Pulp Fiction (1994)

March 30, 2025 11:13 AM

A burger-loving hit man, his philosophical partner, a drug-addled gangster's moll and a washed-up boxer converge in this sprawling, comedic crime caper. Their adventures unfurl in three stories that ingeniously trip back and forth in time.

This is another redo of an FF post that's been lost to the bit bucket. The movie's a big enough deal, both in terms of its own success and renown and also in terms of its massive impact on pop culture, to deserve a repost and maybe even a rewatch if you have the time. (I've done one fairly recently and I think that it holds up very well, generally.) YMMV. Even with the regard given to Reservoir Dogs, this is the one that really catapulted Quentin Tarantino into the stratosphere, and made Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman (already experienced and generally-well-regarded actors) stars, as well as reviving John Travolta's career and boosting Bruce Willis'.

posted by Halloween Jack (43 comments total)

A crowning achievement of narrative over story, though not Tarintino's best film - that would be Jackie Brown.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 12:04 PM on March 30 [1 favorite]

Yeah, for my money, Tarantino made 3 masterpieces, this, Jackie Brown and True Romance.

I didn't see his Kill Bill's and Death Proof, and the others didn't leave a big impression on me. But like you say, YMMV.
posted by growabrain at 12:31 PM on March 30

I don't remember what time of year this was released, but I do remember it having been out for a while when I attended a Halloween party that year and a woman was dressed as Mia Wallace with a hypodermic needle stuck in her chest -- I hadn't seen it yet, but it was generating a lot of buzz and I had seen enough about it to recognize the character but didn't know (entirely) what was going on with that. She was cool enough not to tell me.

That was a fun party.
posted by Pedantzilla at 12:48 PM on March 30 [1 favorite]

I was entertainment editor of a Toronto university paper when this came out, so was invited to the advance screening with other critics. I was 20, so my brain and tastes were still being formed, but I'd really liked Reservoir Dogs and left the screening room thinking this was the best movie I had ever seen.

I was a highly annoying Pulp Fiction evangelist for weeks.

30+ years on, I recognize that I was also a doofus, and it's in a lot of ways a triumph of clockwork rather than of creativity, but it's hard to understate how exciting Tarantino felt at the time. It was action-packed, genuinely funny, and surprised you constantly. There were action-comedies around, sure, but when you put this movie up against, I don't know, Sneakers or Last Action Hero, this really did feel like somebody stabbing adrenaline right into your heart.

I know it's racist (in that '90s 'if we acknowledge it's racist it's not really racist it's commentary' way) and terrible in a lot of ways, but I'll always feel a bit grateful to Tarantino and Pulp Fiction for making more excited about a movie, and about movies, than I'd ever been.

I'll have to spin this up sometime soon. I bet a lot of it I'll be wincing at what 20-year-old me thought was sheer genius, but being one of the first people in the world to see it was genuinely one of the magic moments of my life.
posted by Shepherd at 1:19 PM on March 30 [8 favorites]

I apologize for being a Well actually guy but True Romance is by Tony Scott. The original screenplay was by Tarantino, but was rewritten quite a bit, too.

Poor Tony Scott. RIP, sir.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:48 PM on March 30 [7 favorites]

Genius, not genius…I think that a lot of people (myself included) spend a lot of time defining things, which is totally fine but sometimes those definitions need to be a little fuzzy. Tarantino did what he did extremely well and this is the Tarantino movie that the kids watch first and I think that’s saying something. What it’s saying, I don’t know, but it’s something.

I like all his movies a lot but this one is probably my favourite. Great pacing, it’s not too fast or too slow, the dialogue is sharp, it’s clever, and clever enough to make you think a little bit; when it’s all said and done, it’s a great way lose some time.
posted by ashbury at 4:19 PM on March 30 [2 favorites]

Pedantzilla-Pulp Fiction premiered at Cannes in May of 1994, but its US release was October 14th, 1994 according to imdb. It was one of the first movies I saw when I moved to nyc for college.
posted by miss-lapin at 5:37 PM on March 30 [1 favorite]

The single-screen movie theater in my college town closed almost as soon as I got there, so my first-run movie experiences in college required road trips up to Wilmington or Newark Delaware or over the bridge into Annapolis. I don't remember which direction we all headed for movie night that night in 1994, but I remember this movie night in particular.
posted by emelenjr at 5:54 PM on March 30 [1 favorite]

My then-roommate and I either saw this together or each saw it separately about the same time, because we were quoting the thing to each other every 20 minutes or so for weeks afterward. Sometime in there we had a mutual friend who was crashing on our couch while apartment hunting, and he hadn't seen it yet and kept interrupting to ask us things like "why the hell are you talking about a Royale With Cheese so much" that we finally dragged him to the movie theater to see it again, so he'd finally know what we were talking about.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:03 PM on March 30 [7 favorites]

I remember seeing this in the theater, thinking it felt a little long with Jules and Vincent just eating breakfast and talking... THEN Pumpkin and Honey Bunny jump up! I had totally forgotten about them!

It didn't seem too long after that.

I did have one question then, and still have it now. How did the the boys get from the diner to the bar? Two "dorks" with monster handguns tucked into their gym shorts might stand out on a morning LA street, particularly one that had to have cops rushing to the diner they just left.
posted by Marky at 2:14 AM on March 31 [1 favorite]

True Romance is by Tony Scott. The original screenplay was by Tarantino, but was rewritten quite a bit, too.

I recall a rumor that Tarantino directed the shootout scene (spoiler warning), which certainly 'reads' like something from one of his films.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 5:15 AM on March 31

I also think it's hard now to understand the inflection point in movies created by Pulp Fiction. The notion of an audience laughing hysterically (and somewhat uncomfortably) by the violence depicted in the film would have been inconceivable before it came out.

I also feel that Reservoir Dogs wasn't quite as successful in this regard...the humor seems like it's just slightly off-pitch to me; Pulp Fiction nailed it. When I gave Reservoir Dogs a re-watch (after Pulp Fiction) I saw how close it came to that achievement.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 5:27 AM on March 31 [2 favorites]

I think Tarantino is very skilled and can do some superlative work. As time has worn on, though, I increasingly find myself in that camp of people who have lost some patience with the pastiche nature of his films. Okay, that's from City on Fire. Okay, that's The Bride Wore Black. Etc. It's not that I mind the references, per se, so much as that I find him trying to move me through form and semiotics less interesting than filmmakers who sincerely have something they want to tell me.

I am not full-on to the point of thinking he's a hack like some folks, as I think this level of collage is itself a pretty impressive feat. But he's not in my pantheon at all.

Pulp Fiction is probably the film of his I enjoy the most, because despite the various things that it let's say "quotes from" it still also has a sense of exhilaration and audaciousness, the feeling of a bold and confident driver taking the wheel of a sportscar for the first time and letting it rip.

It's really very fun.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:56 AM on March 31 [4 favorites]

Funny I knew a lot of Mefites skewed old... So yeah I was in my 20s when it came out as well and Shepherd's experience echoes mine.

So when this film came out, autumn of 1994, everybody in our age range was talking about it. It weirdly felt like our film, especially after the summer of the Boomer-centric Forrest Gump (that came out in July). And particularly for me who was very familiar with Tarantino's influences, I was a huge Hong Kong fan and I had lived/travelled in Asia so I had a lot of direct experience with that cinema, it felt like a movie made for me. I think I must have caught it in the first run cinemas on release and really connected with it. Remarkably it lingered for ages in the local rep cinemas so by my second semester it had another run and by that point I had a new group of friends and we kept making plans to watch the movie. What happened everybody would flake out and not show up expect the 2 people who had seen it before, myself and my now partner, so it ended up being an unintentional date/not-date. I think we ended up seeing the movie 3 times accidentally alone and after that we stopped making plans with others to do our own thing and the rest is history.

Haven't seen it since, I'm not sure if I'd like it now but maybe? Jackie Brown is the best but I have a fondness for this one.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:22 AM on March 31 [4 favorites]

I had pretty recently moved to Seattle when this came out. Didn't have a lot of friends at that time and mostly took advantage of the amazing art house theaters in town, seeing a lot of movies. I'd seen Reservoir Dogs on the big screen in Northampton MA when it came out and loved it. So, I was really excited for Pulp Fiction. Lines were around the block for weeks every time I'd decide to see it. Finally did get to see it on the big screen and loved it too. It really was part of a major indie movie shift that happened in the 90s.

Paul Anderson's Shopping played at SIFF (Seattle Intl Film Fest), I think in 1996. It was clearly another of the many Tarantino inspired movies around that time. The producer was there for a Q&A after. He joked about how some people in the British film industry were sick of Merchant-Ivory period dramas and wanted very much to be making these kinds of modern films.
posted by kokaku at 10:39 AM on March 31 [1 favorite]

This is probably still the movie that I've seen the most in the theaters, ever. My best friend and I were in college in Cambridge and would take the T into Harvard Square and catch a matinee - probably did that close to 15-20 times? Take a flask of something and sit in the dark and let it wash over us.

I was doing a lot of film study for a minor as well at the time so it felt "justified" in the way that you can when you're broke and burnt out on studying.

But yeah, Jackie Brown is still the best, but it's cheating because it's Elmore Leonard.
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:48 AM on March 31 [1 favorite]

I apologize for being a Well actually guy but True Romance is by Tony Scott. The original screenplay was by Tarantino, but was rewritten quite a bit, too.

Same, but Roger Avary (who wrote a bunch of pulp fiction)
posted by Sebmojo at 2:17 PM on March 31

playboy interview with qt about it
posted by Sebmojo at 2:18 PM on March 31 [1 favorite]

I've seen this within the past 6 months or so, and, unsurprisingly, it really holds up. QT can tell a story and write dialogue and he put together an absolutely iconic cast to tie it all together.
posted by OHenryPacey at 2:38 PM on March 31

It deserved the Best Picture Oscar and the fact it lost to Forrest fucking Gump will remain the worst scandal of the Academy Awards.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:48 PM on March 31 [5 favorites]

The hill I am willing to die on is that this movie was Quentin Tarantino peak. I have been less and less impressed with every later movie.
posted by KaizenSoze at 6:32 AM on April 1 [4 favorites]

It deserved the Best Picture Oscar and the fact it lost to Forrest fucking Gump will remain the worst scandal of the Academy Awards.

Forrest Gump winning is a perfect fit for the oscars. This award is not for the best movie it's for the movie that most conforms to the expectations of old academy members about what winner of the best movie should be. Rant's over.

Saw this in the theaters in English, which at the time was a challenge for me, I could follow TNG but Pulp Fiction is faster and more slangy, I remember being very confused and it thought some rewatches years later to fully appreciate it.
posted by WaterAndPixels at 7:36 AM on April 1 [1 favorite]

It deserved the Best Picture Oscar and the fact it lost to Forrest fucking Gump will remain the worst scandal of the Academy Awards.

The Shawshank Redemption also lost to Forrest fucking Gump

Other outrages of note include:

Apocalypse Now lost to Kramer v. Kramer
Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash
Citizen Kane lost to How Green Was My Valley
The Dark Knight lost to Slumdog Millionaire
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial lost to Gandhi
Fargo lost to The English Patient
Goodfellas lost to Dances with Wolves
Raiders of the Lost Ark lost to Chariots of Fire
Saving Private Ryan lost to Shakespeare in Love

Driving Miss Daisy won in 1990 ; Do the Right Thing wasn't nominated
The Greatest Show on Earth won in 1980 ; Singin' in the Rain wasn't nominated
The Last Emperor won in 1987 ; The Princess Bride wasn't nominated
Ordinary People won in 1980 ; The Shining wasn't nominated

posted by kirkaracha at 8:50 AM on April 1 [3 favorites]

btw, this Oscar-losers animation from the New York Times is pretty great.
posted by kirkaracha at 8:53 AM on April 1

Roger Avary (who wrote a bunch of pulp fiction)

Avary is a real shitbag now, btw, claiming that Antifa sleeper cells started the Hollywood fires, etc.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:30 AM on April 1 [3 favorites]

I started to notice soundtracks after doing an interview with a favorite local band "what music do you listen to?"; and they didn't mean The Sound of Music type sountracks. It was intriguing, and I started to notice how the modern films were using music, not pop hits but all types of music, instead of having a constant instrumental type theme going on.
This film, whew. Reservoir Dogs has a great sountrack, too, by the same person, but how in the hell she was able to make a silly old Chuck Berry song so relevant, so great...and all that glorious surf music. Literally revived Dick Dale's career, along with all kinds of surf/punk/garage music. On the first rewatch I finally realized how cleverly the music shifts in the middle of the titles (at her name)...
It's a fast tight film, it has people in it who were pegged as pretty indie actresses or edgy guys or over the hill screen gods all doing other things, and very well. The amount of shit I had to hear about Fabienne being dumb was infuriating, when it was fine for Vincent to be very very dumb. It definitely paved the way for much quicker, sleeker, less linear editing, and plotlines, and also more little human moments.
posted by winesong at 3:55 PM on April 1

The amount of shit I had to hear about Fabienne being dumb was infuriating, when it was fine for Vincent to be very very dumb.

One of the things that I realized when I rewatched the film for the first time was how much of the action--practically the entire plot--hinges on Vincent being a junkie, and how he keeps fucking up because he's probably thinking of where and when and how he's getting his next fix instead of paying attention to his job. He doesn't check the back rooms in the apartment even though he and Jules have just had a discussion about how they don't know how many guys are there (he's also not really looking for the briefcase--one of the guys has to tell them where it is), so he misses Bathroom Guy, which leads to the near-death of Vincent and Jules, which eventually leads to Jules having his moment of clarity; he shoots Marvin, even though Marvin is fully cooperating with them, leading to the whole thing with the Wolf at Jimmy's place and eventually the situation at the diner; he leaves a baggie of heroin in his coat pocket, which leads to Mia almost ODing; and when he's staking out Butch's place, he leaves his gun on the kitchen counter while he's taking a crap (opiate addicts often have a problem with constipation) and shuts the bathroom door, basically the day after he and Jules were surprised by a gunman behind another bathroom door--if he leaves the door open and takes the gun with him, no more Butch and therefore no situation with the rapists. He's not the only one who fucks up--Mia should have tasted the white powder instead of assuming that it was coke, and it's not clear to me why Butch couldn't have taken the watch with him to the fight--but a version of Vincent who's not an addict or at least half as competent as Jules would result in a much shorter and more boring movie. There's probably a reason why he was recently in Europe for a while.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:32 PM on April 1 [6 favorites]

it's not clear to me why Butch couldn't have taken the watch with him to the fight

Do you not know where that watch has been?
And for how long?
posted by kirkaracha at 10:18 PM on April 1 [3 favorites]

Recently listened to the You Are Good podcast’s episode on Clerks, and it really pairs with Pulp Fiction as the first movies that properly started to reflect how people born in the 70s (not going to say Gen X or Xennial because I don’t think those labels are helpful here) were moving through the world back at them. In both movies the story/plot is basically secondary. It’s the conversations when very little is happening that people connected with.
posted by dry white toast at 10:25 PM on April 1 [1 favorite]

It definitely changed the course of cinema in the 90s and is deserving of the attention it received. But hoo boy, even at the time Tarantino's self-insertion as Jimmy was remarkably cringe-inducing and it hasn't gotten any better over time.
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:37 AM on April 2 [3 favorites]

It definitely paved the way for much quicker, sleeker, less linear editing

Hi Sally!

I was such an insufferable movie hipster growing up that I told everyone that I preferred his earlier movie Reservoir Dogs, you probably haven't seen it.

The chronological edit is a curiosity but not an improvement.
posted by Molesome at 3:24 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]

(not going to say Gen X or Xennial because I don’t think those labels are helpful here)

Someone recently proposed Generation Goonies as a newer and more accurate label, incidentally.

It deserved the Best Picture Oscar and the fact it lost to Forrest fucking Gump will remain the worst scandal of the Academy Awards.

I maintain that Crash beating Brokeback Mountain is worse. ....Still, this was a comparatively early work from Tarantino, and it came at a time when the Academy membership was still super old-school. This may have been one of the first ripples of dissent that lead to the Academy overhauling its membership rules - it used to be that once you were given membership in the Academy, you had membership in perpetuity, so in theory, a dude who did one film in 1963 and then retired could still stay a member of the Academy. Now, you have to re-qualify for membership after ten years.

The 1990s also saw a more immediate overhaul of the nominating process for documentaries in particular - the documentary Hoop Dreams was a brilliant and popular film, but it didn't get nominated for Best Documentary, and the resulting shit-storm lead to an overhaul of the nominating process for documentaries.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:11 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]

Do you not know where that watch has been?
And for how long?

Well, I'm not suggesting that he keep it in his mouth.

hoo boy, even at the time Tarantino's self-insertion as Jimmy was remarkably cringe-inducing and it hasn't gotten any better over time.

Steve Buscemi should have been Jimmy and Tarantino could have done the cameo as the waiter at Jackrabbit Slim's.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:20 AM on April 2 [6 favorites]

Tarantino’s ability to act is nowhere near as good as his other talents but I enjoyed him in From Dusk till Dawn. Maybe “enjoyed” is the wrong term; he was more suited to play a murderous psychopath than an irate drug dealer.
posted by ashbury at 6:35 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]

The problem with the Jimmy bit is that Tarantino attempts to play him as a regular, relatable everyday guy and I don't think we want to live in a world where white dudes who casually use the N-word over and over can be considered regular, relatable guys.

If say, Walton Goggins had played the part, he could have made it work, particularly if he played it as Jimmy enjoying saying the word in a way that rankled Jules.

The problem was Tarantino wanting us to laugh with Jimmy and think he was an okay guy.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:40 AM on April 2 [5 favorites]

At this point I think even he knows how much his presence ruins a movie. His five minutes in Planet Terror take it down a full letter grade, and I genuinely believe that's why it's been forgotten in favor of the inferior Death-proof.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:58 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]

Now I'm imagining a version of the Jimmy scene with Goggins and when he gets to the "[repeated phrase] is not my fucking business!" punchline we cut to behind Jules, with his hand reaching for the gun in his waistband, then Vincent pushing his hand away. All the same dialogue, much less cringe.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:53 AM on April 2 [3 favorites]

Steve Buscemi should have been Jimmy and Tarantino could have done the cameo as the waiter at Jackrabbit Slim's.

Oh, that would have been better.

I wonder if Steve Buscemi in Pulp Fiction gets crappy tips as karmic payback for Steve Buscemi's no-tips policy in Reservoir Dogs.
posted by kirkaracha at 8:16 AM on April 2 [3 favorites]

I wonder if Steve Buscemi in Pulp Fiction gets crappy tips as karmic payback for Steve Buscemi's no-tips policy in Reservoir Dogs.

I'm not sure if Tarantino has ever confirmed this, but it's held as conventional wisdom at this point.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:33 AM on April 2 [1 favorite]

Honestly, the thing that bugs me most about Tarantino as Jimmy is that he comes across as though Tarantino personally wanted an excuse to say the N-word. I definitely think someone else would have turned a performance that doesn't come across that way.

A rare miss in a great movie.
posted by mrgoat at 11:54 AM on April 2 [3 favorites]

I saw this movie when it came out and loved it. 20 years went by and me and my boys were looking around for a movie to watch during Xmas. I remembered that Pulp Fiction was a good movie, so we watched it. During course of the movie I remembered that not all of the scenes are suitable for all ages. Oh well, my boys are now familiar with the concept of male rape.
posted by SnowRottie at 3:01 PM on April 2 [1 favorite]

I liked Reservoir Dogs so I went to Pulp Fiction with friends when it came out, and I liked it OK.

It has the distinction, I believe, of being the first time I was sitting in a movie theater and somebody in the audience answered a mobile phone and started a conversation with the caller (it was before the film so not as rude as it could have been).
posted by AzraelBrown at 12:39 PM on April 4 [1 favorite]

The problem was Tarantino wanting us to laugh with Jimmy and think he was an okay guy.

I've always thought Tarantino played that role (and wrote it) because he loves saying the n-word.

He reminds me of a housemate I had in college in the 80s, a white guy who loved to give this little lecture on sexist language. It was about how many terrible words there are for women, but not for men, and it included a long list of all the terrible animal-related and other words that you could call women. One time I was watching him give this monologue yet again and realized, "oh! He does this because he likes saying all those words."

I loved Pulp Fiction and still do, and I have come to really love Reservoir Dogs as well. But to me it seemed like what happened after Pulp Fiction is that lots of film makers felt free to emulate the extreme violence and language, but failed to emulate its structural brilliance (I love the way the story plays out) or its interesting characterizations. I'm also a fan of Tarantino's habit of letting his characters have long conversations about nothing, really: Vincent going on about the hamburgers, or the Reservoir Dogs crew at the diner arguing about tipping. I'm a big fan of clever dialogue.

I quit watching Tarantino after awhile, though, and haven't seen anything he made in a long time. The violence and his glee at throwing around the n-word, and a general sense of ugliness, got to be too much for me. But I honor him for Pulp Fiction, and I love him for breaking Harvey Keitel's heart the way he does in Reservoir Dogs.
posted by Well I never at 10:54 AM on April 5 [1 favorite]