Cycles and SelcyC dna

You don’t know how it worked out but it came to that you were doing the same things over and over. You’d get up late, feel stupid, feel disgusted about your parents, feel trapped, drink, drink too much, try to chill out, sit and try and get in touch, do this for a while, forget about it, come back to it, feel as if nothing really helps, feel mechanical, feel there is no way out, shut the fuck up, go on a jog, skive off commitments and drive out to the middle of nowhere, work on interpersonal skills, write about that thing that you were reminding yourself to think about, try to get close to someone, feel like its worthless, watch a lot of tv, recall that things don’t really matter, recall that this means that the self doesn’t exist, recall that feeding the self pleasure and shielding it from pain only escalates matters, forget how this makes sense, wash your truck, mow the lawn, clean your room, do the laundry, want to dress better, go to the library to sit quietly, pick out a billion books you won’t read, wish you’d grown up with a different family, masturbate, look at your cell phone to see if anyone called or text, feel lost, feel very depressed, watch old movies, drug yourself to sleep, try to get up really early, feel as though you must exercise much more than normal, think that its all about discipline, read something and think about putting it at the start of a novel or essay, feel stupid and dull, go back to something you wrote, remember how you still have to read this book someone lent you, remember its your mothers birthday soon, feel that you are too old to be disgusted by your parents, their habits, and the environment they bring with them, feel trapped, spend a few days away from home, notice how different you are while not at home, wonder who you are, remember that you never figured it out when you were first burdened by the question, feel stupid because you don’t know what is important, think that sensitivity is a virtue, feel okay, want to destroy the vulgar bullshit in the world, want to throw yourself into a spiritual practice, feel neglected because you haven’t met an experienced practitioner that could help you, resolve to get to sleep earlier, resolve not spend much money, face some fears, feel okay, not feel able, not feel warmth, believe in yourself, hate things, fuck them, notice how weird it is…

A Mediocre Essay for a Film Class

Pulp Fiction: Pop-Culture, Crime, and the Longing for Vitality

Like many postmodern works, Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 box-office and critical hit Pulp Fiction is saturated with pop-culture: fast food (“Royale with Cheese”), The Beatles (“Ringo”), celebrity personas (the waiters and waitresses of Jack Rabbit Slim’s), surf rock and rock-and-roll, the Pepsi-challenge (Amsterdam drugs vs. American drugs), and what is perhaps the biggest pop-culture reference one can make, the Bible – to name a few. Even the use of neo-noir and the gangster content in Pulp Fiction allows for a play upon pop-culture expectations. For instance, the two central thugs in the film, Vincent and Jules, walk into an apartment building to make a hit, and among other things, they intelligently discuss the differences between McDonald’s in America and McDonald’s in France all the while planning to retrieve a mysterious suit case from inadequate business partners. In addition to the constant presence of pop-culture in Pulp Fiction, there is also a constant presence of drugs and violence. The wife of the big-boss of Los Angeles, Mia Wallace, goes to “powder her nose” with cocaine after a lull in conversation while out at a 50’s diner with Vincent Vega, her husbands employee (who shot heroin just before the meal); experienced boxer Butch, after being captured by a pawnshop pervert, breaks free from the ropes tying him down and instead of fleeing the premises, decides to kill his captors and free his boss, but not without first deciding between available weapons – a baseball bat, a chain saw, or a katana. That Tarantino’s main characters all exist on the fringes of society as outsiders, that Tarantino himself was something of an outsider in the industry at the time, and that the narrative is told in a fragmented but extraordinarily humorous way, points to some of the concerns of the postmodern society – namely, that we experience ourselves as alienated, not feeling connected to any order or whole anymore, and that we must work to seek release from this ridiculous state. In constant nearness to pop-culture and against the backdrop of the banalization of drugs and violence, Pulp Fiction points to, basks in, and ultimately seeks to leave behind the televised and alienated mass of Reagan and Bush’s suburban society.

By the 1990’s the convergence of pop-culture and the mass media had been fundamental to the American psyche for some time. For by the end of the 1950’s ninety percent of American homes had television sets, the new suburban “leisured masses” entry into pop-culture (Belton 322-323). One effect of this is that even the outsider, the person who exists on the fringes of society, even she derives identity and substance from pop-culture in a way similar to how the suburban 9-5’er does. The outsider is just as likely to have a television and watch movies as anyone else. Hit man Jules admonishes his partner early on in Pulp Fiction because he says he doesn’t watch TV and doesn’t know what a pilot is. We could say that Tarantino uses pop-culture in Pulp Fiction for seemingly two reasons: to show the pervasiveness of its reach and to make the violent and drug addled gangster world feel relatable and humorous.

Pop-culture, essentially the “transcript” or social-narrative of a culture, may also be thought of as the public value system of a society: “that set of images regarding space, time, relation, evaluation…which is shared by the mass of its people” (Boulding 64). Such a reality forms the background to which we as individuals move around in the world: it is a lens or a filter placed on our senses that focuses everything taken in so that specific associations arise and so that we all can understand one another to an extent impossible without. When we say Marilyn Monroe, for instance, we associate her with Jane Mansfield and other such starlets of past eras. When we pass through the door of an office building we look to see if we may hold the door for anyone. When driving we stay on a designated side of the road. When we need to release our bladder we use a restroom. When making decisions that affect others we collect a census or tally a vote. Traditionally, the pop-culture is passed down from generation to generation via formal education (books and teachers), one’s parents, and one’s peers (informal education). With the development of the motion picture camera and the dissemination of televisions, however, a communicator may literally spread information to everyone in the world as if they were standing in the living room. An effect of this is that images and values could now be spread in a much quicker and palpable manner as well as from subculture to subculture, unifying them in sense. The California gangster and the South African novelist share the same scene, associate images similarly, and observe manners in like ways. Mickey mouse is recognized no matter where one may happen to be. Our world has entered a state of globalization.

Throughout the destabilizing happenings of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the civil rights era, and the woman’s movement, a large group of the American culture found themselves unable to follow the line – that is, the mainstream way of life – anymore. A broad counterculture, a mass that cultivated its own media and its own system of values in contrast to that of the mainstream, bloomed naturally out of this dissatisfaction. The communal lifestyle and beat attitudes of the hippie, her anti-establishment idealism, drug experimentation, and perception that there is an “incoherence which informs the social and cultural reality” of today, such things were eventually stitched into the tapestry of the mainstream pop-culture as the counterculture’s steam faded away (Belton 374). Even though the Reagan and Bush era with which Pulp Fiction’s audience would be most familiar with was marked by economic posterity and produced a cinema in which nostalgia for and rejuvenation in the past reigned supreme (Back to the Future / Indiana Jones, etc.), something remained of the suspicion and deep-seated dissatisfaction which arouse pointedly during the time of the counterculture in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. The absurd logic and consequences of Reaganomics, the unsettling arms race, the Iran-Contra, the continued ideological foreign policy resistance to communist groups, and the new spectacle of televised wars, such things irritated the wound (Conlin 818-842). If this carrying over of the counterculture’s dissatisfactions did not find its way into postmodernism and its mainstream, as a people we would not relate to (or find affecting) films like Taxi Driver, Do The Right Thing, The Graduate, and The Matrix: films which address alienation, prejudice, and the desire for transcendence from the humdrum.

As if to reaffirm the dissatisfaction with the social-narrative that has become characteristic in postmodern art, Pulp Fiction begins with two lovers, veteran robbers, eating breakfast in a small coffee shop. In order not to feel cheated by the system, by the alienating labor of daily desk jobs, the couple has learned how to cheat. But even this insight has failed them because it’s become too dangerous to go on robbing liquor stores and gas stations. As with virtually all of Pulp Fiction’s characters, the way out of the unfulfilling and alienating drudgery is to utilize some form of crime. “Well what then,” Honeybunny asks, “day jobs?” “Not in this life,” Pumpkin replies. Life by the rules, the spirit of the counterculture suggests, is a life of the square and the alcoholic (Easy Rider). In other words, it’s a life of slavery. And so a further insight occurs to the couple: they will rob coffee shops, collecting not only the cash register but also the wallets of the customers. And so there, in the sunny vitality of a Los Angeles coffee shop, the two kiss, get up, and declare their criminal intensions jammed full with characteristic profanities. Tarantino freezes on the two, guns out, faces lit with tremendous energy as a classic surf song blazes on the soundtrack. The powerful, subversive, and near adolescent intensity that is achieved with this short introduction paves the way for how to interpret the rest of this film. The outsider is dissolute perhaps, but contains innocence and non-cruel intentions.

In effect, the film is broken down into three separated story lines: The Bonnie Situation, Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife, and The Gold Watch. In the “Bonnie Situation” Vincent makes a hit with Jules (1a), experiences a miracle and helps to clean up Marvin (1b), Pumpkin and Honeybunny plan to rob the coffee shop (1c), Vincent eats breakfast with Jules at the same coffee shop, altering Pumpkin and Honeybunny’s plans (1d), and then they both deliver the suitcase to Marsellus (1e). In “Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife”, we follow Vincent the day after the happenings of the “Bonnie Situation” as Vincent obtains heroin and shoots up (2a), has Dinner with Mia Wallace (2b), and deals with her O.D (2c). The final segment “The Gold Watch” starts with a flashback regarding the meaning of the watch (3a), moves to Butch making a deal with Marsellus to throw the fight (1e/3b), from here the story is picked up two days later when Butch boxes (3c), drives back to his hotel to see his French girlfriend (3d), wakes in the morning to retrieve his watch, ‘accidentally’ kills Vincent (3e), runs into Marsellus, gets trapped and frees himself at the pawn shop (3f), and rides back to the hotel to pick up his girlfriend on Zed’s motorcycle (3g). However, these three interrelated storylines are stringed together out of order. The film is presented like this: 1c, 1a, 1e/3b, 2a-2c, 3a, 3c-3g, 1b, 1d.

In editing Pulp Fiction in a non-linear manner, Tarantino achieves two things. First, he allows the most transcendent conclusion of the three segments to be the conclusion of the film: (1d) Jules’ expresses his ambivalence about crime, discusses the possibility of ‘walking the earth’, and saves the amateur criminals. Second, the structure functions as an allusion to (or pastiche of) the pulp-fiction magazines of the 30’s and 40’s whose contents typically were arranged with short stories that “began in the front of the magazine, competing for the reader’s attention, and were then continued in the back” (Stone). We are introduced to the hopped-up couple that plans to rob so as to avoid the doldrums of day jobs, and are brought to the conclusion (after having been immersed in the gangster world) that such a ‘way out’ is not ‘righteous’ but ‘weak’. Jules, re-interpreting his bible passage suggests that he, himself has been the ‘the tyranny of evil men’ with his vocation as a professional hit man, but has since felt the presence of ‘God’ in his activities and wants to become the guide “in the name of charity and goodwill [that] shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness…” The valley of darkness is tantamount to the postmodern predicament: the fleeing from the enslaving narratives of the pop-culture by the reactive employment of drugs and destructive activities. Jules dismisses these activities and submits that they are sleep inducing. You got to stop running and start to walk if you are going to flourish. But unlike other films of this time, Pulp Fiction doesn’t end with the reaffirmation of the community or of the family. Rather, Jules reaffirms some aspects of the counterculture and its spiritual path and points to the kung-fu paradigm of mindful being: he’ll ‘walk from place to place, meet people, get into adventures.’ It is irrelevant if he is called a bum, he’s just Jules. One of the errors of the ‘weak’ is to follow a way of life prescribed by others – consumerism and crime, for instance. You got to ‘calm that bitch down’ in yourself if you are to get past the urge toward drugs and mechanical retaliation against society. The way is beyond society, alienation, and late-capitalism.

The more formal aspects of Pulp Fiction deserve note. The acting style is straight and never over the top despite the ubiquitous humor. Vincent Vega, as Alan A. Stone points out, is a “laid back, get-along kind of guy who is living a depraved and drug-addicted life as a paid killer, but has an astonishingly innocent soul, as do most of Tarantino’s low-life characters.” It is this innocent feature mixed with qualitative humor and compelling intelligence that keeps the film afloat despite the violent content. The use of pop-music and the bright, non-judgmental cinematography incite vitality and clarity, as one might expect a line of cocaine or a big cup of coffee might. We go along with Pulp Fiction diverting our attention away from the baser realities of the gangster world, choosing to play along with this fragmented narrative because it hits all of those deep-seated desires we all carry around with us – namely, to cut out the acquired apathetic tendencies of the armchair anger toward our culture that lies in ourselves, the one that suggests our culture has left underdeveloped our finer fruits and instead made us mechanical and greedy. Pulp Fiction allows us to get high, and to kill and destroy, getting it out of our systems so that we may learn something perhaps in the catharsis.

Works Cited

Boulding, Kenneth E.. The image; knowledge in life and society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956. Print.

Conlin, Joseph R.. "'Morning in America" & "The Millennuim Years"." Since 1865 . 8. ed. Fort Worth [u.a.: Harcourt College Publ., 2001. 818-842. Print.

John, Belton. "The Film School Generation and Into the Twenty-First Century." American Cinema/American Culture. 3rd ed. New York, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 339-415. Print.

Stone, Alan A.. "Boston Review: Alan Stone on Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction." Boston Review — Home. N.p., 1 Apr. 1995. Web. 5 Aug. 2011. .