That's My Bad Motherf*cker

When Pulp Fiction arrived in 1994, it didn’t feel like just another movie—it felt like a shift. Tarantino’s vision fused grindhouse grit with pop-cultural wit, and in doing so, he reshaped what American cinema could be. Thirty years later, the film still resists fading into nostalgia; it plays like myth, endlessly looping, endlessly alive.

Pulp Fiction is such an incredible, genre-defining—and defying—movie that it’s hard to believe it’s simply a work of celluloid fantasy. A multi-sectioned deep dive into the lives of desperate and dangerous people circa 1993, it presents its story in non-linear sections that create a mythological cosmos of human gems: Vincent Vega, Mia Wallace, Marsellus Wallace, and, first and foremost, Jules—Samuel L. Jackson—one righteous brother, a bad motherfucker with a wallet that pays testimony to the same. Jules is in the midst of a life transition, though he doesn’t know it yet.

Pulp Fiction shares the mantle of quintessential, iconic late Twentieth-century American cinema alongside Star Wars, American Graffiti, The Exorcist, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Jaws, Blue Velvet, and on and on. Its infusion into the cultural zeitgeist came at a time when it was desperately needed. Writer/director Quentin Tarantino brought his cult cinema sensibility—his appreciation for the low-brow entertainments of yesteryear, particularly the blaxploitation, kung fu, crime, action, and horror genres of the 1970s grindhouse—to an audience that had grown jaded and bored. By making these self-referential signposts the terrain of his personal vision, he breathed new, vital life into a cinematic landscape grown stark and depleted.

The film is presented in various loops, little “circles of hell.” Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Yolanda, aka “Honey Bunny” (Amanda Plummer), sit in a nondescript restaurant or diner, discussing robbery. Roth gives a monologue about the various pros and cons involved in robbing banks, liquor stores, and then restaurants. Roth is completely authentic here (indeed every performance in the film, even the small one given by Christopher Walken, is one hundred percent spot-on). We soon find out they are indeed restaurant robbers. The denouement of this prologue will not be resolved until the end of the picture, though it is not—oddly enough—the end of the story (at least not Vincent’s story, which comes at a central point in the film).

We are introduced to Vincent Vega (the cultural resurrection of John Travolta) and Jules, in the scene that has become a classic exchange: “What do they call a Big Mac in France?” Jules and Vincent are both too-hip hit men. We don’t know what has brought them to this place in life where they can mete out violence so casually, almost bored by the prospect, but before we know it, they have broken into the cheap, slum apartment of several young men—none of whom look as if they would naturally flow in the same social circles. There’s a mysterious briefcase, with a running joke about the glowing what’s-it inside. Vincent and Jules make short work of the hapless young men, abduct one, Marvin (Phil LaMarr), and while driving, Vega manages to accidentally kill him, leading to a blood-drenched car.

Ezekiel 25:17 | Pulp Fiction FULL SCENE with Samuel L. Jackson (Strong language)

This is a chapter (each segment is preceded by titles as in a pulp novel or penny dreadful—but the chapters are out of sequence) featuring Harvey Keitel as “The Wolf,” an organized crime “fixer” for Marcellus (Ving Rhames), in a sterling, memorable appearance.

A central section of the film involves a prearranged “date” (by Marcellus Wallace himself) between his wife and hit man Vega. Mia Wallace—played expertly by Uma Thurman, who provides one of the film’s most striking presences—appears with perfectly squared hair and retro-mod fashions that belie a strangely coy, psychologically distanced personality, desiring only limited interaction with her “quarry.” (She confronts Vega, in a scene that seems altered in certain cuts, with an old-fashioned video camera, asking him if he is an “Elvis man or a Beatles man”—implying variant levels of perceived masculinity. Vega, naturally, is an Elvis man.)

The restaurant they go to, staffed by look-alikes of Fifties and Sixties celebrities, is a kitsch mausoleum of pop-cultural references, a place where our collective cinematic and musical memories go to be buried, resurrected, and displayed in synthetic form. A costumed Buddy Holly (played by Steve Buscemi) takes their order. Then comes the dance—famous, comic, iconic—but they are like children playing dress-up, acting out roles. At one point in the evening Mia, a coke addict, overdoses, leading to a panicked Vega driving her to the home of low-rent drug dealers Lance and Jody (Eric Stoltz and Rosanna Arquette), hippies and pierced burnouts who seem to exist in another world entirely. Yet in Tarantino’s Los Angeles, these desperate but fashionably doomed souls are always on intersecting collision courses.

Another crucial section of the film bends the spiral further. Butch Coolidge (a hard-as-nails Bruce Willis), an American palooka paid by Marcellus to take a dive during a boxing match, disobeys and kills the boxer he was set up to lose to. Wallace wants his blood. Butch and his girlfriend Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) abscond to a hotel room, Butch only emerging long enough to reclaim a sacred item—his father’s gold watch, hidden for years in a rather sensitive and blackly humorous place, as explained by Christopher Walken in an unforgettable cameo.

Pulp Fiction runs over two hours, but they are engrossing hours. The film leaves the viewer living in Tarantino’s pop-cultural, meta-referencing world of characters who are too smart, too hip, too handsome, too bold, and—in the case of Jules—too hard to kill. As Jules himself reflects, “I just thought it was some cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I bust a cap in his ass.” Forgive the language, but this is Tarantino’s scripture, and Jules is quoting his own personal Bible. By the end, he is the only character who walks away redeemed.

And redemption matters. Only after sending Pumpkin and Honey Bunny away with their lives does Jules walk out—into daylight, into surf guitar, into the mythic circularity of Tarantino’s pulp world. He exits redeemed, but we, the audience, remain trapped in the loop—forever quoting, forever resurrecting, forever lost in the cinematic pit of our passing and passionate dreams.

Pulp Fiction Official Trailer #1 - (1994) HD

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