Pulp Fiction

I watched Pulp Fiction on a night when I was too tired for a complicated film.

This was bad planning.

A friend had given me the DVD and said only, “Watch it.” I began without knowing the structure. Half an hour later, I was convinced either I had missed something or the movie had.

Then I realized the confusion was part of the entertainment.

The film does not arrange events in the order they happened. Once I stopped demanding that courtesy, another question became more interesting than “what happens next?”

Why am I seeing this now?

That question changed the way I watched stories.

Chronology gives events sequence. Editing gives them meaning.

A character can die and later walk into a room alive without resurrection, simply because the storyteller has moved us to an earlier point. The knowledge of the death follows us backward, changing every ordinary gesture the character makes.

The event is the same.

Our position is different.

The dialogue surprised me even more. Criminals are expected to discuss crime. The people in Pulp Fiction discuss hamburgers, foot massages, television pilots, coffee and names, then commit acts of terrible violence and return to conversation.

The effect is unsettling because villains usually help us by behaving like villains.

These people behave like people.

Jules became the character I carried away from the film. Bullets miss him and Vincent, and the two men experience the same physical event. Vincent calls it luck. Jules decides it is a message.

Whether a miracle objectively occurred is almost irrelevant.

Interpretation creates the consequence.

Two people can survive the same accident. One continues exactly as before. The other changes careers, relationships, religion, habits or direction.

The event does not contain the future.

The meaning assigned to it helps produce the future.

Years later I had a minor car accident. Nobody was hurt, the damage was repairable, and objectively the event was not important. Still, for several weeks I drove differently. A friend who heard the story said, “You were lucky.”

He was right.

I also understood Jules.

Objects acquire unusual gravity in the film: a watch, a briefcase, a wallet. None has meaning by itself. People attach memory, danger, honor or desire to them.

We do this constantly.

An old ticket is paper to everyone except the person who kept it.

When the film ended that first night, I immediately replayed the opening.

Nothing in the scene had changed.

But it was no longer the beginning.

The movie had rearranged my understanding without altering a frame.

That was the trick I admired most.