“Serious Gourmet Shit”: Quentin Tarantino’ sPulp Fiction
Year: 1999
Type: article
Abstract: Summary Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994a) is a prime instance of postmodern meta‐cinema, a highly eclectic anthology of narratives which oscillate between filmic genres. Tarantino sets up his stories within the regime of the crime film, then overwrites this with the codes of comedy, using humorous conventions to defuse the suspense of the crime thriller and register its elements as comic. These two sets of conventions organise narrative materials in different ways, offering radically different forms of viewer identification and different forms of closure. The whole is organised as a comic mise en abyme in which the cultural debris of the text mirrors the subjectivity of its characters, and the fictional predicaments of its protagonists mirror the decoding dilemmas of the film's spectators. Pulp Fiction operates as a metatext which at once inhabits and dismantles the conventions of the crime movie and “performs” the cooperative principle of filmic narrativity.
Source: Journal of Literary Studies
Author: Eve Bertelsen
Institution: University of Cape Town
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $388
OpenAlex ID: W2048565355