Allow Me to Retort: The Intellectual Violence of Pulp Fiction

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Culture has a very special relationship with murderers, as it is simultaneously accused of creating them and tasked with representing them. Emotionally, culture often revels in the shock-value and morbid sex-appeal of killers (Natural Born ones, in particular…) while also claiming a moral high-ground from which to criticise them. A love-hate relationship, if you will.

Naturally, this relationship creates problems. I once read a screenwriting manual – oh, don’t act like you’ve never done it, in the back of a Barnes & Noble, when you thought no one was looking – that talked about the need for audience empathy in violent movies, using Pulp Fiction as its prime example. In particular, the writer claimed that the professional killers John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson (Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield) are made empathetic through a dialogue in which their Gangster boss is made to seem much worse than they are.

The writer – let’s call him Snyder- is a good two-thirds right. We do need to be empathetic to protagonists, whether they are murderers or sacrificial lambs, and the dialogue does make Vincent and Jules empathetic. But it’s not at all about making their boss comparatively worse. It’s about intellectualising violence, the special sauce that makes this arguably the best Gangster movie ever written.

We like these guys not because they are less bad than their boss – if anything, they seem worse to me – but because they are so darn philosophical. And they are philosophical about the least intellectual subjects, sex and violence, which gives them that unique Tarantino smell. We often watch movies about characters who enjoy killing, and in the right context, dramas about characters who enjoy debating. If then, you give us characters who enjoy debating, killing, and debating about killing, and life could not be better.

I suspect all my readers know the foot-massage dialogue, so I’ll keep the summary brief: the ethical issue at hand is whether a certain mister Tony Rocky Horror deserves to be thrown out of the window for giving his boss’ wife a foot massage. I’d like for you to consider how closely the dialogue resembles a Socratic debate:

V: “That’s a damn shame. Still, I have to say, you play with matches you get burned.”

J: “What do you mean?”

V: “You don’t be giving Marcellus Wallace’s new bride a foot massage.”

J: “You don’t think he overreacted?”

V: “Well, Antoine probably didn’t expect Marcellus to react the way he did, but he had to expect a reaction.”

The debate takes the declarative form for a couple of sentences: “foot massage is nothing, I give my mother a foot massage.” “sticking your tongue in the holiest of holies,” etc.. but most of the progression in reasoning follows the socratic style, where Vincent (the Gangster Socrates) leads his interlocutor into a realisation of his logical errors through a series of questions:

“Have you ever given a foot massage?”

“Don’t be telling me about no foot massages. I’m the foot fucking master.”

“Given a lot of them?”

“Shit yeah, I got my technique down and everything. I don’t be tickling or nothing.”

“Would you give a guy a foot massage?”

“Fuck you.”

“You give them a lot?”

“FUCK – YOU”

I think on some level anyone who has encountered Plato’s dialogues was envious of Socrates’ intellectual prowess, and Tarantino is the only writer I know to bring that prowess down to a level anyone can feel comfortable following. The joy, then, is two-fold: you sense that here are some pretty special criminals, and simultaneously that you too can reach the heights of intellectual debate. The linguistic alternations between the purest Ebonics and higher registers of diction, too, speak to both the “high” and the “low” in the viewers.

“I’ve given a million foot massages to a million women, and they always meant something. We act like they don’t, but they do. That’s what’s so fucking cool about them. There’s a sensuous thing going on where, y’know you don’t talk about it but you know it, she knows it, fucking Marcellus knew it, and Antoine should have fucking better known better… You know what I’m saying?”

“It’s an interesting point.”

I suspect in the history of human conversations no one has ever responded to a sentence of 5 “fuck” expletives with the philosophical air that Jules displays with the phrase “interesting point.” This is particularly rich coming after Jules himself was morally outraged at Marcellus’ behaviour. Indeed, the best thing about this movie (with the exception of the Travolta-Thurman episode) is Jules’ intellectualised murders. Before he murders Marcellus’ delinquent partners, he philosophises sarcastically about burgers being the cornerstone of every nutritious breakfast. As he shoots the first one, he still maintains his debating society airs:

“I’m sorry, did I break your concentration? I didn’t mean to do that. Please, continue. You were saying something about best intentions? What’s the matter? Oh, you were finished? Oh, well, allow me to retort”

I also suspect that no one in the history of humanity has used the word “retort” to preface a murder. But what we love about Jules and Vincent is precisely how unrealistic their portrayal is, how they transcend our binaries of violence and philosophy, of high and low subject matter and discourse. The irony and complexity of Jules’ dialogue reaches a climax in the sermon he delivers before the final murder. Not only do we combine socratic debates and charming small-talk with brutal murder in this scene, but we bring biblical righteousness to a hired killing. The dissonance is one of the most extraordinary and mesmerising things ever written.

This raises the ultimate question that has been asked by the many critics of Tarantino’s work – does such wonderful art promote, say, murder? I think so, but I also would say that is an unfortunate byproduct rather than the aim of the piece. Of course Tarantino doesn’t want you killing people (though I imagine he would want you talking like Jules if you were determined to kill people), he has simply landed on a unique equation that creates amazing dialogue and cinema. Intellectual, polite conversation + murder = tremendous art. But in the process, we see how charming murder can be, we get to experience every nerd’s fantasy – their intellectual power augmented with physical superiority, rather than humiliatingly tied to their physical inferiority.

The nerdy instinct that created superheroes created Tarantino’s intellectual violence, and insofar as a lot of shootings are Campus-shootings, it is very possible, maybe even likely, that Tarantino inadvertently gave a murderous voice to brilliant and weak men. I can’t help but wonder how many of our school shooters have enjoyed thinking, right before they killed their teachers and class-mates: “well, allow me to retort.” Pulp Fiction is far too good of a movie, tragically too good.

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