I remember the posters. The covers of the VHS tapes at Blockbusters. You know the iconic shot. The one dressed up as the cover of the pulp paperback novels the movie emulates. Uma Thurman lays on a bed, cigarette in one hand, a novel in the other. A gun lies right in front of her. I don’t know if there was anything that screamed, “Do not let your kid watch this!” to a Catholic parent any more than the advertising materials for Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
It checked all the wrong boxes. It was not to be watched. And so I went most of my life hearing about this seminal, impactful film and never actually seeing it.
By the time I hit high school in the early 2000’s, my band and Honors English friends were obsessed, I mean OBSESSED with one movie. It wasn’t Pulp Fiction. It was one of its many imitators: The Boondock Saints. I was able to sneak a VHS copy home (we weren’t cool enough for DVD players yet) and watch it when the family was away.
The movie has 239 instances of the F-word. Pulp Fiction has 265 instances (slightly dwarfed by Tarantino’s previous, Reservoir Dogs’ 269 instances). Both films have partnered main characters, with Saints’ Catholic twin brothers, and Pulp Fiction’s Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I have a feeling my dumb teenage brain thought that ultraviolet Catholic criminals dedicated to taking out the scum of the earth would be slightly more permissible to watch than whatever this Tarantino guy had cooked up.
The first time I saw Boondock Saints – either on its own merits seen through my rapidly changing teenage brain, or through the heavy influence of wanting to be a part of the cool conversation with my friends – I absolutely loved it. I laughed all the way through. I found it supremely entertaining and couldn’t wait to rave about it with my buddies back at school.
But when I saw the movie again four years later, this time with a very Catholic friend, I had a completely different experience. While my friend loved it and found it hilarious, I found it to be a transgressive piece of trash. All the swearing and over-the-top violence grated on me. It felt designed to speak to my teenage brain, but had nothing to offer my slightly-more-mature college brain. Maybe it was all the foreign films I had seen. Maybe I had more sophisticated taste. Maybe, just maybe, the movie was always that awful and I needed time to see it. Who knows?
What I do know is that if there was ever a time to see and appreciate Pulp Fiction for what it is, the time was now. With Tarantino’s newest just arriving in theaters and Pulp Fiction an easy few buttons away on Netflix, I decided to hunker down and see what 25 years of fuss was all about.
From what I had seen with Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, I had grown to love just how much fun Tarantino has with his movies. You can disagree with his choices. You can call his dialogue too writerly. You can say he uses too many references and maybe a little too much violence. You can say all these things, but you cannot say the man does not absolutely entertain himself before anyone else. You can hear the giggling behind the screen in every frame. In every song choice, every carefully-worded monologue and shocking blast of violence.
From a screenwriting perspective, what stuns me the most about Tarantino and Roger Avary’s script is how it feels so structurally sound despite being told out of order. If you placed all the scenes in their chronological order, we’d see Jules have a conversation with Marcellus Wallace about quitting the game much sooner, and then he’d be off the chessboard. But we don’t see this anxiety about the future from Jules until the last 20-30 minutes of the movie, when Jules and Vincent’s storyline collides with the restaurant robbery that begins the movie. And after we’ve seen Butch blow off a promise to try and escape his own game, get nearly killed 3 different times and somehow escape with the same guy who broke his promise to, we’re left with one question that Jules answers in his own way: if you have a chance to get out of this awful, bloody game, why wouldn’t you take it?
We see how dangerous the game is in the opening acts of the film, see all the things that can go wrong when drugs and business get mixed up, and then we get many many instances of people being in the wrong place and wrong time and paying dearly for it. It’s an brutal, taxing game. For all it’s problematic elements, this is still a very entertaining movie that’s aged reasonably well, a worthy wine of a movie for those ridiculous Catholic brothers to get a taste of.
