By Luke Goodsell of the ABC
John Travolta, Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. Photo: AFP
In a year that gave us Nancy Kerrigan's shattered grimace, Kurt Cobain's lifeless sneakers and OJ Simpson leading the world's slowest police chase, 1994's most unforgettable image might just be Samuel L. Jackson's jheri-curled hitman in Pulp Fiction, savouring a slow, sinister slurp from a Big Kahuna soda as he prepares to lay his vengeance upon some unlucky kids.
When the second film from writer-director Quentin Tarantino hit cinemas 30 years ago, it was more than just a critical and commercial smash - it was an instant cultural sensation, arguably the defining American movie of its decade.
An LA story of garrulous thugs, twist contests, prize fighters and gimps, it was a fresh, funny, irresistibly quotable blast. It blended exploitation movies, the European New Wave and its maker's grubby video-store obsessions to haul the underground into the mainstream - not unlike a cinematic Nevermind, or Jean-Luc Godard via the Dust Brothers.
"Pulp Fiction played in suburban multiplexes, and crowded the shelves at video rental chains. It was a rupture of disreputability and energy into the unsuspecting mainstream," New York magazine and Vulture film critic Alison Willmore tells the ABC.
"I first saw Pulp Fiction as a teenager, and I didn't stand a chance."
Critics (well, most) loved it, Cannes gave it the Palme d'Or, and Tarantino won a Best Screenplay Oscar. It made US $213 million off an $8 million budget, launched a multi-platinum soundtrack, and John Travolta's second act. Jackson became ubiquitous on movie screens; Uma Thurman became ubiquitous on bedroom walls.
Surf guitar instrumentals, references to Royales with Cheese and just who was getting medieval on whose ass soon became part of the cultural fabric.
"There was definitely a sense that Pulp Fiction was the movie to watch. And being an impressionable teenager, I fell in line," says Beverley Wang, ABC's National Culture Correspondent and host of podcast Stop Everything!.
Radio National film critic and host of The Screen Show Jason Di Rosso says its cultural impact could be seen at Halloween parties, when suddenly everyone was dressing up as Uma Thurman's Mia Wallace "in a black wig and white blouse with a giant syringe sticking out of their chest".
"People were suddenly ready for Pulp Fiction's black humour, its violence, its drugs," he explains. "It reflected a broader generational change in mainstream cultural sensibilities, and neo-liberalism as the dominant ideology of the post-Cold War was a big part of this. Pulp Fiction, with its shifting perspectives, fragmented storytelling and post-modern bricolage, made perfect sense.
"There were new freedoms, but also new anxieties," Di Rosso adds. "Pulp Fiction interrogated the romance of the gangster epic, replacing wiseguys with killers who were cheeseburger-eating gig workers."
Everybody be cool
Pulp Fiction also appeared to herald a new era in American cinema.
It electrified the independent film scene, set the bar for aspiring screenwriters, and had Hollywood A-listers - in the wake of Bruce Willis's creatively renewed performance - booking indie projects to boost their cred. Not incidentally, it also magnified the power of executive producer Harvey Weinstein.
An attempt to catalogue every single film or show that Pulp Fiction influenced - from Trainspotting and Boogie Nights, to Spice World and the Bad Guys - would leave you as bewildered as, well, the confused Travolta meme.
The movie would also inspire a plague of inferior knock-offs, as screens were overrun with yappy hitmen and other pop culture chatterboxes. Tarantino seemed to see the writing on the wall, bucking expectations with his muted 1998 follow-up, Jackie Brown.
Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. Photo: AFP
"I think with Tarantino, it was the imitations that made him less cool," argues critic and podcaster Alexei Toliopoulos.
"While he evolved into a more interesting and mature filmmaker with Jackie Brown and Inglourious Basterds, the filmmakers working within the Tarantino-sploitation niche took over the crimey but kinda funny and overtly cool space."
The rise of the film bro
John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson in Pulp fiction. Photo: MIRAMAX / A BAND APART
One of the side effects of Pulp Fiction was the rise of the hyper-effusive, know-it-all movie fan - think Jamie Kennedy in Scream - who soon became synonymous with the so-called 'film bro'.
"Pulp Fiction was forced upon me by a dude that had the Mia Wallace poster on his wall," recalls ABC Entertainment writer Velvet Winter, echoing an experience no doubt familiar to others.
"I do remember passionately hating it. I just couldn't get over how thinly written the female characters are and how little I cared about the action, but I'm not a huge Tarantino fan to begin with," she says.
Looking back, Wang says she has mixed feelings.
"I owe Tarantino a certain debt of gratitude, because he opened the door to appreciating a whole world of cinema beyond the shopping centre cineplex. But then thinking about how it came to symbolise a kind of unwelcoming film-bro vibe, I'm less enamoured," she says.
"Every generation of viewers are invariably going to challenge anything deemed a classic," says ABC film critic Jamie Tram. Still, she questions the dismissal of Pulp Fiction as as 'film bro' cinema.
"[That] not only cedes ground to boring gender essentialism, it makes it harder to truthfully evaluate a movie that's become the cornerstone of contemporary cinema - for better and for worse," she says.
"Younger viewers are still connecting with Pulp Fiction's characters -Mia Wallace is forever iconic - and have recognised the film as an influential turning point in our own, endlessly referential cinema."
For Toliopoulos, who saw the movie "countless" times as a teenager but hadn't revisited it since, a recent rewatch proved a revelation.
"I retained second-by-second, frame-by-frame, syllable-by-syllable, near-perfect recollection of the film," he says. "I loved it all over again."
"That it's become unhip to love the movie is a testament to its influence," adds Willmore. "For me, its one-time omnipresence and continuing traction among casual film fans is part of its power as much as it is part of the baggage it might have."
As Willmore says: "It, undeniably, still slaps."
Toliopoulos agrees, saying he thinks Pulp Fiction "has swung right back around to being cool again".
- This story was first published by the ABC
