Pulp Fiction - Influence and Reputation

Influence and Reputation

Pulp Fiction quickly came to be regarded as one of the most significant films of its era. In 1995, in a special edition of Siskel & Ebert devoted to Tarantino, Gene Siskel argued that Pulp Fiction posed a major challenge to the "ossification of American movies with their brutal formulas". In Siskel's view,

the violent intensity of Pulp Fiction calls to mind other violent watershed films that were considered classics in their time and still are. Hitchcock's Psycho, Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange . Each film shook up a tired, bloated movie industry and used a world of lively lowlifes to reflect how dull other movies had become. And that, I predict, will be the ultimate honor for Pulp Fiction. Like all great films, it criticizes other movies.

Ken Dancyger writes that its "imitative and innovative style"—like that of its predecessor, Reservoir Dogs—represents

a new phenomenon, the movie whose style is created from the context of movie life rather than real life. The consequence is twofold—the presumption of deep knowledge on the part of the audience of those forms such as the gangster films or Westerns, horror films or adventure films. And that the parody or alteration of that film creates a new form, a different experience for the audience.

In a widely covered speech on May 31, 1995, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole attacked the American entertainment industry for peddling "nightmares of depravity". Pulp Fiction was soon associated with his charges concerning gratuitous violence. Dole had not, in fact, mentioned the film; he cited two less celebrated movies based on Tarantino screenplays, Natural Born Killers and True Romance. In September 1996, Dole did accuse Pulp Fiction—which he had not seen—of promoting "the romance of heroin".

Paula Rabinowitz expresses the general film industry opinion that Pulp Fiction "simultaneously resurrected John Travolta and film noir". In Peter Biskind's description, it created a "guys-with-guns frenzy". The stylistic influence of Pulp Fiction soon became apparent. Less than a year after the picture's release, British critic Jon Ronson attended the National Film School's end-of-semester screenings and assessed the impact: "Out of the five student movies I watched, four incorporated violent shoot-outs over a soundtrack of iconoclastic 70s pop hits, two climaxed with all the main characters shooting each other at once, and one had two hitmen discussing the idiosyncrasies of The Brady Bunch before offing their victim. Not since Citizen Kane has one man appeared from relative obscurity to redefine the art of moviemaking." Among the first Hollywood films cited as its imitators were Destiny Turns on the Radio (1995), in which Tarantino acted, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (1995), and 2 Days in the Valley (1996). It "triggered a myriad of clones", writes Fiona Villella. Internationally, according to David Desser, it "not only influenced a British brand of noir, but extended the noir vision virtually around the world." Pulp Fiction's effect on film form was still reverberating in 2007, when David Denby of The New Yorker credited it with initiating the ongoing cycle of disordered cinematic narratives.

Its impact on Hollywood was deeper still. According to Variety, the trajectory of Pulp Fiction from Cannes launch to commercial smash "forever altered the game" of so-called independent cinema. It "cemented Miramax's place as the reigning indie superpower", writes Biskind. "Pulp became the Star Wars of independents, exploding expectations for what an indie film could do at the box office." The film's large financial return on its small budget

transform the industry's attitude toward the lowly indies...spawning a flock of me-too classics divisions.... mart studio executives suddenly woke up to the fact that grosses and market share, which got all the press, were not the same as profits.... Once the studios realized that they could exploit the economies of (small) scale, they more or less gave up buying or remaking the films themselves, and either bought the distributors, as Disney had Miramax, or started their own...copy Miramax's marketing and distribution strategies.

In 2001, Variety, noting the increasing number of actors switching back and forth between expensive studio films and low-budget independent or indie-style projects, suggested that the "watershed moment for movie stars" came with the decision by Willis—one of Hollywood's highest-paid performers—to appear in Pulp Fiction.

And its impact was even broader than that. It has been described as a "major cultural event", an "international phenomenon" that influenced television, music, literature, and advertising. Not long after its release, it was identified as a significant focus of attention within the growing community of Internet users. Adding Pulp Fiction to his roster of "Great Movies" in 2001, Roger Ebert called it "the most influential film of the decade". Four years later, Time's Corliss wrote much the same: "(unquestionably) the most influential American movie of the 90s".

Several scenes and images from the film achieved iconic status; in 2008, Entertainment Weekly declared, "You'd be hard-pressed, by now, to name a moment from Quentin Tarantino's film that isn't iconic." Jules and Vincent's "Royale with Cheese" dialogue became famous. It was referenced more than a decade and a half later in the Travolta vehicle From Paris with Love. The adrenalin shot to Mia Wallace's heart is on Premiere's list of "100 Greatest Movie Moments". The scene of Travolta and Thurman's characters dancing has been frequently homaged, most unambiguously in the 2005 film Be Cool, starring the same two actors. The image of Travolta and Jackson's characters standing side by side in suit and tie, pointing their guns, has also become widely familiar. In 2007, BBC News reported that "London transport workers have painted over an iconic mural by 'guerrilla artist' Banksy.... The image depicted a scene from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, with Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta clutching bananas instead of guns." Certain lines were adopted popularly as catchphrases, in particular Marsellus's threat, "I'm 'a get medieval on your ass." Jules's "Ezekiel" recitation was voted the fourth greatest movie speech of all time in a 2004 poll.

Pulp Fiction now appears in several critical assessments of all-time great films. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly named it the best film of the past quarter-century. That same year, the American Film Institute's "Ten Top Ten" poll ranked it number 7 all-time in the gangster film genre. In 2007, it was voted 94th overall on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list. In 2005, it was named one of Time's "All-Time 100 Movies". As of January 2010, it is number 10 on Metacritic's list of all-time highest scores. The film ranks very highly in popular surveys. A 2008 Empire poll combining the opinions of readers, movie industry professionals, and critics named Pulp Fiction the ninth-best film of all time. In a 2006 readers' poll by the British magazine Total Film, it ranked as the number three film in history. It was voted as the fourth-greatest film of all time in a nationwide poll for Britain's Channel 4 in 2001.