Film review
Pulp Fiction is both like and unlike Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), another recent film about a set of interlinked LA stories. Short Cuts’ massive editing effort privileged the simultaneity of the unfolding of the various narratives over their individual resolution and temporal progression in today’s ‘LA world’. From its ‘Apocalypse Now’ beginning (the helicopters in spraying formation) to its ‘Apocalypse already’ end (the aftermath of the earthquake) the film takes us from one tale to another without ‘going’ anywhere, except perhaps to the end of narrative significance, be it ethical, political, or poetical. People dies and relationships end, but these events fail to produce meaningful narrative experiences. The disarticulated, distracted characters seem to be asking the spectator and each other ‘How can you kill me? I’m already dead…’ Each story has its own ‘after the earthquake’ which delivers neither moral nor existential closure or disclosure. Julianne Moore’s provocative naked-from-the-waist-down-revelaing-all-about-her-extra-martital-affair scene fails to provoke a decisive narrative outcome, despite its full-frontal approach. Short Cuts’ exacerbated simultaneity begs the question of the possibility of its own coherence-the coexistence of different times (of the individual narratives) and different spaces (of the film’s LA world) in a synthesising unity considered to be the zero degree of meaning.1
Though it is by no means as explicit a concern as its is in Short Cuts, Pulp Fiction also begs the question of coherence, but in a different way. The film’s structure is not dedicated to an exposition of simultaneity. As its title suggests, Pulp Fiction’s interlacing of three different stories has more to do with exploring the conventions of the crime fiction novels and serialised stories of the American thirties and