Yulianto 1

Unflinchingly Cool: Commodification and Subversion in Pulp Fiction1

By Wawan Eko Yulianto

There is something suspicious with Pulp Fictions coolness. This coolness, which even actors like James Wood considers empty (Gormley 25), has managed to win the attention of the general public almost too easily. Whereas it is clear to the cinematically informed reader that Pulp Fiction has a lot of elements borrowed from other movies, the movie undoubtedly espouses a significant amount of originality that singles it out from other movies in his age, even from independent movies. Its positive reception among general audience and critics alikeand academia, later onindicates some sort of special feature that most of its contemporaries failed to offer. Among the special things in this movie is the fresh non-linear plot and unexpected turns of events. Early in her review of the movie in New York Times, Janet Maslin credits the movies cleverly disorienting journey to the directors ripe imagination (web). Alan A. Stone, in Boston Review, deems Pulp Fiction a rare accomplishment [that] opens a new aesthetic horizon in film (web). I tend to believe that it is nearly impossible to ascribe the success of Pulp Fiction solely to its coolness, because the coolness itself tends to be seen as empty. There seems to be something beyond the movie that made the audience accepted it. A cinematically informed reader might be able to identify what elements in the movie are borrowed and from which cinematic traditions they are borrowed. This type of response cements Quentin Tarantinos reputation as a movie enthusiast who has good eyes for valuable elements from a certain cinematic tradition to preserve with his signature scriptwriting. To a general audience, myself included prior to this research, Pulp Fiction is a movie that can charm with its funny dialog, silence the audience with its Tarantinian violence, and bewilder with its unexpected turns of event. In this paper, I am arguing that along with its coolness, Pulp Fiction is a movie-length continual subversion of the seemingly inevitable commodification. It is good at this point to remind us all of one of the most-frequently quoted strong statements by Karl Marx: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle (Communist Manifesto 769). This first sentence of the section where Marx explores the ever-antagonistic nature of oppressor and oppressed suggests that this class struggle infuses all aspect of the society, not only the open revolution such as the one that the bourgeoisie waged against the feudal, which ended the feudal, patriarchal, idyllic
Well, this article, essay, or whatever is protected under creative commons principles please fell free to read, quote, use or whatever wisely, and in such doing, please give credit to Yours truly the author, because hes a bit of a narcissist who will be very happy to know someone quotes from him. And one more, you can use this essay, but please dont capitalize or commodify it! Grandmarx wont be happy about it! :D
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Yulianto 2 relations (771). Fredric Jameson, holding on to this doctrine, suggests that all cultural texts have inherent political content, even though it is not explicitly political or even when the author intentionally avoids being political with his/her work. For Jameson, politics can seep into a cultural text not only through its creator but also through various other ways that the creator himself is often unaware of. The society as well as the time in and during which the creator lives are the closest among the many channels through which political concerns seep into cultural artifacts. Therefore, for Jameson, political approach to literature is not some supplementary method, not an optional auxiliary to other interpretive methods current today but rather the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation (The Political Unconscious 1). This political content is often repressed into the unconscious by the society and history and when it is released through art, what we have is a work underneath which lies the most basic intent, the political unconscious. For Jameson, the task of a literary analyst is to reach this political unconscious. Jameson offers a dialectical strategy by which we can approach a cultural text and unearth the political unconscious in its various layers of appearances. The strategy that Jameson offers cover three horizons, following the dialectic course that Jameson calls the three concentric horizon of political, social and historical horizons. This dialectical process includes the movement from textual analysis to the analysis at the social level and, finally, the analysis of the historical level. The first horizon is the political horizon, which includes the reading of the cultural text as an allegory of the real-life history. The second horizon is the social horizon, in which the movie will be seen in relation to the social dynamics and the ideology at work in a particular society. Finally, the two horizons of interpretation will be followed with the historical horizon, in which the work will be read in the light of wider history in order to see the works formal influences as well as how different modes of production co-exist in this system. This paper will steer by this strategy and deviates in a few points where it is impossible to follow strictly to this strategy. I Pulp Fiction strikes its audience with its unexpected plot turns. Janis Maslin, writing for New York Times in September 1994, the month when the movie was released for general audience in the United States, calls this unpredictability a triumphant, cleverly disorienting journey (web). The viewer will always question and eventually must be content to only follow when all of a sudden, for example, during Vincent Vegas (John Travolta) and Mia Wallaces (Uma Thurman) dinner, there is a dance contest where Mia forces Vincent to dance with her. Another example of an unexpected turn of events is when Marsellus Wallaces (Ving Rhames) and Butchs (Bruce Willis) chase scene ends up in a pawnshop, where they later meet the Gimp and Marsellus gets sodomized. No matter how far these unexpected turns of events create a deviation from an expected main line of story, however, the story eventually returns to its initial track. The same pattern is recurrently seen throughout the movie even in the details. In the course of the first scene,

Yulianto 3 when Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent Vega have to retrieve Marselluss briefcase from the small-time criminals who have probably stolen the briefcase, the reader will see how Jules repeatedly talks about something other than what he is supposed to do. For example, as soon as Jules and Vincent enter the young mens apartment, the former does not immediately talk about the reason of their presence there, but he talks instead about the Hawaiian burger that he sees on the table and even tells Brett about the trivia information on the difference between American and European names of Quarterpounder with cheese. Of course, he eventually gets back on track and finishes his order with the young criminals. There is a recurrent tension in the movie between completion of a task and distractions during this process. This continuous presence of distraction in the course of something is a motif, to use the terminology from Russian formalism, that the viewer will hardly fail to sense. This motif will constitute the interpretation of the first horizon of our search for the political unconscious. Jameson suggests that at the symbolic level, a cultural text can be the resolution to a problem or contradiction that cannot otherwise be resolved in the real life. At this level, a cultural text is seen as a wish fulfillment. Borrowing Jamesons words, here the text is grasped essentially as a symbolic act (The Political Unconscious 61). In the case of Pulp Fiction, I argue that the recurrent motif of distraction in the course of an event can be read as the allegory of real-life tension between idealist artists, in this case idealist movie makers, and capitalists who hold the key to the production of a movie. Any idealist movie makers, who desire to create movies of high artistic quality, will have to go through this tension, especially since the capitalist expects the possibility to garner profit out of the movie they help produce. When I talk about distractions in this paper, they refer to irrelevant actions, speeches or events that occur in the course of another important action, speech or event. Distractions are present in all parts of Pulp Fiction, from the minutest part, that last in a fraction and do not affect the story at all, to the most major one that takes a relatively long of time in the movie. Without any intention to enumerate all such distractions, I have found in my observation of the movie several types of distractions. They include movement, dialog, and story. Examples of the first type of distraction is 1) when Vincent wrongly looks into the upper cupboard after the character Jules calls Flock of Seagulls tells him that the briefcase is in one of the cupboards, and 2) when Vincent swings the briefcase on to the table and wrongly places the briefcase upside down and in a split second he realizes it and turns it up. The second type of distraction, or the dialog distraction, includes the moment when Butch returns to his inn to pick up Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) and during this hectic moment Butch still has the time to correct Fabienne who calls the chopper a motorcycle. An example of the third type of distraction is the interruption of Butchs and Marselluss chase by Maynards and Zeds crime. Other examples of distraction can be easily found throughout the movie. It is even possible to read the movie as a narrative of robbery by Pumpkin (Tim

Yulianto 4 Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) that is distracted or interrupted by the three stories (Vincent Vega and Marselluss Wife, The Gold Watch and The Bonnie Situation) that narrate to the viewer what has happened in the recent past and will happen in the near future, which in turn constitute an explanation for the reader as to why Jules does not kill Pumpkin (Tim Roth) at the end of the robbery narrative. The complete title of the script, Pulp Fiction: Three Stories about One Story, seems to justify this reading of Pulp Fiction as robbery narrative interrupted by three stories that will eventually help the viewer make sense of the robbery narrative. However, such discussion is beyond the scope of this paper and thus has to be avoided for now. While these distractions undeniably give the movie its much talked-about fresh taste of humor and in certain places unexpected turns of events, they have a bigger implication. These distractions, surprisingly, are a challenge to the classical Hollywood tradition. In the case of these distractions, especially those that are interesting while at the same time irrelevant to the whole story, we can see them as subversion to the so-called continuity editing that is commonly held in Hollywood. According to Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland in Studying Contemporary American Film, continuity editing demands that everything in a classical film is motivated and serves a purpose (37)purpose here being the end of the story or the completion of the movies task to entertain its audience. Vincents looking for the briefcase in the upper cupboard before Flock of Seagull tells him to find in the right place does not seem to have any significance to the closure of the story. So is the distraction when Vincent mistakes Jody, Lances wife, for Trudy. While these small distractions do not seem to cater for the end of the story, they help create a more lifelike portrayal of human being. If in real life one person can impossibly know every single thing that another person means when the latter says something; Pulp Fiction applies this policy throughout the story. It is not insignificant probably that Butch, after his fits of anger because Fabienne has left the gold watch in their old apartment, says You aint a mind reader, are you? Nobody is, in real life. Nobody always puts a briefcase in the right orientation to open its lock all the time. More about this logical narrative will be discussed in the next section of this paper. For now, let us suffice to focus on how these distractions represent a challenge to the mainstream Hollywood convention of Aristotelian rhetoric, which deems everything on screen to serve the end of the story. Jameson has pointed this out in his exploration of reification in mass culture. After suggesting that all sub-genres of contemporary commercial art show the tendency of treating most parts of, say, a book as commodities to serve the fetishized closure, Jameson writes that in the older adventure tale, not only does the denouement (victory of hero or villains? discovery of the treasure, rescue of the heroine or the imprisoned comrades, foiling of a monstrous plot, or arrival in time to reveal an urgent message or a secret) stand as the reified end in view ofwhich the rest of the narrative is

Yulianto 5 consumed, this reifying structure also reaches down into the very page-by-page detail of the book's composition (Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture 132). What Pulp Culture does with these distractions is actually a move away from the unavoidable commodification of literary works. These distractions thus become elements of the movie that stick in the viewers mind in addition to create more realistic depiction of a person. Even further, Pulp Fiction definitely defies the importance of a single end of the story. If an end is still considered importance, then Pulp Fiction provides the viewer with a number of ends that the viewer can choose to enjoy. In fact, Pulp Fiction is a movie that plays mostly in the details. Being free from the dictate of closure fetishization, Pulp Fiction presents well-crafted entertainment even to the minutest parts. Maslin in her New York Times review comments that The bare bones of [Pulp Fictions] stories may be intentionally ordinary, as the title indicates, but Godot is in the details (web). The most prominent aspect of Tarantinos movies is their dialog. Many actors and directors alike, including John Travolta, Bruce Willis and Tony Scott, as Jeff Dawson notes in Tarantino: The Cinema of Cool, show their appreciation of Tarantinos dialogs. Dialog is also the powerful element in the movie that make every moment in the movie significantly important, as opposed to make it a means in the achievement of the fetishized closure commonly found in contemporary commercial arts, as Jameson says. Understanding how serious Quentin treats every single detail in the movie might help us understand why the movie does not present a single protagonist. It will be more appropriate here to say that Pulp Fiction presents all of its characters as major characters in the sense that they play vital roles in making their respective scenes worthtreasured. Even for characters that appear only in short parts of the movie, such as Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel) who appears only in the chapter entitled The Bonnie Situation and Colonel Coon (Christopher Walken) who appears only to present a monologue to narrate the story of the gold watch, they are presented as important characters the moment they appear on screen. Jeff Dawson definitely agrees on this when he says that Tarantino has drawn even the minor characters extremely well (182). This also explains the presence of a lot of grade A actors at the same time in one movie. The short part of Colonel Coon, which in other movies might be considered simply a cameo, is a central moment when it takes place, which only a seasoned actor can do best. All these distractions, however precious they look when they take place, have to eventually surrender to the story (or stories) that encloses them, implying some sort of tension between indulging in details and the necessity to return and support the closure of the story. After talking about many things, from the nomenclature of fast food in Europe to the ethical evaluation of foot massage Jules and Vincent eventually has to do what they have been sent to do, i.e., retrieve Marsellus briefcase and punish Brett and his gang. With regards to Mia and Vincent, after spending the evening in an emotional conversation over

Yulianto 6 dinner and a passionate dance on stagewhich does not fail to make the viewer expect to see Vincent and Mia end up in bed togetherthey have to return to Marsellus residence as a boss wife and an employee who has started the evening to be a friendly company to keep her from boredom. As for the conflict between Butch and Marsellus, after the distraction with the appearance of a couple of serial homosexual rapists and the chance to escape from his problem with Marsellus when Marsellus is raped, without really settling the conflict that he has started with Marsellus at the beginning of the Gold Watch chapter, Butch has to return to kill the rapists out of the story and thus settle his problem with Marsellus. This motif is a precise allegory of the relationship between idealist filmmakers and capitalists. As the type of artist whose burden is twice as bigg as those of other types, idealist filmmakers highly need capitalists to fund their projects. Unless a filmmaker is one who happens to have a big amount of money at his command, a filmmaker, especially the young ones such as Quentin Tarantino (who was 31 when he released Pulp Fiction) who by then only had little to show on their CVs, still highly depends on the capitalists. As idealist filmmakers, they want to produce works that are different from commercial films, with which they are often dissatisfied, sometimes by deviating from the long-held norms if they have to; at the end of the day, however, they have to present something that their capitalists have to approve of because otherwise they cannot publish their works. Pulp Fiction seems to embody the wish fulfillment or even depiction of such problem where distractions are maximized to come up with details that do not immediately serve the purpose of a closure and defy commodification. Here, Pulp Fiction is more like an allegory than an imaginary solution to the filmmakers real-life problem. Still, it is an aesthetic release of a turmoil that has been artistic cuff to a lot of filmmakers. Those who surrender to the dictate of the economic condition would chose to let their labor be commodity and thus become commodified, while Pulp Fiction presents a story of how one can negotiate the inevitable condition of late capitalism. II Despite the fact that Pulp Fiction won Palme dOr at Cannes 1994, Alan A. Stone in his review in the May 1995 issue of Boston Review correctly predicts that the movie would probably have to pay for its punkness at the Oscars (web). In fact, although it was nominated for seven categories for 1995 Academy Awards, Pulp Fiction only won 1 award, i.e. for best screenplay. Stone was correct there. Is it that easy to see the stance of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science in the face of such work? Indeed, Pulp Fiction plays at the fringe of political correctness. Its bold and pervasive use of cuss words and racially charged word such as nigger seemed to have made it lost to Forrest Gump whenever the two movies were nominated in the same categorybesides, of course, Forrest Gump itself is for a lot of people a good movie. This could be the right place for us to embark on the interpretation of Pulp Fiction on the social horizon. In this section, I argue that Pulp Fiction is

Yulianto 7 built over an aesthetic that, among other, challenges Hollywoods simplistic adoption of political correctness. Pulp Fiction shows a subversive attitude with regards to the use of political correctness. Geoffrey Hughes in Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture writes that there are three central emphases in the notion of political correctness, namely, offensive language, prejudiced attitude, and insulting behavior towards the marginalized (8). In this same book, to show how complicated and debatable political correctness is, Hughes lists a number of inappropriate practices and how people consider them with regards to political correctness. According to the list, using ethnic slurs, rape, chauvinism, sexism, homophobia, racism, smoking cigarettes, cruelty to animals, wearing fur and eating veal are considered politically incorrect practice; meanwhile, religious swearing, pedophilia, blasphemy, smoking cannabis and eating beef are considered not politically incorrect; as for religious swearing, sexual swearing, pornography, and domestic violence, there is no decision about them (Hughes 12). That is what the society and academia think about political correctness. As opposed to literature and arts, which tend to problematize political correctness, Hollywood, as an industry whose audience comes from various segments of American and global societies, takes the safe step to secure its interests. While the notion of political correctness itself started to surface under the label political correctness in early 1980s, the classical Hollywood period between 1930s and 1950s seems to contain the origin of this practice. Prior to his exploration on the notion of film noir, R. Barton Palmer reviews the mode of production of the classical Hollywood era. Palmer said that Hollywood, according to the then applicable Production Code of 1930, performed the role of providing entertainment for the general public (including foreign viewers), regardless of age, religion, or political opinion (3). It is implied here that Hollywood cinema presented itself to be neutral in the sense that it does not follow any practical political view because such practice will only limit its audience. If Hollywood ever wants to address a certain group of audience, such as when it produces Christmas movies, it has to be done in such a way that it does not harm the other groups, for example the Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. This, however, as I will shortly explore, tends to restrict artistic expression. The most politically incorrect term that even a foreigner who has just learned about American culture and society will immediately get to know is the word nigger. Since its mere use, especially by white people, is considered to have racist tones to black people, the word is discouraged from use in Hollywood movies almost for whatever reason. Tarantino apparently holds the aesthetic view that deems such shallow political correctness to be unreasonable to follow. From his films and interviews, we can infer that there is an aesthetic view to which Tarantino seems to stick. Tarantinos movies seem to present imaginary world that follows strict narrative logic. Tarantinos movies have been inspired by elements from the real world, such as geographical places, people, historical

Yulianto 8 moment or historical people, or by fiction or earlier movies. Jackie Brown, Inglourious Basterds, or the upcoming movie Django Unchained show that he can draw inspiration for his work from historical as well as fictional sources. However, once these materials are appropriated to be included in his movies, they become his properties that he can tailor at his convenience. The Hitler in Inglourious Basterds is no longer the historical Hitler that headed the Third Reich, so that it is legitimate to end his life without really following what history has to tell about how the historical Hitler died. When Tarantino adapted the novel Rum Punch for the movie Jackie Brown, what the viewer ends up seeing is a black protagonist whose name is Jackie Brown instead of a white protagonist called Jackie Burke who inhabits the original novel. Meanwhile, Tarantino adopts strict narrative logic and depict his characters in realistic manner most of the time in his movies. Distraction as we discussed in the previous section is an embodiment of this aesthetic. Unexpected things do happen in real life and discussions on things unrelated to job at work place, which is comparable to Jules and Vincents conversations on the French name of Quarterpounder with cheese and foot massage on their way to kill some young criminals, render the whole story less story-like. Other instances of Tarantinos adoption of strict narrative logic and realistic depiction include the use of language and graphic violence. Given the characters and conflicts that Tarantino uses, especially in Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, i.e. gangster and black people, the viewer eventually sees on screen things that are commonly known to be politically incorrect. Language is an important element in creating atmosphere in Tarantino movies. In an interview with NPR, Tarantino says that a lot of movies are made in the language that in real life will not be spoken in the places depicted in the movie. The example for this would be Hollywood World War II movies in which German or Italian military officers would speak English. Tarantino deems this among the certain contrivances in movie industry. Therefore, in Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino maintains this logic by using native actors who speak their languages in their respective settings. The movie switches languages as the story jumps from one place to another. So is the case with the use of curses and racially charged nigger in Pulp Fiction. It is quite impossible to clean Jules and Marsellusand a little of Jimmys (Tarantino)dialogs off the words nigger and negro when in reality black people use this word to address one another. The tendency of Hollywood cinema not to use the word nigger altogether to avoid accusation of being politically incorrect could be one of the contrivances that Tarantino means in the NPR interview. As a matter of fact, Tarantino cannot just easily get away with his use of the word nigger, whose history we can trace back to the moment when the black African people suffered in, using Bob Marleys phrase, the bottomless pits of slave ships. The director Spike Lee strongly criticized Tarantino for his liberal use of the word nigger throughout Pulp Fiction and, especially, Jackie Brown. For Spike Lee, only black people could use the word to other black people, while white people are not supposed to do that because it is

Yulianto 9 impossible for a white writer and filmmaker to use it without evoking the history of white oppression and abuse that it carries with it (Gormley 33). Indeed, every choice of aesthetic comes with its own consequences, but we will see shortly how Tarantino presents the word nigger without the presence of racial condescension. Another element of Tarantinos aesthetic related to the strict narrative logic is the use of violence. In an interview with Dennis Hopper, Tarantino suggests that the emergence of the new wave of violence in movies in early 1990s was inseparable from the rules that had been controlling Hollywood. These rules made it impossible for a scriptwriter to depict how violent an act of revenge is, for example, while films produced in Hong Kong can freely portray violence where it is necessary. For a movie to be considered safe and following Hollywood rules, violence, if its presence is inevitable in a movie, tends to be presented to resemble an accident or done as an act of selfdefence. We can take the death of Joker in The Dark Knight and Hans in Die Hard as instances of this tendency. Tarantino shows his stance through his treatment of violence in his movies. In Reservoir Dogs, the infamous ear cutting scene is triggered by Mr. Blondes hatred of the police officer he takes as a hostage because the police have been the element that caused the failure of their robbery and the deaths of some of his fellow robbers. In Pulp Fiction, such violence is seen when Marsellus takes a revenge against Zed who has raped him. Having explored Tarantinos aesthetic views on language and violence in the movie, we need to see it in the light of political correctness. While words such as nigger and homo are often considered outright politically incorrect, the idea of political incorrectness goes deeper than that. Political correctness is more on the attitude that comes with the use of such words than the words per se. If such words are used without any racial prejudice or condescending tone, especially in a fiction whose characters are black, there is no reason to deem the use of nigger for example as politically incorrect. In Pulp Fiction, the word is used mostly by 1) Jules when he talks to Marvin, who is a fellow black person, 2) Jules about Tony Rocky Horror, 3) Jules and Marselus (one using negro instead of nigger), 4) Jimmy about Marvin (Jimmy being a close friend of Jules' and married to a black woman himself), 5) Marsellus to Vincent Vega and Butch (to show their being accepted in his circle) and 6) Zed and Maynard to Marsellus. Among the use of nigger in these relations, only Maynard uses the word with a condescending tone when he says to Butch Take your foot off the nigger (Pulp Fiction). To add to the racist treatment that Maynard and Zed do to Marsellus, Zed chooses to rape Marsellus first. Their crimes (hate crime and serial rape) do not go unpunished in Pulp Fiction). As for Butch himself, although he has killed Floyd Wilson the black boxer, there is no implication in the movie that he is racist. Butchs reaction when he knows that Floyd has died is far from any indication of racism; he does not regret killing Floyd, though, because Floyd himself has not shown sportsmanship by conspiring with Marsellus to fix the boxing match, and

Yulianto 10 sportsmanship is what Butch is concerned about (Silberstein 266). Finally, when he gets the chance to escape from the serial rapists, his conscience tells him not to leave Marsellus in the cellar to be raped by Zed and Maynard. Then the viewer sees Maynard and to a certain degree Zed meet their ends in the basement, as if the movie tells the viewer that what Zed and Maynard have done is politically incorrect in the truest sense and it has to be punished. Thus, Pulp Fiction operates within a deeper level of political correctness instead of the Hollywood style surface level political correctness, which can possibly be a cover for a truly politically incorrect attitude underneath. In this regard, the movie critic Alan A. Stone, who is by profession a professor of law and psychiatry in Harvard University, says that Pulp Fiction is politically correct since There is no nudity and no violence directed against women; in fact a man, the crime boss, gets raped and the only essentially evil people in the film are two sadistic honkies straight out of Deliverance who do the raping (web). This whole deal with political correctness shows that it is possible not to limit ones artistic expression to using the language and images that are safe or politically correct at the surface level while holding up a high ethical standard. As if to justify its ethical position after using sensitive words and curses all over the movie, Pulp Fiction shows a number of ethical virtues that operate in the movie. Michael Silberstein, in his article Grace, Fate and Accident in Pulp Fiction, explores these virtues, which include Butchs sportsmanship, Vincents loyalty, Jules respect. Indeed, when we distance ourselves from the details in the movie, we can see how Pulp Fiction operates within a safe thematic zone and even emanates a more optimistic atmosphere, when compared to Tarantinos earlier movie Reservoir Dogs. It has become more and more accepted that the central theme of Pulp Fiction is redemption. The characters who choose to change for the better in the course of their lives in the movie will find redemption at the end of the movie. Jules, despite the coldblooded murder that he commits within the first half hour of the movie, can eventually walk the earth when he decides to quit the profession after seeing what he considers a miracle. Butch deserves all the money that he wins in the betting and can, presumably, live happily ever after possibly in Bora-bora because he holds up virtues by maintaining his sportsmanship and siding with the oppressed, although this oppressed individual has almost killed him. Zed and Maynard meet their violent ends because they have been serial rapists, and Marsellus, as the man behind Jules and Vincents crimes, also learns his lesson near the end of the Gold Watch chapter. A scene that strongly marks the difference in tone between that of Pulp Fiction and that of Reservoir Dogs is how the signature three-shooting scenes in both movies end: Reservoir Dogs presents a violent result of the truel when all of the three shooters get their respective shares of bullets, while in Pulp Fiction the viewer sees the three shooters lay down their guns and their conflict settled. From this exploration, we can see that the aesthetic by which Tarantino works in Pulp Fiction shows a tension with regard to the notion of political correctness which represents its subversion of the classical Hollywood cinema.

Yulianto 11 The movies play with the Hollywood take on political correctness and the optimistic tone singles it out from other Hollywood products in its age. In one way, through its message on ethical virtues and its representation of multiracial and multinational society gender and race, to take just to example, Pulp Fiction preserves one of the ideologeme in Hollywood cinema since the classical Hollywood era to the present times, i.e. providing entertainment that does not degrade, to use the phrase from The Production Code of 1930, the standard of life and living. However, the aesthetic of Pulp Fiction, which represents the ideologeme of unprejudiced liberal expression, questions Hollywoods surface level political correctness that is detrimental to creativity. This last aspect of Tarantinos aesthetic seems to be a good complement to Gormleys argumentto counter certain actors and critics accusation of Pulp Fiction as an ultimate postmodernist product, which is marked by the triumph of content and the absence of contentthat Tarantinos films, from Reservoir Dogs to Jackie Brown (1998) are extraordinarily political in the way that they evoke and crystallize the sensations and affects around questions of race that were embedded in the white cultural imagination in the US of the 1990s. (Gormley 25). Through aesthetics, Tarantino sends a political message, not by using movie as a medium, but by making the movie or the medium itself the message. From Gormleys defense of Tarantinos racial politics, it seems like Tarantinos choice of forms or genres is central in Tarantinos aesthetics. Thus marks our shift to the next horizon of interpretation in reading Pulp Fiction. III Finally, after exploring the political horizon with its allegory and the social horizon with the dialogic relation between the ideology of the work and the stronger ideology that it subverts, we now come to the historical horizon in which we will see the work in its relation with the wider and ultimate realm that is history. In this horizon, we will no longer see how the larger history is represented in Pulp Fiction. Instead, we will focus on the influence of the overlapping modes of production and ponder at the marks that they leave on Pulp Fiction as a cultural object that cannot escape the grip of history. I will limit the scope of this historical reading on the generic aspect of Pulp Fiction with only occasional digging of detailed aspect where it is deemed necessary to do so. Seen in the wider historical context, I argue that Pulp Fiction tends to side with the marginalized with an apparent aim to revive and re-present them to a wider audience that might have missed them when they appeared for the first time. With regards to genre, Pulp Fiction appears to be exploiting genres, instead of using a genre. Fredric Jameson, in Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture, breaks down the opposition of high culture and mass culture and argues that this division is a product of capitalism whose nature it is to commodify every entity in life and create rifts between entities that are supposed to be

Yulianto 12 inseparable from one another. In the capitalist stage of history, literary works are then classified into genres to address different segments of audience. Therefore, when a work of art consciously takes, or is pigeon-holed into, a particular genre, then it has let itself be commodified, to be mere means in the whole capitalistic realm whose interest lies solely in the accumulation of capital. Pulp Fiction is a movie that, as if aware of the impossibility of being free from the encompassing identification of genre, embraces a number of genres and an array of signs that each speaks for the sub-genre from which it is borrowed. The co-existence of these genres for one complicates the position of the movie within the capitalistic world that demands everything to be easily definedand thus tamed. For the audience, it is apparently an enriching experience to experience something that is not easily predictable. Such reception is definitely what Tarantino aims at when he says that he does not like it when he can predict what a movie will be about while he has only been sitting for ten minutes in the movie theater. The first genre that shows its mark on Pulp Fiction is film noir, and by extension hard-boiled fiction, which, according to Andrew Spicer in Historical Dictionary of Film Noir, is the most important influence on film noir (125). Meanwhile, in his book entitled Hollywoods Dark Cinema, R. Barton Palmer reminds the reader that film noir is a debatable category whose categorization can be based on theme (such as done by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton), motif and tone (Raymond Durgnat) or style (Paul Schrader). In that same book, however, Palmer also presents a simple but to a certain degree inclusive definition of films noirs as movies that offer a bleak vision of contemporary life in American cities, which are presented as populated by the amoral, the alienated, the criminally minded, and the helpless or, in five words, the obverse of the American dream (6). Most critics agree that the designation film noir is limited to film with the above-mentioned characteristics that were produced between early 1940s to late 1950s. This period is important since it was the heydey of the Production Code, which compelled Hollywood cinema to be "proper, uplifting fiction." To comply with this production code, for example, a movie has to limit "sexual liasions and their consequences" to a safe degree, show "poetic justice" with punished villainy, and end all problems with solutions. Most of the films considered films noirs lacked one or more of these codes. Pulp Fiction's indulgence with the underworld and its attitude towards the underworld have led critics to relate it to the film noir phenomenon and call it neo-noir, such as Mark T. Conrad in The Philosophy of Film Noir. It is important to stress that Tarantino himself never claims to make a neo-noir; it is equally important, however, that Tarantino has adapted a number of his movies from hard-boiled fiction. Pulp Fictions indulgence with film noir, however, seems to have some ideological underpinning. Film noir holds a unique position in American cinema for its notoriety as the group of movieshaving said this, we have to remember that the term film noir was used later on by French critics and the categorization itself, as we discussed, is debatablewhose stories tended not

Yulianto 13 to abide by the then applied Hollywood Production Code of 1930 for its gloomy portrayal of American life and sexually charged conflicts. Nevertheless, film noir was neither considered independent movie. Double Indemnity, the movie that critics credit to be the beginning of the film noir era, had been rejected many times before Paramount Pictures eventually accepted it. As for the hardboiled fiction itself, Tarantino appreciates hard-boiled writers, such as Charles Willeford, Lemore Leonard and Jim Thompson who are not constrained in their realistic depiction of violence where it is necessary (Blood Lust Snicker Snicker 16); it reminds us now of the importance of freeing oneself from the constrain of political correctness in artistic expression discussed earlier in this paper. The next major generic presence in Pulp Fiction is the Blaxploitation genre. In Pulp Fiction, blaxploitation can be felt most strongly in the presence of the cold-blooded Jules and Marsellus, who still keeps his quasi-stoicism and cool expression even after being raped by Zed. The language that they use in their dialogs are the reminiscence of blaxploitation movies, besides the naturalistic language of black people. Gormley in New Brutality Film, Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema argues that Pulp Fiction is similar to Reservoir Dogs in its equation of black culture and a contemporary cinematic affect, and hipness (161). The presence of Blaxploitation cinema in the history of the United States is inseparable from the civil rights movement of the mid-1960s and later the emergence of general African-American Hollywood cinema following the increasing pressure from civil rights organization [for Hollywood] to improve the quantity and quality of its representation of African Americans (Gormley 184-185) that gave way to the birth of black action movies whose themes include ghetto life, black sensibilities and humor. From historical perspective, it is almost impossible to see Tarantinos decision to use Blaxploitation element in Pulp Fiction, a movie produced in 1993, without relating it to the L.A. riot in 1992. Interestingly enough, Pulp Fiction does not have any direct reference to the 1992 riot. There is no direct essential reference to the May-April 1992 riot in Los Angeles that erupted following the dissatisfaction of the black public by the court decision regarding the four LAPD police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King in February the same year. While the real conflict was triggered by polices view of black people as constant threat that ended up with the abuse of an unarmed black person by four police officers, Pulp Fiction presents a world that is free from police. The closest representation of law enforcement to police is Zed, who is wearing a security guard uniform and who is eventually shot in the bellyto represent a slow, painful deathas a result of his own crime. From the arrays of genres that can be detected in Pulp Fiction, there is an indication that the movie consciously tries to distance itself from what really sold in the 1990s regardless of quality. Its leaning towards film noir is actually risky to Pulp Fiction as this, for example the vivid heroin scene which serves to to give a complete depiction of the underworld, has made Tristar refuse to

Yulianto 14 distribute the movie (Pulp Fiction Collectors Edition). In this case, it represents the directors insistence on making the movie an essential element in itself instead of being a commodified product that serve the purpose of reification in late capitalism. As for the adoption of blaxploitation as a constitutive element, it shows the movies appreciation of blaxploitations unfettered artistic expression, such as when it comes to portraying violence. In short, Tarantino goes beyond the artistic and racial boundaries with Pulp Fiction. From the three concentric horizons of reading, Pulp Fictions struggle with commodification and, by extension, reification recurrently surfaces. Interestingly enough, this subversive attitude, which has often escaped the attention of a lot of critics and actors, is actually present in the outermost layer of the movie, i.e. the style. It means, in constrast to the reading of Pulp Fiction as a movie without message, the subversion is throughout the length of the movie. It is ironical then when after Pulp Fiction a number other movies came out that tried to follow Pulp Fictions success by using the non-linear narrative, violence and even offensive language. After seeing the three horizons of this political reading, it becomes clear now that the failure, at least from my perspective, of these poseurs lies not in their inability to create a copy of Pulp Fiction, but in the fact that they missed the kernel of Pulp Fictions subversion. It is clear that these movies want to pursue the same financial success of Pulp Fiction, which grossed twelve times as much as its production cost. These poseurs apparently fell to the trap of commodification. To end this paper, I would like to take an anecdote told by Lawrence Bender to Jeff Dawson in Quentin Tarantino: The Cinema of Cool. Among the many things that Lawrence tells about the production process of Pulp Fiction, is that due to the limited funds available he had to pay equal small amount of money equally based on the number of weeks each of the starts worked. However, these stars did not mind it because for one they really liked the script, such as for Bruce Willis, could really force actors to show off their real potential. The second reason is because, playing in a movie directed by Tarantino, actors never really get to work with a director, because Tarantino, as an actor himself, knows that each actor needs a different approach and that he does not make a distance between the actors and himself as the director (Dawson 187). It seems cool to see that the struggle against commodification within the movie actually has actually started in the real life, during the production of the movie, when the actors are not treated as means to reach the fetishized masterpiece.

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