Pulp Fiction, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, is twenty years old this month having premiered in Cannes, May 1994.
It's a fabulous film: a cinematic desiring-machine in which everything magically comes together and functions perfectly at the same time, despite being cut across a trio of stories and a non-chronological assemblage of scenes that involve violence, humour, romance, and plenty of what Mia might describe as mindless, boring, getting-to-know-you chit-chat which dazzles and delights in its very banality.
The critic who said, rather sneeringly, that whilst it has several great scenes, it's not a great movie simply fails to understand that whilst Tarantino is concerned with creating a singular work of art, he is not attempting to bring its various elements together so as to form a Whole; the kind of unified work which cries out to have 'The End' stamped upon it and is consummated by this.
For Tarantino belongs to a super-smart and super-literate generation of film-makers who understand that breaks in the flow of action or even moments in which the narrative stalls leaving viewers confused and bored, are in and of themselves productive and vital processes of becoming and eternal return.
In this respect, Tarantino is the Marcel Proust of Hollywood; one who knows that we live today in the age of partial objects and multiple scenes in which the artist's task is not to produce a finished masterpiece in which heterogeneous bits have their rough edges rounded off so that they might all fit together smoothly. Rather, the task is to think fragmentation, difference, and multiplicity.
Believe in the ruins ...!
