Pulp Fiction Themes

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Recommended: Elements of post classical hollywood cinema

Taking ONE film or TV programme discuss the ways in which academic concepts can help us to understand scriptwriting and the screenplay Your answer MUST (a) explore TWO or THREE of the concepts introduced in key lectures and readings and (b) analyse a selection of examples including film and media texts, film and media scripts and your own production work.

Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is an extremely interesting case study to explore conceptually. There are a wide range of concepts I could be analyzing in reference to this film however the main ones I shall be exploring are Intertextuality between this film and his others as well as certain intertextual inspiration he may have taken from past texts. I shall also be examining Pulp Fiction …show more content…

Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretation of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. Pulp Fiction has demonstrates a breakdown of the chronological order within the film formulating a specific captivation with intertextuality ‘bringing in texts from both traditionally "high" and "low" realms of art’ (Kretzschmar 2002, 6) placing the film in the theory of postmodernism as through this reference Pulp Fiction falls into one of Dominic Strinati’s (1995) five key features of postmodernism ‘3. Breakdown of the distinction between high art and popular culture’ as the film embraces both the ‘high’ art and ‘low’ art of ‘popular’ (Hollywood). ‘Pastiche is a technique peculiar to postmodernism because it denies the existence of – refuses to acknowledge – the original form it appears to be imitating’ (Jameson 1991:17) highlighting Pulp Fiction’s pastiche use of different interlinking storylines filled with completely different characters and genres borrowed from different films. Some of the filming techniques used can be considered pastiche of the past as it may seem that Tarantino is deliberately using historically bad backdrops whilst Vincent and Jules drive around as well as using the visual effect of square referencing historic colloquialisms. Even the title ‘Pulp Fiction’ and the overall structure of the film presents a pastiche of the pulp idiom as this specific type of fiction was printed with cheap pulp paper and presented in a non-linear order with each chapter containing its own title. A certain example of pastiche used in Pulp Fiction pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho 1960, the scene where Marcellus Wallace walks in front of Butches car whilst stopping for a red copying from Psycho’s where Marion’s boss appears in front of her car whilst crossing the street. The

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