According to many film critics and scholars, Pulp Fiction remains Quentin Tarantino's defining achievement as a writer and director—the purest distillation of the kind of audacious aesthetic and narrative experimentation for which he has become widely known over the last twenty-five years. An avid cinephile from an early age, Tarantino's various trademarks as a filmmaker are all on full display in Pulp Fiction: non-linear storytelling, stylized ultra-violence, punchy dialogue, self-referentiality, eclectic music, and synthesized homages to other cinematic genres.
Many of these qualities were also on display in Tarantino's first feature, Reservoir Dogs, which followed a group of bank robbers before and after a critical heist gone wrong. That film's penchant for elliptical storytelling—it never actually shows the heist itself—anticipates the unusual structure of Pulp Fiction's plot, which withholds and delays key events from the audience, and delivers them out of chronological order. Tarantino recruited Tim Roth and Harvey Keitel from Reservoir Dogs to join the ensemble cast of Pulp Fiction, and used much of the same production crew. The director also met Portuguese actress Maria de Medeiros while shopping his previous film around the European film festival circuit.
Also like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction begins with a scene of bickering criminals eating breakfast at a diner. The argument between Pumpkin and Honey Bunny about no longer wanting to rob banks, due to the inordinate risks, is at once a setup for the final scene of the film, where Pumpkin and Honey Bunny hold up the diner with Jules and Vincent inside, and a self-aware nod to the disastrous aftermath of the bank robbery in Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino further sutures the two films together by making Pulp Fiction's Vincent Vega, played by John Travolta, the brother of Reservoir Dogs's Mr. Blonde/Vic Vega, played by Michael Madsen.
Pulp Fiction's opening scene exploits the contrast between banal ordinariness and jarring outbursts of violence, a running theme throughout the film. Tarantino intention when writing the script with Roger Avary was to borrow stock characters and familiar storylines—such as the mob associate who must take his boss's wife to dinner, or the corrupt boxer who refuses to throw the match—and exposing them to the happenstance, unpredictability, and human error of everyday life. This exposure often undermines the conventions of typical film genre. For example, when Vincent goes to the bathroom just before a climactic shootout might have taken place, or when the audience expects Esmeralda to inform on Butch, or when a careless Vincent accidentally shoots Marvin in the face.
In addition to paying broad homage to bygone genres like film noir, French New Wave, Blaxploitation, and the rape-and-revenge flick, Tarantino explicitly references specific cinematic touchstones like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, John Boorman's Deliverance, and Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part, turning the film into a kind of love-letter to cinema. Tarantino's creative synthesis of lowbrow and highbrow genres, which are systematically subjected to the unforeseeable nature of life itself, lends the film a live-wire energy that constantly undermines expectations and produces unlikely, comic images, such as the cold-blooded killers Jules and Vincent soaking wet and wearing "dorky" tee shirts in Jimmie's backyard.
The scene at Jackrabbit Slim's—the film's most expensive to produce—serves as a metaphor for the larger way in which Tarantino recycles and repurposes the tropes of cinematic history, and American entertainment culture more broadly. The sequence begins in a large room populated by Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, and Buddy Holly impersonators, and ends with Vincent rushing Mia to a heroin dealer's house so he can plunge a needle full of adrenaline into her heart. The contrast between the family-friendly atmosphere of the 1950s diner, and the dingy, amoral squalor of Lance's crash-pad, symbolizes the way in which the Hollywood studio system gradually ceded its stranglehold on film production to a new generation of independent filmmakers between 1950 and 1980, who appealed to mass audiences with exploitative and sensationalistic content. Pulp Fiction strives enthusiastically to condense several generations of filmmaking styles under the banner of a single feature-length plot, leading to a distinctly postmodern form known as the "pastiche."
