. We see none of the pain that both leads to and results from heroin, in contrast actually to Tarantino’s vivid depiction of physical pain. I disagree, therefore, with Mark Brown’s claim that the film rejects ‘the right wing idea of inherent evil’. On the contrary, violence portrayed in this abstract way leads to the conclusion: this is human nature.
Tarantino has called his film Pulp Fiction. But again it seems to me he is too absorbed in the culture he portrays to offer a radical critique of it. True, there is an amusing scene in a restaurant where the staff are made up to look like 1950s media idols. But the film is realistic in style. The dialogue and narrative are intended to portray real life. He ends up simply incorporating the stylistic features of crime novels and horror movies.
The alternative to Pulp Fiction is not Forrest Gump, as Tony and Chris Chilvers assert. Apart from Scorsese or Coppola, a black comedy such as Man Bites Dog is a brilliant satire both on current violence and media collusion with it. Because its style is caricature rather than realism, we both laugh at the violence and are shocked by it.
The right wing press in fact liked Pulp Fiction. The Daily Express gave it glowing praise, ‘as dazzling a movie as Reservoir Dogs, only bigger and better’, declaring that it was ‘guaranteed to be a smash hit’ (21 October 1994). The reason the establishment refused it a video release is because of a naive belief in a simple, direct link between violence in the media and in real life.
Mary Whitehouse wants the media to ignore the violence at the heart of capitalism, in favour of promoting traditional conservative values. As socialists, we don’t ask film makers ‘to tone their material down’. But we certainly can hope that in dealing with social decay, they do more than make entertaining films which catch the flavour of the time, that they explore in greater depth the social forces that create violence.
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