The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Quentin Tarantino · a film · 1994 · directed by Quentin Tarantino
Mode
Crime film as a book of linked stories, told out of order; pulp and genre surfaces turned on a moral choice
Mythos
The sign given to two men, accepted by one and refused by the other; the descent below the earth and the return by choice; the father’s token carried through war
Phase
One morning and the days around it, from a coffee shop robbery begun to the same robbery ended, with a death in the middle of the story that the film sets near its middle and then moves past
Presentation
Feature film, the theatrical cut of about 154 minutes, in colour, with title cards for three chapters; no original score, a selection of existing recordings in its place
Register
One deadpan key from a twist contest to a pawnshop basement; farce and horror held level
Scale
Two killers, a boxer, a gangster and his wife, a fixer, a handful of rooms
Governing Proposition
Two hired killers, a boxer, a gangster and his wife pass one long stretch of criminal time in talk, and the film tells their stories out of order so that it ends on a reprieve. The wager of the film is that violence in this world is an accident or a choice rather than a fate, and that the men who live by it are each given one chance to choose otherwise, which one takes and one refuses.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in a coffee shop with two young lovers, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, played by Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer, talking themselves into robbing it. The robbery begins, and the scene breaks off. Dick Dale’s “Misirlou” plays over the titles. The scene will not be finished until the end of the film, and the film is built between its two halves.
Quentin Tarantino wrote and directed it, from stories by himself and Roger Avary. Lawrence Bender produced it for A Band Apart and Jersey Films, and Miramax distributed it. Andrzej Sekula photographed it, Sally Menke edited it, and David Wasco designed it. There is no original score: the music is a selection of existing recordings, surf instrumentals, soul and pop. The film was shown in competition at Cannes in May 1994, where it won the Palme d’Or, and was released in the United States that October. The film judged here is the theatrical cut of about 154 minutes, the only cut released.
Between the halves of the robbery come three chapters, each with a title card, “Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace’s Wife”, “The Gold Watch” and “The Bonnie Situation”, the second opening with a prelude of its own. They are not told in the order in which they happen. The last of them in story time is set in the middle, a man killed in it walks alive through the two sections that follow, and the film ends, in the order of its story, near its middle.
Movement II
Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega, played by Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta, are killers working for Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames). They drive to an apartment to retrieve a briefcase, talking on the way of hamburgers in Amsterdam, the “Royale with Cheese”, and arguing over a foot massage. The case, when opened, glows, and its contents are never shown. Before a killing Jules recites the Ezekiel passage, as theatre. The talk is the action, and the killing interrupts it.
Vincent takes Marsellus’s wife, Mia (Uma Thurman), out for an evening. At Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a theme restaurant under a fake 1950s sky, she describes the pilot episode of a television show, and they dance the twist to Chuck Berry. The scene is a beauty of a lighter order, two performers playing a role borrowed from pop and playing it well.
Then Mia overdoses. At the house of Lance (Eric Stoltz) and Jody (Rosanna Arquette) the household falls into terror played as farce, and an adrenaline needle is driven into her heart. The cut on the needle is the film’s most famous jolt, and the evening ends with the role broken by chance.
Movement III
The prelude: Captain Koons, played by Christopher Walken, visits the boy Butch Coolidge to give him his dead father’s watch, and tells him in a single long monologue how it was carried through two wars and a prison camp. The watch is patrimony passed from father to son through war and through the body, an obscene joke that is still honoured.
The man, Butch (Bruce Willis), has crossed Marsellus over a fixed fight and is running, with Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros). He goes back to the apartment for the watch. There he finds a gun left on the kitchen counter, and Vincent comes out of the bathroom. Vincent is killed on the toilet, at his third visit to the bathroom in the film, the joke repeated until it kills him.
Butch and Marsellus fall into the hands of the men in a pawnshop basement, a place of rape and murder: “bring out the gimp”. Butch gets free and could leave. He chooses among the weapons on the shop floor, takes a katana from the wall and goes back down the stairs for the man who wanted him dead. The knight’s choice is played straight inside a grotesque, and he rides off on a dead man’s chopper, named Grace.
Movement IV
The film returns to the apartment of the first chapter, before Vincent’s evening with Mia, and Vincent is alive again. Shots are fired at Jules and Vincent, and every bullet misses. In the car afterwards they argue whether it was a miracle. Jules reads it as a sign; Vincent calls it luck.
Then Vincent’s gun goes off into the face of Marvin, in the back seat of the car. Violence here is not the fate of genre but an accident. The two men take the car to the suburban house of Jimmie, played by Tarantino himself, and Winston Wolfe, the Wolf (Harvey Keitel), comes to clean up.
The cleanup is comic procedure, conducted with the Wolf’s calm. It is the slackest stretch of the film and the strangest courtesy among killers, men of violence attending to a domestic problem. When it is done the two men go to a coffee shop.
Movement V
The coffee shop is the one in which the film began, and Pumpkin and Honey Bunny rise to rob it. The prologue and the epilogue are one continuous scene, cut in two and set at the ends of the film. Jules holds his gun on Pumpkin.
Jules reads the Ezekiel passage a last time, and this time turns the words on himself. The film stills and rises. He lets Pumpkin go. He has read the bullets that missed as a sign and will walk away from the life, and the reading that was once theatre before a killing has become a choice.
Jules and Vincent walk out of the coffee shop together. Vincent, who has refused the sign, is alive, and the audience has already seen him dead. By ending here, in the middle of the story, the film makes the difference between the two men the last thing it knows: grace offered to both, accepted by one, refused by the other, and the reprieve of one morning held open at the close.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is hardest here, because the film’s manner is digression, and much of what looks removable is paid. The watch Koons carried through a prison camp is why Butch goes back to the apartment, which is why he meets Vincent coming out of the bathroom; Vincent’s visits to the bathroom, a joke repeated, kill him at the third. The gun on the kitchen counter, the adrenaline needle and the bullets that miss are each required by what follows. The talk is the content: the way these men pass the time between deaths. What gives is the length of that talk, the foot-massage argument, the pilot Mia describes, and stretches of the cleanup before the Wolf arrives, which could be shortened without the loss of a fact the film needs.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and the structure delivers it. Violence in this world is not the fate of genre but an accident, Vincent’s gun going off into Marvin’s face in the back of a car, or a choice; and the men who live by it are each given one chance to choose otherwise. Jules reads the bullets that miss as a sign and walks away, and lives. Vincent calls it luck and stays, and dies on a toilet. Butch, free and clear, goes back down the stairs for the man who wants him dead. The idle duration of criminal time and the strange courtesy among killers are shown in image and sound as fully as in words. Held from the gate because the moral turn is carried by two scenes, much of what the film shows is a manner and a pleasure, and its women and its city are seen only from inside the genre.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The elevation is frequent and mostly of one kind, the jolt: exhilaration and dread turned on a cut. The adrenaline needle driven into Mia’s heart, the household’s terror played as farce, is the most famous. The twist at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Travolta and Thurman dancing to Chuck Berry under a fake 1950s sky, is a beauty of a lighter order. The pawnshop basement, “bring out the gimp”, and Butch’s choice among the weapons on the shop floor build dread into something like a rite. The summit is Jules’s last reading of the Ezekiel passage in the coffee shop, the gun held on Pumpkin and the same words now turned on himself; the film stills and rises. Held below the top because the height is chiefly the height of shock and style, and elevation rarely reaches feeling for longer than a scene.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The myth is built where it bears load. Two men are given a sign; one accepts it and one refuses, and the structure, by ending on the one who accepts, makes the old pattern of grace offered and refused govern the whole. Butch’s story is a descent: down into a basement under a shop, among men worse than his enemies, and back up the stairs by choice, taking a katana from the pawnshop wall to free the man who was hunting him, the knight’s choice played straight inside a grotesque. The watch is patrimony passed from father to son through war and through the body, a grail made into an obscene joke and still honoured. Held below the gate because the patterns are carried lightly and as play: the briefcase, glowing and never shown, is a talisman without content, and the film winks at its myths as often as it builds them.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is plain: the pulp crime magazine the title names; the hardboiled film; Godard’s play with genre and the dance in Bande à part (1964); Leone’s duration before violence; Kubrick’s broken chronology in The Killing (1956); Tarantino’s own Reservoir Dogs (1992). The departure is real and was wagered. It made a broken chronology the governing law of a mainstream crime film, not a device, so that the hero of one section dies in the middle and returns; it made conversation the main action and violence the interruption; it cast a faded star as a heroin-using killer who talks about hamburgers in Amsterdam, the “Royale with Cheese”. The stake was an independent film at a modest budget, an unproven structure and scenes of a kind studios cut. It reaches the bar and no further, held there because the turn is a synthesis of moves already made, by a director whose first film had proved the manner.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the film loses its meaning. Told in order, it would end with Butch riding off on a dead man’s chopper, named Grace, and Vincent’s death, two thirds through the story, would be a punchline. Reordered, it ends on Jules’s choice and on Vincent alive, walking out of the coffee shop beside him, a man the audience has already seen killed; the form makes the difference between the two men the last thing the film knows. The chapter cards make the work a book of stories, and the prologue split from its epilogue frames the whole as one morning’s chance of reprieve. Scenes the length of conversations are the form of the criminal’s idle time. Held from the top because within each section the form is conventional, and the reordering, load-bearing as it is, is one move rather than a form worked through every scene.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Thirty-two years of return are evidence, and the questions have stayed open. Whether Jules’s conversion is real or another performance, since he has used the same passage before as theatre. Whether the film’s moral turn is sincere or a frame for its pleasures. What the reordering means for fate and choice. How its use of race and its language should be read, a question that has grown with time rather than settled. On formal return the rhymes reward attention: the bathroom, the two restaurants, the two pairs of lovers, the repeated reckonings over who is owed what. Held at the figure because much of the return is to lines, performances and design rather than to new meaning, and the most argued question, what the case holds, is a riddle with no answer by intention, not a depth.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Released in 1994, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of the 1990s. Intrinsic force: the film showed that broken chronology, dialogue as main action and genre pastiche could carry a popular film, and it gave American crime cinema a new grammar of talk before violence and comedy inside horror. It perfected and enlarged a manner as much as it reorganised possibility, which holds it from the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May 1994 and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay; the success that made Miramax the model of independent production as a commercial category; a wave of imitators within five years, crime films built of chatter, chapters and needle drops, in America and in Britain; existing recordings used as score made a common practice. The successors borrowed the surface more than the meaning, and that is discounted.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty-two years. The form survives whole: one cut, never revised or replaced, its original version always in circulation; the deleted and extended scenes issued later on home video are not part of the film. Presence has been continuous and of the widest kind for the span: in repertory and on every form of home video, in teaching, in quotation, in parody, and in the general memory of people who have seen little else of the decade’s cinema. Fame is not proof of permanence, and wide presence is credited by a tenth at most. The fabric is charged a little: its pop references are already history to younger viewers, and its racial language has become a live objection in exhibition. The pop is mostly retro by design, the 1950s diner, the twist and surf guitar, and ages as style already aged.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The writing is the first instrument: long scenes built of argument and digression that keep tension under talk, with lines that passed into common speech. Sally Menke’s editing carries the reordering and the timing of shock, the cut on the needle, the bathroom door, the gun on the counter. The performances are commanded throughout, Jackson above all, with Travolta, Thurman, Rhames and Keitel, and Walken in a single long monologue. The recordings are chosen and placed with exact effect. Andrzej Sekula’s photography is clean, saturated and functional, rarely the instrument of meaning. The costs are real: Tarantino’s own Jimmie is the weakest performance in a key scene, parts of the third section move slowly, and the craft’s gestures are sometimes visible as gestures. The making carries the form in fewer departments than that of Chinatown (8.6) or The Third Man (8.5).
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the twist at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, a dance in a theme restaurant, and the pawnshop basement, rape and murder. One law governs both: a world in which every act is a performance of a role borrowed from pop and genre, and in which chance breaks through the performance and asks for a real choice. The dance is the role played well; the basement is the role become monstrous; Mia’s overdose breaks the first, and Butch’s return breaks the second. A single deadpan register holds farce and horror in the same key, and the chaptered form makes the range a design rather than a drift. The strain: the Wolf’s comic procedure obeys the law only loosely, and Jules’s conversion, which the ending needs to bear the whole, is set in a tone the film has spent two hours teaching us not to take seriously.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 154 minutes holds. The criminal economy and its codes of debt, loyalty and honour; marriage, in its tenderness between Butch and Fabienne and its threat between Marsellus and Mia; war and inheritance, in a watch carried through two wars and a camp; the sacred, in the Ezekiel passage, the bullets that miss and Jules’s choice; consumer America, in the diners, the theme restaurant, the television pilot and the brand names; the suburb, in Jimmie’s house; sport and its fixing. The watch, the fix and the conversion run through one structure, and the orders are integrated. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: the state and the law (no police enter), labour except as crime, a family beyond one marriage and a dead father’s watch, consciousness shown from within rather than as talk, and a city seen as more than a set of interiors.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, then The Made at 8.7, then The Imperishable at 8.6. A film that gave American crime cinema a new grammar of talk before violence and moved its decade’s field; a making in which writing, editing and performance carry long scenes of talk under tension; and a single cut in continuous circulation for thirty-two years.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.1: the criminal economy, marriage, war and inheritance, the sacred and consumer America are held in one structure, but the state and the law are absent, labour exists only as crime, and consciousness is shown only as talk. Above it, The Sublime at 7.9, an elevation chiefly of shock and style, and The Inevitable, The Unconcealment and The Bottomless Well at 8.1: talk that could be shortened, a moral turn carried by two scenes, and a return drawn as much to lines as to meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 falls two tenths short and The Unconcealment at 8.1 four tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.9, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate, unmet on The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep, and by its aggregate, 8.3 from a sum of 99.0, against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Pulp Fiction as released, the theatrical cut of about 154 minutes, from the coffee shop to the coffee shop: written and directed by Quentin Tarantino from stories by Tarantino and Roger Avary, produced by Lawrence Bender for A Band Apart and Jersey Films, distributed by Miramax, photographed by Andrzej Sekula, edited by Sally Menke, with production design by David Wasco, shown in competition at Cannes in May 1994 and released in the United States in October 1994. Only one cut has been released; deleted and extended scenes issued later on home video are not part of the film and are not judged. No print, screenplay or recording was consulted, and shot-level detail is not argued from. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and the Ezekiel passage is described rather than quoted. Figures that could not be verified, among them the budget, the box-office returns, the scene timings, the shot count and the share of the running time given to dialogue, are not given.