For the past few years, the film that young people were most interested in talking about was Pulp Fiction. They wanted to know how on earth the structure of the Hero's Journey could be found in that film. Its defiance of the conventions of structure, content, framing, dialogue, and editing intrigued them. They enjoyed its passionate intensity and sardonic humor. Some people were offended by its vulgarity and flashes of violence, but most admired the film for proving that unorthodox subject matter and uncompromising style can be both entertaining and highly successful. However, despite its innovative qualities, Pulp Fiction can be interpreted with the reliable old tools of the mythic Hero's Journey. Seen this way, the film in fact presents at least three distinct journeys for three different heroes; Vincent, Jules, and Butch.
THE POST-MODERN MIRROR
Young people may have responded to Pulp Fiction because it reflects the post-modern artistic sensibility they grew up with. Post-modernism is the result of a world blown apart, fragmented into millions of pieces by a century of war, social disruption, and rapid technological change. The doors of perception have been shattered by machines and the frantic pace of electronification. Young people now come to awareness in a high-intensity bombardment of random images and brief story segments torn from all the previous styles of art and literature. The bits may have an internal consistency and obey some rules of the old story world, but they assault the consciousness of the young in no apparent order.
Young people perceive the world as reflections in a shattered mirror, whether they channel-surf to cut up the stories themselves or have the stories chopped up for them by MTV-style editing. They are accustomed to juggling story lines, time periods, and genres at staggering speed. Because of the archival nature of television, constantly churning images and eras, post-modern kids live in a stew of styles. The young can costume themselves in fashions ranging from '60s hippie to heavy metal headbanger, from cowboy to surf dude, from gangsta to grunger to preppie. They
master the idioms and attitudes of all these options and more. On their interactive, multi-media computers, they are comfortable with randomly sampling bits of entertainment and information without concern for the old world's notions of time and sequence.
Pulp Fiction reflects the postmodern condition in both style and content. Postmodernism is most apparent in its unusual structure, which disregards the conventional cinema's respect for linear time. The sequences appear to have been sliced up with a samurai sword and thrown in the air, although in fact the order of scenes has been carefully chosen to develop a coherent theme and produce a definite emotional effect. The signs of postmodernism are also present in the film's content. The nightclub where Vincent and Mia dance is a perfect postmodern microcosm. Contemporary characters find themselves in an environment peopled by icons of former eras — Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley, Jayne Mansfield, Ed Sullivan, Buddy Holly, Dean Martin, and Jerry Lewis. Most of these people are dead, but they eerily live on through their immortal images. Vincent and Mia perform novelty dances from the 1960s to music that hasn't been heard in movies for thirty years. Pulp Fiction is part of the pop-culture jet stream, flowing easily out of the current collective unconscious, charged with images and sounds from previous eras.
RELATIVITY AND WORLD CULTURE
Pulp Fiction is postmodern also in its sense of cultural relativity. Although the film is set in America, it is shot through with a sense of worldwide culture and a global viewpoint. The characters are constantly comparing one culture to another, one set of standards to another. Jules and Vincent discuss the peculiar way American fast food is named and consumed in other countries, and marvel at drug laws in other lands. Butch, the American boxer, compares notes with a South American woman cabdriver on personal names in different cultures — her Spanish name is poetic and meaningful, while in America, he says, our names don't mean anything. This consciousness of other cultures may have contributed to the film's worldwide popularity.
The characters in Pulp Fiction are engaged in debate about value systems, reflecting the postmodern sense that no single code of ethics is adequate anymore. Jules and Vincent argue the moral significance of foot massage and the cosmic importance of a pattern of bullet holes. Where Vincent sees a meaningless accident requiring no response, Jules sees a divine miracle demanding a complete change of behavior. In the postmodern universe, everything is relative, and moral values are the most relative of all. Although the audience has seen Jules as a cold-blooded killer, he can seem like a hero compared with those around him. The story appears to say that Western society's narrow value judgments about morality are outdated. In the new world, each person must select his or her own moral code, argue it fiercely, and live or die by it.
THE ETERNAL TRIANGLE IN PULP FICTION
One of the pop-culture streams tapped by Pulp Fiction is the tradition of film noir and its sources in the hard-boiled fiction of 1930s and '40s pulp magazines. Like Titanic, the film employs the powerful archetype of the Eternal Triangle. The Mr. Big of Pulp Fiction is Marsellus Wallace, mysterious crime boss; the Young Woman is Mia, Marsellus' wife; and Vincent is the Young Man, who as usual finds himself attracted to the Young Woman, testing their loyalty to Mr. Big. Vincent passes through this ordeal without betraying Mr. Big, like a Grail-questing knight refusing to yield to grievous bodily temptation. But, as we shall see, in another arena, another branch of his Hero's Journey, Vincent fails a more spiritual test.
"PROLOGUE" AN ORDINARY WORLD
In Pulp Fiction's opening segment, tided "Prologue," two young people sit talking in a "normal Denny's, Spires-like coffee shop in Los Angeles." What could be more ordinary than this world? However, it turns out this young man (Pumpkin) and woman (Honey Bunny) are discussing the pros and cons of various forms of armed robbery. It's a different kind of ORDINARY WORLD, an underworld of low-level criminals, a world most of us would rather not think about. It's too horrifying to consider that all around us are legions of dull-witted crooks waiting for their chance to rob us or kill us, perhaps sitting right across from us in our favorite '50s coffee shop.
Pumpkin's first words are characteristic of a REFUSAL — "No, forget it, it's too risky. I'm through doin' that shit." Apparendy Honey Bunny has just issued a CALL by proposing they rob another liquor store, their line of crime until now (their ORDINARY WORLD). While demeaning Asians and Jews who run liquor stores, the English-accented Pumpkin talks himself and Honey Bunny into robbing the restaurant, where there are no security guards or cameras, and where the employees have no need to play hero. He evokes a MENTOR of sorts, referring to the story of a bank robbery in which the robbers used terror and trickery to seize control. Working each other into a frenzy, Pumpkin and his daffy girlfriend CROSS THE THRESHOLD, waving their guns, bringing the possibility of instant death into play. Then with a swirl of retro surfer music, we are thrown into the main tides and the body of the movie.