James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

It is well known that Tarantino acquired his knowledge of film history from a video store rather than a cinemateque. Even so, he makes densely hypertextual movies that reproduce the "underground" quality of 1960s criticism. His politique consists of tributes to European auteurs such as Godard, Fassbinder, and Jean-Pierre Melville; Americans such as Scorsese, Schrader, and Sam Peckinpah; old-fashioned tough guys such as Hawks and Samuel Fuller; and contemporary specialists in blood melodrama such as John Woo and Abel Ferrara. Pulp Fiction alludes to these figures, but also (as the title indicates) to a kind of pantheon of junk, similar to the "over-the-top" horror movies and peplum favored by the surrealists. Among its touchstones are Italian exploitation movies like Zombie (1980), blaxploitation flicks like The Mack (1973), and Roger Corman B pictures like Shock Confessions of a Sorority Girl (1957). In fact, it ultimately becomes a comic, almost encyclopedic celebration of every sort of male-adolescent trash over the past fifty years. For example, it pays homage to cheap cartoons (Clutch Cargo), profoundly obscure combat-on-motorcycle movies (The Losers), and a series of kiddie culture heroes (Lash LaRue, Fonzie, and Charlie's Angels). At various junctures, it even contains learned conversations about the relative merits of mass-produced cheeseburgers.

Retro killers in Pulp Fiction (1994).

(Museum of Modern Art Stills Archive.)

Not surprisingly, the narrative events in Pulp Fiction are borrowed indiscriminately from other movies. In the episode called "The Gold Watch," a prizefighter named Butch (Bruce Willis) has an absurdly funny nightmare starring Christopher Walken, who parodies his famous role as a Vietnam veteran in The Deer Hunter. Butch wakes from the dream to find himself in a situation that resembles noir boxing movies such as The Killers, The Set-Up, and Body and Soul. After killing his opponent in the ring, he jumps out of his dressing room window and into the back seat of a taxicab, which is driven by a beautiful woman just like the one in The Big Sleep (through the windows of the cab, we see a black-and-white process screen). Over the next fifteen minutes, he keeps lurching from one scary movie to another, including Psycho, Deliverance, and even Reservoir Dogs. The frenzy of allusion reaches a climax when he chooses a series of possible weapons from the wall of a pawn shop: first he's Buford Pusser in Walking Tall, then he's Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw, Massacre, and finally he's Robert Mitchum in The Yakusa.

This use of mostly lowbrow materials is strongly reminiscent of the original auteurists.

And indeed the early Godard is especially important to Tarantino, who likes the feeling of "movies commenting on themselves, movies and movie history" (quoted in Woods, 74). Godard's influence can be seen everywhere in Pulp Fictionin Uma Thurman's hairdo (which recalls Anna Karina), in the scene where Thurman and Travolta dance the twist (which was inspired not only by Saturday Night Fever but also by Bande a part [1964]), in the comic intertitles, and in the very spirit of the film's allusiveness. The important point to note, however, is that even though Pulp Fiction is filled with references and crossreferences to a variety of texts (including an important quote from the Book of Ezekiel, which incidentally evokes Night of the Hunter), it is light years from a movie like Breathless in the range of material it brings together and the demands it places on an audience. For all his talent, Tarantino's "hypertext" is relatively narrow, made up largely of testosterone-driven action movies, hard-boiled novels, and pop-art comic strips like Modesty Blaise. His attitude toward mass culture is also much less ironic than that of a director like Godard. In effect, he gives us Coca-Cola without Marx. "I get a kick out of the fact that you can buy Coca-Cola all over the world," he told an audience at Britain's National Film Theatre. ''It's little things like that, like Coca-Cola and Big Macs and Madonna and Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali and Kevin Costner, that make us part of a world, whether we like it or not" (quoted in Woods, 73). Pulp Fiction therefore remains entirely within the sphere of entertainment and postmodern capitalism, never requiring us to rethink or criticize the nature of movies. The result, for all its youthful vigor and inventiveness, is an unintentionally parodic repetition of classic auteurism, in keeping with the less political and more commercial atmosphere of MTV and mainstream Hollywood.

In less direct ways, Pulp Fiction also seems to grow out of a kind of parodic repetition of European nightlife in 1945. Tarantino had written part of the film in Amsterdam, and he was well acquainted with the trendy, drug-filled culture of Los Angeles, where international artists and rebellious young movie stars mingled in clubs such as Tatou in Beverly Hills. One inevitably thinks of Tabou in postwar Paris, although the American version has a more hazy philosophical justification, and its drug of choice is different. According to a 1995 item in Playboy magazine, Tatou achieved a certain status because its fashionable clientele wore dark clothes and experimented with heroin. The owner told reporter Mark Ehrman that his patrons were obsessed with a "new film noir mentality" that involved an attempt "to experience in real life what film noir is aboutthat certain bliss which will inevitably lead to doom" (May 1995, 144). Whether Tarantino knew of such places or not, they seem appropriate to his outlaw characters in Pulp Fiction. ''Coke is dead," Eric Stoltz tells Travolta at one point in the movie. "Heroin is coming back in a big fucking way." Not long afterward, we see Travolta (a nightclub trendsetter in Saturday Night Fever and Urban Cowboy) mainlining heroin and going for a nocturnal drive in a red T-bird.

In still another sense, Pulp Fiction could be said to parodically repeat the history of Hollywood as a marketplace for crime movies. Far too dark a picture to please the industry establishment, it lost the Academy Award to Forrest Gump, just as Double Indemnity lost to Going My Way in 1944. But here again, certain obvious differences between the past and the present need to be observed. Tarantino and Avary won an Oscar for their screenplay, probably because their film was less threatening than Billy Wilder and Chandler's. Ultimately, Pulp Fiction lacks the seriousness and originality of the best of the historical films noirs; it repeats history as bloody, inconsequential farce rather than as tragedy or cutting-edge satire.

Of course Pulp Fiction remains an exciting departure from the typical special-effects blockbuster or sentimental comedy. It shows the seamier side of Hollywood's utopian mythology and demonstrates what I have been trying to suggest all along: that film noir, like any other style or genre, tends to evolve by repeating old ideas in new combinations. Even so, after seeing this picture and a good deal of other postmodernist noirs, I find myself wishing it were possible for directors to follow the advice that Orson Welles once gave to Peter Bogdanovich:

[F]ilms are full of good things which really ought to be invented all over again. Again and again.

Inventednot repeated. The good things should be found/owndin that precious spirit of the first time out, and images discoverednot referred to. . . . Sure, everything's been done, but it's much healthier not to know about it. Hell, everything had all been done when I started. 42