Pulp Fiction at 20: Tarantino's Classic Changed Movies—But It Changed TV Even More


Photo: ©Miramax Films/Everett Collection

Was Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction "the movie that changed everything," as devotees like to say? Well, no: Joe Biden's career went on pretty much undisturbed. The AMA didn't start raving up pork rinds as swellacious health food overnight. More to the point, a whole slew of movies, both good and bad, would exist in identical form if Tarantino's Moebius-strip extravaganza had never been made.

But that's not to deny Pulp Fiction's transformative impact when it premiered in 1994. More than any pop landmark since Star Wars and Steven Spielberg's early dazzlers, it got a generation of wannabe filmmakers and budding cine-heads jazzed to the teeth by redefining art as cool fun and cool fun as art. Even old coots who'd been through the eureka bit before—flipping out over, say, QT's own favorite weird French uncle, Jean-Luc Godard, back in the '60s, or maybe David Lynch in the '80s—knew they were seeing something new.

Interestingly, so did plain old moviegoers, both sophisticated and un-. That they dug it was Tarantino's real breakthrough. Pulp Fiction would occupy a very different place in screen history if it hadn't gladdened Harvey Weinstein's soul (and thereby ensured QT's future bankability) by becoming an honest-to-gosh hit—maybe not a Star Wars-sized phenom, because life doesn't work that way, but definitely a heftier box-office champ than most Cannes Palme d'Or winners. Converting the esoteric into the popular without dilution is the ultimate hat trick in the arts, and Tarantino was able to pull it off because he was a born aesthete—just try to imagine him without his video collection, why don't you?—who was also a born smartass, in love with effrontery at a level that made the Ramones look austere.

Just like Godard's agit-pop movies, but with a lot more Baskin-Robbins-y effect, Pulp Fiction was meta as can be. Not a damn thing in it was derived from real life, turning most musicals and/or Tom and Jerry cartoons into bitter reports from the trenches by comparison. What really connected the characters sassing their way through the movie's loop-the-loop storylines—John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson's metaphysically inclined hit men, Bruce Willis's stoically enterprising bor, Uma Thurman's here-comes-trouble gangland moll, and so on—was that they all had Hollywood bloodlines to dwarf Secretariat's. The paradoxical reason they seemed so modern was that they'd been decisively ID'd as fixtures of our pop unconscious.

Launching a tradition that keeps every piece of used goods in the biz hoping for a second-act remodel to this day, Tarantino also used his cast to simultaneously trigger and rearrange our memories of our formative moviegoing years. Getting Travolta back on a dance floor to do the Twist with Thurman going on two decades after Saturday Night Fever was the clincher, and don't think QT didn't know it. In fact, one of Pulp Fiction's more elegant psych-outs is the brazen way he cuts off their sizzling dance number—still the sexiest scene he's ever directed—midway through, as if to say, "Okay, gotcha. Nothing more to see here."

Travolta's revitalized career brings us to the elephant in the room—Pulp Fiction's, you know, influence. While the Guy Ritchies of this world have fashioned whole careers in Tarantino's wake, tough guys saying goofy things while brandishing artillery to a rock and roll soundtrack are a pretty glib legacy for a movie that supposedly changed everything. In their more ponderous way, so are the Sudoku flicks of the Oughties that mimicked QT's mashups of seemingly unconnected anecdotes into relevatory canvases—the basic mistake there being to assume that this was an enlightening view of life, not a bunch of friskily audacious games with genre formulas and audience expectations. But if Pulp Fiction's reset of the bar for aspiring filmmakers has inspired oodles of lamentable tripe, oh, well: So did Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Besides, the movie's most salutory after-effects aren't found at the multiplex. When you think about it—and even leaving out graphic novels, because that's a whole other arena—where would the past decade's cable dramas be without Pulp Fiction's innovations? That's where you find Tarantino's jigsaw-puzzle storytelling put to genuinely apt and inventive use, from Breaking Bad's cryptic but tantalizing flash-forwards to The Sopranos' jones for narrative circularity. The same goes for brainy shock value—the life-saving hypo jammed into Thurman's heart when she ODs on Travolta's heroin has been the blueprint for any number of startling, sick-joke solutions to crises since—and dialogue that's unabashedly big on set-piece, often foul-mouthed riffs and arias. The Davids Chase, Milch and Simon—and let's not even mention Aaron Sorkin—all learned more from QT than they let on.

Above all, it's on cable that a series in a given genre is understood by its creators and its audiences alike to double as a self-conscious, revisionist or puckish commentary on that genre. It's also where inherently violent, prurient pulp material has become the preferred grist for art, not to say artiness. And then there's chic, which Tarantino has always both emplified and transcended. Would educated viewers be so comfy getting off on Game of Thrones—bye, Masterpiece Theater, and the grandparents still love ya—if he hadn't done so much to turn gore all classy and air-quotey?

Although he's talked about it on occasion—and no wonder, because he talks about everything on occasion—QT has yet to try his hand at a nouveau-cable epic himself. But maybe he knows it would just date him, something he's stayed determined to avoid for twenty years. Nobody wants Dad around to remind you he got there first.