The Travolta/Cage Project #39 Pulp Fiction (1994)

Like a blood-splattered, racial slur-spouting, drug-addled, violent version of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, Quentin Tarantino’s zeitgeist-capturing 1994 masterpiece Pulp Fiction has been there for me at every stage of my adult life.

I saw Pulp Fiction at an ideal age, when I was an eighteen year old video store clerk and juvenile delinquent hopelessly in love with the entirety of film, with an insatiable curiosity about art and trash, highbrow cinema and lurid b-movies. I was the kind of precocious kid who read collections of Pauline Kael reviews in between his all-important shifts at Blockbuster, where my real, useful education took place. 

My nascent identity revolved around being a cinephile and movie geek. Then something miraculous happened: Quentin Tarantino almost single-handedly made being a giant fucking movie geek cool. In the post-Pulp Fiction world, the bigger a geek you were about movies, the cooler you somehow became. 

And NOBODY was a bigger movie geek than Tarantino, which made him the coolest guy in the world while still remaining a giant fucking dork, literally and figuratively. QT, as I call him, is eight feet tall, most of which is head and chin. I don’t like to humble-brag, but I was also a huge fucking movie nerd when Pulp Fiction came out, and for a brief, tiny little window, that almost made me kind of cool. 

I was such a movie snob, in fact, that while Pulp Fiction rocked my world along with the rest of the universe, I considered it inferior to Reservoir Dogs, largely on account of the gay panic in the Bruce Willis segment. That might seem obnoxiously proto-woke of my teenage self but I was nothing if not politically engaged. 

When I was thirteen my cousin took me to see Gene Siskel give a talk about the Academy Awards when I was thirteen and I asked him how he felt about GLAAD picketing the Oscars in protest of Basic Instinct and Silence of the Lambs and he asked me what GLAAD was. 

Six years later I was living in a co-op and working at an even cooler video store when I re-watched Pulp Fiction in the room of a girl I had a crush on and, after everyone else cleared out post-viewing, I lost my virginity or rather eagerly surrendered it.

Pulp Fiction is one of those movies that made me want to devote my life to film in some capacity, whether that meant making films or writing about them, or even consuming them rapaciously as an insatiable cinephile. 

In my 2009 memoir The Big Rewind I wrote about the films of Quentin Tarantino as an important personal and culture touchstone in my life. Years later I was given the tempting opportunity to write an entire book about Pulp Fiction that I had to reluctantly pass on because I did not have the time to do it justice. 

Pulp Fiction popped up in my life yet again a few years back when it was one of the final entries in The Simpsons Decade, my Rotten Tomatoes column on the central role television and post-modernism played in 1990s comedy. 

Yes, I’ve written about Pulp Fiction over and over again over the course of my career. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. I have devoted my career to the idea that the more you put into something, the more you get out of it. That’s the principle behind The Weird Accordion to Al and it is one of the guiding theories behind Travolta/Cage and the Travolta/Cage Project. 

Clint Worthington and myself have now spent close to a year watching every movie John Travolta and Nicolas Cage have made over the course of their gloriously, transcendently checkered careers. 

At this point, Clint and myself are only slightly less emotionally invested in John Travolta’s career as his late wife Kelly Preston was during her all too brief life. We know just how far Travolta’s career sunk before Tarantino helped engineer what can truly be deemed one of the all-time great comebacks in film history, right up there with Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. 

We know because we’ve seen every single one of the abominations Travolta made between 1981’s Blow Out and 1994’s Pulp Fiction. The movies Travolta made in this dreary interim weren’t just egregiously awful: they barely existed. In the years the insultingly idiotic Cold War comedy The Experts spent on a shelf, unloved and unwatched, the Cold War ended. 

The Travolta/Olivia Newton-John vehicle 1983’s Two of a Kind was so bad it damn near ruined Grease. The same is true of 1983’s Staying Alive and Saturday Night Fever. Continuing that theme, 1990’s Look Who’s Talking Too and 1993’s Look Who’s Talking Now seemed designed to purge audiences of their affection for the exceedingly modest, shaky charms of Look Who’s Talking, which wastes a spectacularly charming Travolta performance with its inane talking babies gimmick. 

The absurd child trafficking thriller Chains of Gold debuted on Showtime while Eyes of Angel went direct-to-video the same year Travolta got nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in Tarantino’s surprise blockbuster. 

At this point in Travolta/Cage, we need a win like Pulp Fiction nearly as much as Travolta did.

In the movie that made him an unlikely rock star of cinema, Tarantino brought the style, sound and aesthetic of the 1970s roaring back to life, reminding a perpetually forgetful pop culture world of the myriad treasures the era contained, chief among them John Travolta’s extraordinary run at the top of the music, TV and film world during his Carter era prime. 

The role of Vincent Vega combined the darkness and brooding intensity of Travolta’s performances in Carrie, Saturday Night Fever, Urban Cowboy and Blow Out with the ebullient charm of his previous comeback turn in Look’s Who Talking.  

Travolta’s anti-hero Vincent Vega is a heroin-addicted professional killer you can bring home to mom, a man of violence and brutality who also seems like he’d be super fun to hang out with. For all of the charisma and personality and iconic baggage Travolta brings to the role, a huge part of what makes him so spectacularly effective here is that he knows when to get the hell out of Samuel L. Jackson’s way. 

Samuel L. Jackson has far and away the flashier role in Pulp Fiction. He gets the big, iconic monologues. He is volcanic in his energy and intensity. He is the movie’s unlikely but inspired moral center. He has a fascinating redemptive arc that makes Pulp Fiction a film about morality instead of a snarky exercise in adolescent nihilism like its wannabes. 

On the other hand, John Travolta is white, so of course he got the nomination for Best Actor and most of the attention and Jackson had to settle for Best Supporting Actor. 

Then again, Travolta does get to dance here, as he does in seemingly all of his movies. But the context is different. In stinkers like Look Who’s Talking Now, the vibe is, “We have NOTHING going for us except John Travolta dancing so enjoy?” whereas in Pulp Fiction it’s more like, “We have EVERYTHING going for us AND John Travolta dancing. Enjoy!” 

Unlike Jackson, Travolta gets a love interest of sorts in Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), the wife of boss Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames). Vincent famously tells Jules that he is NOT going on a date with his boss’ wife, that he’s simply showing her a good time as a favor to a very powerful man but during their wild night out Vincent and Mia make what Chuck Woolery would call a love connection despite wildly varying interests. Vincent is, of course, a high-functioning heroin addict while Mia’s preference is for cocaine. 

Re-watching Pulp Fiction I was struck by how young Thurman was when she made the film. Thurman was barely old enough to drink legally yet in Mia Wallace she very confidently, even cockily embodies the forceful spirit of a woman who has lived. She’s married and retired, although that implies she enjoyed a career as an actress, when her acting life seems to have consisted on a role on a failed pilot called Fox Force Five. 

Thurman’s youth works within the context of the character. On a non-date date with one of her husband’s killers for hire, Mia would obviously want to come off as precociously world-weary. Besides, we are not our true selves on first dates but rather our best selves. That’s Mia Wallace at Jackrabbit Slim’s: funny, sexy, brazenly self-confident and chatty and verbose in a way only people flying on cocaine can genuinely be. 

Vincent and Mia’s date for the ages takes an unfortunate turn when Mia mistakes Vincent’s heroin for cocaine and it takes a syringe full of adrenaline to the heart to keep her from dying of an overdose. When a mortified Vincent drives Mia back to her home we see Mia as she truly is: a goddamned kid who just barely survived a dream date that turned predictably into a comic nightmare. 

Pulp Fiction is boldly, bravely, even revolutionarily casual. Pulp Fiction realizes its auteur’s meticulous vision down to a cellular, molecular level but unlike the dire knockoffs that followed in its path, it never tries too hard to be cool. It doesn’t try to be cool: it just is. It swaggers with genuine confidence where its facile imitators work up a mighty flop sweat desperately trying to impress audiences with coolness, attitude and gleeful transgression.   

Pulp Fiction elevates casual conversation to the level of irresistible pop art. It’s seemingly in a terrible hurry to skip past what other movies would consider the good parts to get back to its comfort zone of richly drawn lowlives and opportunists shooting the shit. 

Take, for example, the pugilistic killing at the center of the story about Butch’s travails. Instead of showing Butch (Bruce Willis) literally murdering a motherfucker in a boxing ring with his hands in defiance of an order to throw the fight from a terrifying gangster we instead skip directly to the aftermath so that Bruce Willis, a paragon of stoic masculinity, can kibitz at length with aggressively quirky women turned on by the brutality of his profession and his effortless cool.  

When Butch’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl girlfriend monologues about how sexy a little cellulite can be Pulp Fiction briefly but fascinatingly becomes one of those French New Wave classics where lovers banter flirtatiously and philosophically in dialogue that’s alternately improvised or written by Jean Luc-Godard earlier that day. 

In scenes that seemingly no one ever talks about, Bruce Willis is sexy and playful and funny and deeply engaged, all qualities he seemingly lost for good some time in the aughts. Pulp Fiction is a film of wonders, like Vincent Vega becoming an icon of cool despite alternating between the two least hairstyles in existence—the modified mullet and ponytail—and Bruce Willis actually trying. 

The world has changed tremendously since 1994 in ways that impact the way we see the film. When Pulp Fiction was released, its brazen use of racial slurs was the subject of much controversy. From the vantage point of 2020, Tarantino’s use of one word in particular still feels provocative and incendiary, button-pushing and attention-grabbing. But it feels like something else as well: realistic. 

In Pulp Fiction, racism is not the exclusive domain of the wild-eyed redneck who sodomizes unfortunate souls in his basement sex dungeon but rather an insidious poison that taints and corrupts everything it comes into contact with. Racism is a pervasive force within Pulp Fiction; it transcends class and gender and shapes and molds the way people see themselves and the world around them. 

Part of the reason Tarantino caught so much flak for using the most loaded word in the English language is because he himself utters it multiple times in his role as Jimmie, a domestic type whose home Vincent and Jules come to with a dead body to dispose of and a whole lot of drama he does not need in his life. The twist is that the wife Jimmie is terrified will come home and see him involved in gangster shit is black. 

On a larger metaphorical level it seems like Tarantino feels like he’s symbolically married to black culture, that he sees himself as someone who inhabits world of blackness from the inside out rather than as an outsider, and is consequently free to use words that would otherwise be verboten to him as a white man. 

Pulp Fiction is consequently problematic as well as perfect. It’s a testament to its depth that I got substantially more out of it the ninth time than the eighth. 

At this point in the Travolta/Cage journey I am obscenely grateful for good Travolta movies, let alone movies that earn their reputations as game-changing all-time greats the way Pulp Fiction does. 

Tarantino brought Travolta back in a big way with Pulp Fiction. Travolta made the most of his comeback and rocketed to the A-list for much of the rest of the 1990s. At this point, however, Travolta’s career is in the toilet every bit as much as it was when Travolta got cast as Vincent Vega. 

Tarantino, however, remains at the very top of his field and his game. So I very much hope the multiple Academy Award winning superstar throws his old pal a lifeline by casting him in his next film because good lord could the man use a break right now.  

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