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Like an ominous oil-slick, the Death Drive is lapping at the L.A. coast. Recent films set in the paradigmatic late-capitalist city (Blade Runners, The Grifters, Short Cuts, and The Player) are haunted by an inchoate force beyond both pleasure and reality. Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, like its predecessors, presents a heterogeneous group of characters drawn against an L.A. background where violence and destruction lurk as surely as the palms and palpitating oil-wells. The film draws freely on a rich cinematic unconscious. With comic ease and a virtuoso polyvalence of associations, the film suggests that in the best creative tradition Tarantino “doesn't know what he is doing.”
As in Robert Altman's Short Cuts, the narrative takes the form of several linked stories. The first of these, which begins before the credits roll, frames the rest of the film. Set in a coffee shop (like the opening of Tarantino's earlier Reservoir Dogs, one of many self-references in the film) two small-time crooks engage in a kind of verbal foreplay before passing to the act of robbing the very place where they are having breakfast. Sex and work in Tarantino's fictional reality are presented as interchangeable elements; as with Lacan's Moebius strip, we find ourselves passing imperceptibly from one side to the other.
The conversation between Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent (John Travolta) as they drive to work in the early morning L.A. traffic is manifestly trivial banter, which these performers deliver like wine-tasters savoring rare Sauternes. The subjects discussed range from the marketing of hashish in Amsterdam and the French for a McDonald's quarterpounder with cheese, to gossip concerning a business associate who was thrown out of a fourth-floor window by their boss, reputedly for intimacies with the boss's wife. This last subject is remarkable for the dialectical twists and turns that pivot on the masked homosexuality in their relationship. Here, as elsewhere in the film, Tara