:: 11.14.2003 ::

Pulp Fiction
Eureka! There is intelligent life in the inky universe of film studies! I stumbled across an insightful exegesis of Pulp Fiction on Metaphilm. Here's a preview:

In addition to the pop iconography in the film, its discourse on language is concerned with naming things. What's a Big Mac called? What’s a Quarter Pounder called? What's a Whopper called? (Vincent doesn't know—he didn't go to Burger King.) When Ringo (Tim Roth) calls the waitress "garçon," she tells him: "'garçon' means 'boy'." When Butch's girlfriend refers to his means of transportation as a "motorcycle," he insists on correcting her: "It's not a motorcycle, it's a chopper."

And yet—and here's the crux—when a lovely Hispanic cab driver asks Butch what his name means, he replies: "This is America, honey; our names don't mean shit." The point is clear: in the absence of any lasting transcendent or objective framework of value and meaning, our language no longer points to anything beyond itself. To call something good or evil makes it so, since there's no higher authority or criteria by which one might judge such things. Jules quotes the "Bible" before his executions, but he might as well be quoting the Fonz or Buddy Holly.

This absence of any kind of foundation for making value judgments, this lack of a larger meaning to their lives, creates a kind of vacuum in their existence that is soon filled by power. Lacking any other ordering principle for their lives, Vincent and Jules fall into a hierarchy of power, with the crime boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) at the top and themselves as henchmen below.

Read all of Mark T. Conrad's astute interpretation here.

:: Posted by Grant "C.K." Dexter Haven @ 7:23 PM [+] ::
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