In 1993, Quentin Tarantino’s dreams broke containment.
They had previously been kept inside his skull, but they now began to leak into the world and become part of the shared reality you and I and everyone who takes part in our culture experiences. The first sign was when his buddy called him in a happy huff, having just driven by a theater marquee promoting a triple feature of none other than Tarantino’s favorite actor, the martial arts screen microlegend Sonny Chiba. It was his dream come true! The friend was more correct than even he knew, for what he had just driven by was a set from True Romance, written by Tarantino. It quite literally was Tarantino’s dream come true. But that was just the first small leak. The following year, in October 1994, Pulp Fiction would be released, whereupon the fascinating, cool, dorky, violent, referential, chatty, discursive inner world of Tarantino, filled as it was and is with comic books and karate flicks and cinematic masterpieces and half-remembered Bible verses and sexual fetishes and whatever else made this singular man, cracked open and flooded into all of our collective unconscious.
That was 30 years ago. Thirty years of bedroom posters, 30 years of guys showing it to their girlfriends and remembering in real time where the Bruce Willis subplot leads to (Netflix and blackpill, if you will). Pulp is a film so revered in the annals of Tarantino, and indeed cinema itself, that it’s hard to find a critical stone left unturned. It would be easier to argue the merits of ketchup or the neglected contribution of carbon. Just as a monkey could type Shakespeare given enough time, perhaps everything needed to be said about Royales with cheese was soliloquized by your college roommate under the plume of something now sold by John Boehner.
This kind of ubiquity is irritating with the likes of Marvel, which monopolized the film industry to such a degree that it had no choice but to dominate the conversation, the same way one befriends a volleyball on a desert island. Pulp is different: Tarantino arrived on the scene with a voice so singular and fully formed that we immediately stole it for ourselves, his shadow looming so large we mistake it for night. Just as he manifested a Sonny Chiba triple feature, the legacy of Pulp is that our world has been remade in his fidgety image, for good and ill. After Pulp Fiction, the imagination of Quentin Tarantino broke containment, and it became part of the collective imagination.
Tarantino is a man of simple tastes: pop culture, Elmore Leonard novels, and a secret third thing impolite to discuss outside of a Foot Locker. But the first of these is his true passion, and his is an obsessive love. Tarantino wasn’t the first director to be in dialogue with his media consumption, but he was the first to give himself to it wholly. Pulp is homage colliding into pastiche, threaded together with hitmen discussing Green Acres and the Fonz. Pop culture has always been popular, if you can believe it, but Pulp centered it in a way we’ve never really recovered from. It has become our lingua franca, superseding religion, politics, or any other topic we’re technically supposed to avoid.
One could argue that this merely spoke for a generation raised by television, but I’d say that Tarantino’s deep yet limited purview created a generation of specialists. I paraphrase a quote from New Yorker critic Richard Brody (which is just a more academic way of saying I remember the line even if Google doesn’t) that directors of the past used to have interests that informed their work; directors nowadays are only interested in movies. There’s no drive to be a Renaissance man anymore, with too many filmmakers seemingly content with being the jack of exactly one trade.
Tarantino himself I absolve of this; he is the rare man who digs so deep into his knowledge he escapes the crevasse from the other side. It’s his disciples who lack the same discipline. If Pulp is an echo chamber of film references, the chamber is capacious. There’s no shame in stealing from the likes of Fellini and Ford and Cassavetes. Directors influenced by Tarantino merely want to make Pulp Fiction for the rest of their careers. This is often a profitable move. (Call Guy Ritchie on his private island and ask how much he minds being the Monkees.)
The rise of Tarantino also signaled the final victory of Andy Warhol, the veil between high and low art torn forever asunder. Tarantino treats film as a seamless garment, cherishing the dregs as much if not more than the classics. Listen to any of his million podcast interviews; he’ll have more to say about Paul W.S. Anderson than Paul Thomas Anderson. Pulp Fiction quite literally refers to the lurid stories in the cheap magazines, the smut that no one read but somehow sold out at every newsstand. Tarantino’s innovation was to cast this trash in a new light or at the very least increase the quality until we could understand what he saw in the first place.
In less capable hands, this reclamation of pulpy crap would be mere bad taste. A food critic once pointed out that there are complex flavors in a Quarter Pounder, which is in fact delicious. But no doubt this critic’s view and that of the average customer at the drive-thru, while identical on the surface, come from different considerations. Simply put, most Pulp Fiction-influenced post-”poptimism” movie lovers just haven’t developed the taste buds to properly savor their slop. The cinephile hero’s journey is a long and arduous process but can be summarized thusly: You like Star Wars, you pretend to dislike Star Wars, you actually dislike Star Wars, and, finally, you like Star Wars again but this time from a place of refinement. The post-Tarantino generation has the low cunning to recognize this is a circle and decide to save the trip. But it’s those years in the proverbial wilderness eating locusts that give you standards. The dark spawn of Tarantino’s egalitarianism is every 40-year-old man with opinions on cartoons and every Twitter reply that wheedles you to “let people enjoy things.”
I’m talking past Pulp Fiction an awful lot in a piece supposedly about it because the legacy of Pulp Fiction is larger than the film itself. But what of the actual movie, the thing with the actors and scenes and sets? Every time I return to Pulp Fiction, I anticipate Big Kahuna burgers and $5 shakes and scripture of dubious canonicality. What I find instead is an odd strain of melancholy. Vincent and Jules and Mia and Butch look more like sad 30-somethings stranded in the concrete purgatory of the Valley, reconciling that this is who they grew up to be. So if the world after Pulp Fiction looks like the idea of Pulp Fiction, Pulp Fiction itself can’t help but remind me of the world before it. It’s a welcome reminder, even 30 years on, not to let the cultural legacy swallow the piece of art. Pulp Fiction isn’t merely a Great Film but also a good one.
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Joe Joyce is a writer. Follow him on X at @bf_crane.