10 / 10
Official trailer
A Royale with Cheese
Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield drive across Los Angeles in the morning, on their way to kill some college kids who’ve crossed their boss.
What do they talk about? Burgers. Vincent has just come back from Amsterdam, and he explains that in Paris, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is called a Royale with Cheese, because of the metric system. Jules is hooked.
Then they walk into an apartment, eat a kid’s burger, quote scripture and blow people away. Nobody had ever made a crime film like that, where the talk matters as much as the plot and the violence arrives in the middle of a sentence about fast food.
Quentin Tarantino made Pulp Fiction in 1994, two years after Reservoir Dogs, and it took the Palme d’Or at Cannes, made a fortune on a tiny budget and turned him into the most imitated director of the decade.
This is my kind of movie from the burger talk on. I could listen to these people argue about foot massages for another two hours, and the violence hits harder because I’ve been enjoying their company. It’s a 10, and the only thing I’d take out is a word Tarantino couldn’t stop using.
For Writers
Jules and Vincent talk about burgers on their way to a murder. The mundane conversation makes the violence more shocking and the characters more human.
Characters who talk about ordinary things in extraordinary situations feel real. Their small talk tells the reader who they are, and it creates a strange, unsettling contrast with what they’re about to do.
Tarantino’s genius is that the small talk is never filler. The Royale with Cheese conversation establishes Vincent’s worldliness, Jules’s curiosity and their easy friendship, all before a single shot is fired. By the time the guns come out, the audience knows these men well enough to be shocked by what they do.
Out of Order
The film tells three main stories, and a couple of smaller ones, out of chronological order.
Vincent takes his boss’s wife out for the evening. A boxer named Butch refuses to throw a fight. Jules and Vincent have a very bad morning after a job. The stories overlap, characters wander between them, and the film opens and closes in the same diner at the same moment.
The scrambled structure justifies itself. It lets Tarantino end the film on a moment of grace instead of death, and it means a character who dies in one story is alive and walking out of the diner in the last scene. The effect is dizzying and oddly moving, and it made nonlinear storytelling fashionable for years.
For Writers
The scrambled structure lets the film end on Jules’s redemption instead of Vincent’s death. The order of events changes the meaning of the whole story.
The order in which you tell events can shape their emotional impact as much as the events themselves. Ending on a moment of grace, even if it happened earlier in the timeline, can leave the reader with a completely different feeling about everything that came before.
Look at where your story ends chronologically, and ask whether a different final scene would leave the reader with the feeling you want. Structure is a way of choosing what the reader remembers last, and the last thing they remember colors everything else.
Jules
Samuel L. Jackson plays Jules, and it’s the role that made him a star. He’s funny, frightening and philosophical, a hitman in a Jheri curl who delivers a fierce, invented passage of scripture before he kills people. His scenes crackle with energy, and every line he speaks became quotable.
Jules also has the film’s real arc. After a man empties a gun at him and Vincent from close range and misses every shot, Jules decides he’s witnessed a miracle and that God is telling him to quit. Vincent thinks it’s a fluke. The argument between them about divine intervention is funny, and Jules’s decision is sincere. In the final scene, Jules has the chance to kill again and chooses not to. It’s the only real redemption in the film, and Jackson plays it beautifully. He earned an Oscar nomination. He should have won.
Vincent and Mia
John Travolta plays Vincent, and the film revived his career. That had collapsed into talking-baby movies. He’s relaxed, slightly dopey and oddly charming, a heroin-using hitman who’s very bad at avoiding trouble.
His boss, Marsellus Wallace, asks him to take his wife, Mia, out for the evening while he’s away. Uma Thurman plays Mia, and she’s cool, playful and dangerous. They go to Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a fifties-themed restaurant with waiters dressed as dead movie stars, and they win a dance contest doing the twist to Chuck Berry. Film has few dance scenes as famous.
The twist contest is my favorite scene in the film. Travolta, fresh off a career everybody had written off, dances with Thurman in a restaurant full of fake movie stars, and both of them look like they’re having the night of their lives. Then she mistakes his heroin for cocaine and nearly dies before the night is out, and the jolt works because the film gives no warning.
Then Mia finds Vincent’s heroin in his coat pocket, thinks it’s cocaine and overdoses. The frantic drive to his dealer’s house, and the adrenaline shot straight into her heart, is horrifying and darkly funny in equal measure.
The Gold Watch
The film’s middle story belongs to Bruce Willis as Butch, a boxer who’s been paid by Marsellus to lose a fight and wins instead, killing his opponent, and tries to skip town. It starts with a flashback: Christopher Walken, as an Air Force officer, delivers a gold watch to young Butch and tells him the long, deadpan story of how his father and grandfather protected it through two wars. The punchline is unforgettable.
Walken’s watch speech is the funniest monologue in the picture, and it works because he delivers every absurd detail with a perfectly straight face. I’d sit through a whole movie of him telling stories to children who shouldn’t be hearing them.
Butch’s story takes a sharp, dark turn when he and Marsellus end up captured in the basement of a pawnshop by two sadists. The scene is disturbing, and Tarantino shocks the audience with how suddenly the film’s playful tone can turn. Butch escapes, then goes back to save the man who wanted him dead, choosing a samurai sword from the shop wall to do it.
It’s Butch’s moment of honor, and it’s also the moment Marsellus lets him go.
Marsellus
Ving Rhames plays Marsellus Wallace, the crime boss everybody in the film works for or fears, and for most of the running time we see him only from behind, with a strange bandage on the back of his neck. He’s a presence more than a character, a man whose name makes other men sweat.
When he finally steps into the story, in Butch’s section, he’s knocked down by a car, chased through the streets, captured and assaulted, and saved by the man he wanted dead. Rhames plays the aftermath with stunned, furious dignity. His decision to let Butch go, as long as he leaves town and keeps quiet, is one of the film’s quiet grace notes, the second of its unexpected mercies.
The Wolf
When Vincent accidentally shoots a man in the back seat of Jules’s car, they need help, fast.
Enter Winston Wolf, played by Harvey Keitel, a fixer in a tuxedo who arrives in minutes, drinks coffee, gives orders and solves everything. He’s calm, polite and completely in control, and his comic timing is perfect from an actor who’d played it deadly straight in Reservoir Dogs. Keitel is my favorite surprise in the whole cast. He walks into a car full of blood, asks for coffee, and I relax right along with everybody on screen.
The Wolf sequence is also Tarantino at his funniest: the gruesome clean-up, the argument over whose towels are ruined, Tarantino himself playing the annoyed homeowner who’s more worried about his wife coming home than about the body in his garage.
The Diner
Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, two small-time robbers played by Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer, open and close the film by deciding to hold up a diner. At the end, we discover that Jules and Vincent were eating breakfast in that same diner.
The final standoff, with Jules sitting calmly while a nervous robber points a gun at him, is the best scene Tarantino ever wrote.
Jules recites his scripture again, but this time he explains what it means, and what he’s decided to be. He lets the robbers go, with money from his own wallet. The film ends with Jules and Vincent walking out, alive, into the morning.
For Writers
Jules recites his scripture twice. The second time, he explains what it means and chooses a new path. Repetition shows how much he’s changed.
Give your character a speech or gesture early on, and bring it back at the climax transformed. The contrast will do more than any narration could to show who they’ve become. Jules says the same words and means something completely different, and the audience feels the difference in their chest.
Repeating a line, a ritual or a scene at the end of a story, with a new meaning, is a powerful way to show character growth. The reader recognizes the echo and measures the change without needing a word of explanation.
Talk
Tarantino’s dialogue is the heart of Pulp Fiction. His characters talk about burgers, foot massages, television pilots, pot bellies and pie, and the conversations are funny, rambling and full of personality. They sound like real people, only sharper, and they make even the minor characters vivid.
There are also problems in its language. Tarantino uses a racial slur repeatedly, including in his own cameo, and critics, notably Spike Lee, called it out. That’s the one black mark on this movie, and it’s worst in the cameo, where the director puts the word in his own mouth for no reason the scene needs. It’s a real blemish on a great script.
The Soundtrack
It has no original score. Instead, Tarantino filled it with surf rock, soul and old pop, from Dick Dale’s Misirlou over the opening credits to Dusty Springfield, Al Green, Urge Overkill and Chuck Berry. The music defines the film’s mood as much as the dialogue does, and the soundtrack album was a huge hit.
Misirlou over the opening credits is still the best needle drop I know. The surf guitar hits and the film’s whole attitude arrives before a single character says a word. The choice started a fashion. For years afterward, every crime film seemed to have a jukebox full of vintage songs, and none of them used them as well as Tarantino.
Its Legacy
Pulp Fiction made independent film mainstream. It was made for around eight million dollars and earned more than two hundred million, it made Miramax a powerhouse, and it launched a decade of fast-talking, violent, nonlinear crime films, most of them much worse.
It won the Oscar for best original screenplay, for Tarantino and Roger Avary, and it’s been endlessly quoted, parodied and studied. Thirty years later, it’s still thrilling to watch, and it still feels completely fresh.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Tarantino weaves several crime stories together out of order, and the structure turns a collection of violent episodes into a story about grace, chance and choice. Jules’s redemption lands at the end because Tarantino put it there.
A nonlinear structure works best when the arrangement creates meaning as well as surprise. Each jump should change how the reader understands what they’ve seen. If you’re telling a story out of order, decide what you want the reader to feel at the very end, and arrange the pieces to deliver it.
Jules Walks Out of the Diner
I give Pulp Fiction a 10, and I don’t have to think hard about it.
It’s funny, violent and endlessly quotable, it rewired American movies, and it gave Samuel L. Jackson the role he should have won the Oscar for. Travolta’s comeback, Uma Thurman’s Mia and a structure that ends on Jules choosing mercy put it over the top for me. The slur costs it something in my eyes without costing it a point, and thirty years on I’d still put it ahead of every crime film that tried to copy it.
