Pulp Memories

Monday is about movies (and sometimes TV). Today I revisit Pulp Fiction…first time in 20 years or more…

In the earlier days of this newsletter, I listed my ranking for all of the Tarantino films. Ever since posting that, I’ve been thinking it would be great to rewatch them all. The stumbling block has been that the first two films are now around 30 years old, I’ve seen them both way too often, and I’m a very different person now, though that’s actually a reason to revisit them.

But, the arrival of The Big TV has brought with it the rediscovery of Blu Ray. So I’m starting to work through some of the discs I’ve stockpiled, and I took a trip to the last Video Store standing to get even more…

I watched Reservoir Dogs for easily the first time in 20 years. I expected to just have it on in the background and let it happen, checking in on it now and then. But I was almost instantly pulled back in. I don’t think I’d ever quite appreciated the sheer Mamet-ness of the dialogue. Everyone knew about the dialogue; knew it was a feature – one that was almost instantly a calling card. But in watching the Scorsese-ness of his camera in that diner scene, I’d never really noticed what a lift it was, him just wholesale taking David Mamet tropes and flinging them from the mouths of his characters.

It was cool.

As was the film.

So, with runs on the board, I decided to dive on back in to Pulp Fiction.

This film holds the record for the most times I’ve been to a cinema to see the same movie.

Six times. I still remember them all. Three times in Hawke’s Bay. Three times in Wellington. It marks the end of high school and the start of university for me. It was the film that convinced me that going to the cinema can be an event.

My older brother had returned during a university holiday with the videotape of Reservoir Dogs for us all to watch. It was the talk of the town, he’d seen it as part of some film festival and me and my folks loved it. Everyone loved it of course. We were no doubt just catching up, but in little old Havelock North in 1993 (by the time we got to it on VHS) we still felt a bit ahead of the pack. In early conversations after, you’d have to explain the hype around the director, and the coolness of the film. It was hard to describe, but “ya just had to see it!”

So Pulp was something to anticipate. It had been billed as a John Travolta comeback. We knew it was going to have a cool soundtrack. We knew it was going to have some other great actors in the cast, a walk-on or two, some reappearances from some of the Res Dogs cast…

And so it was off to see it on a Friday afternoon. I’d finished seventh form. And was in that purgatory ahead of university. Me and a couple of mates went to the 2pm screening of Pulp. We talked about it with all of our friends after. That night out drinking we were already doing our best to replicate the dialogue, so taken in by the audacity of some of the scenes.

A plan was hatched that at 2pm the next day a couple of us would go again. We took a couple of others from the gang, to introduce them.

Another night at the pub after, underage, and full of it. More plot-spoilers and botched impressions.

And then, at 2pm on the Sunday I watched Pulp Fiction for the third time in a row. Same cinema, same screening time, practically the same seats. A couple of new friends in tow.

After that weekend, I was obsessed.

A week later I packed up everything I owned and moved to Wellington. First walk down Cuba Street I bought a Reservoir Dogs poster (from the shop that is now the Flying Nun headquarters) to hang in my hostel. Someone I had just met had a wallet engraved with Bad Mother Fucker. He had bought a Zippo too. We bonded over Tarantino, jazz music and a few other things. But Pulp Fiction was one of the obsessions in that hostel. (If we ever have a reunion there’ll probably be a twist contest, ffs).

If you walked past other rooms you’d hear Counting Crows, Pearl Jam, Offspring. But if it wasn’t the Reservoir Dogssoundtrack when you walked past my room then it was absolutely the songs from Pulp Fiction. (Or Natural Born Killers or True Romance).

Straight after buying that Res Dogs poster, moneybags-me forked for the Pulp soundtrack on full-priced CD with a bonus disc that featured Quentin Tarantino talking about the musical selections, and how he’d wanted My Sharona for the Gimp scene (it had “a sodomy beat”).

We passed this information around like secret wisdom. We had years to wait for podcasts. Or social media.

That first weekend in Wellington, my folks came to visit, to say goodbye properly, to drop off more stuff. We squeezed in a screening of Pulp – because they’d loved Dogs so much. They were into the movie, despite me clawing at their arms to “watch this” and “wait for it-wait for it” during far too many of the scenes.

One week after that, a group of us found out there were late night movies in the Big Smoke. We were all kids from Hawke’s Bay and Palmerston North and New Plymouth and Taupo and Tauranga. We were already friends for life (who are they now?) and so, after a few drinks, we went to an 11pm screening of…what else…?

My fifth watch.

We stood up and did the twist during the Jack Rabbit Slim’s scene.

Some time after that, a few months, and the Paramount Theatre (R.I.P.) announced it would be showing Pulp Fiction for the final time on the big screen in Wellington. We bought tickets. Another gang of us from the hostel. We bought beers, and sat on the floor in the very front row, lying up to look at the screen, a giant TV in a giant lounge.

For my birthday that year, I was given Pulp on VHS tape, and watched it a bunch, talking about editing it to put it in the chronology of the film, so that it would finish with Bruce Willis’ Butch doing his “Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead” speech after his “weird” morning. Then driving off into the sunset.

Sometimes I’d just watch a single segment – Mia, or The Gold Watch, or The Bonnie Situation. Saving the tape each time to get to the other segments on other days.

At some point, after a couple of different flats, and many aborted screenings – we’d come home drunk, think Pulp Fictionwas a good one, then fall asleep or drift off anywhere else after about 40 or 90 minutes – I replaced my VHS with a DVD. But I don’t remember watching it much on that format.

I have definitely lost count of the number of times I’ve seen it.

But I had to have watched it right through way more than a dozen times, probably two dozen.
Enough that, a couple of years ago, we saw it on Sky or Netflix or something at my folks’ place, and dad thought it might be a laugh to revisit it. I was able to recall nearly every word of the opening 15 minutes, despite not watching it for about 20 years. Maybe 25.

He was horrified.

Flicking the telly off to head to bed, he said, “well, there’s no point really is there…” Adding, cruelly, and with an archer’s accuracy, “at least we know where all the money went when you were at uni…”

Yahtzee!

Last Saturday night, I sat transfixed watching Pulp Fiction on the back of seeing Reservoir Dogs a day or so before. Both films meant the world to me, and were more important of course for the worlds they opened up. Deep diving down into Tarantino’s influences. And a profound interest in the movies – which continues to this day. In both cases, I owned the soundtracks, bought and read the film scripts, watched alternate angles and deleted scenes and filmed commentaries, and have since listened to podcasts about them and featuring the bit-part players as well as the main stars.

I was worried that Pulp Fiction might mean nearly nothing now – but you should never run from nostalgia. It means enough if it just means that. The film is more a collection of tropes than anything. But what wonderful tropes they were – and in some cases still are. It inspired so many parodies, caricatures, direct lifts, and inferior attempts. It inspired a generation of new filmmakers, some of them just coming into their own now.

And it still crackles like a warm favourite on vinyl.

I just can’t ever imagine myself watching it three days in a row. Once again.