I’m working on a post about Rorshach, and it reminded me of a thought I had during my seventh or eighth viewing of Pulp Fiction. Jules (Samuel Jackson) tells us that fearsome Biblical quote he uses is just a badass thing to say, a tool of the trade. But there’s no business reason for him to use it. When he’s terrorizing those boys early in the movie, there’s nothing he wants them to do, no lesson he wants to engrave on their minds. Vincent (John Travolta) has found the stolen briefcase and now there’s nothing to do but execute the boys and let their bodies rot. Why torment them? If you think about it, Jules is not a just a thug but a sadist. But we don’t think about it. That’s because he’s going thru the whole rigamarole for our sakes. We enjoy aiming that gun and browbeating that pasty-faced little squirrel. People don’t dream so much about being violent, more about having the complete upper hand and seeing their advantage played out in the face of their opponent.
Personally, I think this fact is a byproduct of office life. On the frontier you might have the opportunity to hit someone but not the guts. We still don’t have the guts, but nowadays hitting isn’t the point; you just want to see the other guy blink. Consider all the perfectly innocent witnesses on Law and Order and CSI who are morally one-upped by the cops and then look at their shoes or try to swallow their lips. Considering that we have to find a killer, who cares if some guy used a fake name on a date? We do because it gives us a chance to see the guy’s face crumple.
I think Tarantino is pretty on top of that. Jules actually says he says that stuff not to terrorize anybody but because it’s “some bad ass shit”, if I remember correctly. He thinks it makes him cool…and later on he decides that it doesn’t, and that he needs to cut it out.
He decides that he needs to cut out the violence, to stop being a thug. But I don’t see an indication that Jules or Tarantino, or the audience, realizes that he was also being a sadist. As I remember it, when he says he thought the quote was just some badass shit, he means he never thought about what the quote meant, not that he never thought about why he was taking the time to scare people to no purpose.
I think Tarantino’s pretty smart about violence and its moral connotations in general. In Pulp fiction it seems to me that part of being a thug is being a sadist, and Jules’ recognition has to do with realizing that glorifying violence and cruelty is wrong, or at least problematic.
Ah well. A final judgment must await another viewing of the film, which could be a while.
“I think Tarantino’s pretty smart about violence and its moral connotations in general.”
“Kill Bill” was ridiculous in its final scene’s portrayal of a child blissfully content that the only parent she had ever known had been slaughtered in the back yard so she could go live with some stranger she had never known.
Kill Bill 2 was really not Tarantino’s best moment. I think he couldn’t really figure out how to integrate the themes of motherhood and violence, and the result ended up being a hash. I talk about it at some length here.
I remember realizing that I thought Pulp Fiction was just decent. And then I saw Res Dogs and began to dislike him utterly; not because I didn’t like Res Dogs, because I DID. Everything Tarantino has ever done since then is try to copy his first film in different forms.
Really? There are lots of similarities, since it’s the same guy making the films, but plenty of differences too. I mean, the Kill Bill movies have all those crazy bells and whistles, True Romance is an extended daydream (whereas Res Dogs is by way of being a tragedy), and so on.
I have to admit True Romance is my favorite Tarantino. I don’t mind that whole Tony Scott-Ridley Scott-Michael Bay-Adrian Lyne style of direction. No, all right, I’ll say it: I like that kind of direction.
Death Proof is probably my favorite one of his movies at this point. And it’s very different from his others.
I haven’t seen True Romance, though.
I think the actual line is “I thought it was some cold shit to say to a motherfucker before I put a cap in his ass”, which does seem to indicate some sadism, or at least something more than just badassery.