14 Screenplays -- Day 2: Pulp Fiction

Today is Day #2 of the 14 Days of Screenplays: Version 2.0. The script of the day is Pulp Fiction (1994), which won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, the script is notable for its style, distinctive dialogue, and non-linear approach to the plot. There are a great number of things we can discuss about the movie. Let me focus on the plot to ask this basic question:

Why tell the story in a non-linear style?

The first time I read Pulp Fiction, I thought Tarantino had gone the non-linear route because it was stylistically cool. And indeed, it is cool. Arguably, this movie spawned an entire wave of cinemati storytelling, everthing from end-scenes placed up front movies (The Usual Suspects), movies which employ occasional non-linear elements (Out of Sight), to movies whose plot is told in reverse (Memento).

But after reading Pulp Fiction again, I've come to the conclusion that Tarantino, whether he intended it or not, hit upon non-linearity as the only way he could tell one particular subplot in the script, the tale which comprises the 'moral' center of the movie: That story involves the fates of Jules and Vincent.

Tarantino goes to great lengths up front, enormous gobs of seemingly inane dialogue (P. 7-17), to establish Jules and Vincent as sort of philosopher-goofballs, whose vocation, as it happens, is to whack people. So Tarantino has set us up to anticipate yet another post-modern, ironic take on violence, the breakdown of society, etc.

But what is really going on, in my opinion, is farm more traditional: A tale about morality and humanity, one guy who finds it (Jules), and one guy who does not (Vincent). The guy who finds it lives. The guy who does not dies.

What if consider Jules and Vincent to be co-protagonists. Both are confronted by the same story-turning event, the Fourth Man shoot-em-up scene which happens on P. 26, where the shooter bursts out and fires away. Against all odds and in defiance of all logic, both Jules and Vincent survive without a scratch.

Jules is convinced this is a miracle ("We just witnessed a miracle!" -- P. 115), but Vincent denies it, choosing to see the incident as "a freak, but it happens."

Jules is moved by the event to decide to change his lifestyle ("That's it for me. From now on in, you can consider my ass retire." -- P. 116), while Vincent is convinced that Jules is "freakin' out."

The fact that one of them chooses to change and the other doesn't -- that is the reason the non-linear approach to telling the story works.

By presenting the story's seminal moment up front, then moving forward in time to see how Vincent handles the event (no change in attitude) and his resulting death, underscores the importance of the story's other significant moment, one which plays directly to the script's themeline.

On P. 152, back in the coffee shop where the script begins, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny have drawn their weapons and are rousting people, pulling off their twitchy robbery. Eventually they come upon Jules sitting calmly at his booth, wearing his absurd "I'm With Stupid" T-shirt (Vincent happens to be off in the bathroom, a second time his gastro-intestinal timing impacts the plot, his other visit to a bathroom resulting in his untimely death). Pumpkin has his gun trained on Jules, unaware that Jules has his own gun drawn out of sight beneath the table.

Now Jules is faced with a big choice: He could easily blow away Pumpkin, an act which would in effect renounce his recent determination to live a different (moral) life; or he could try another more peaceful tact.

Tarantino literallly presents two potential futures: The first is Jules killing Pumpkin; the second is Jules talking his way through the situation, going so far as to give up his own hard-earned cash to the robbers, allowing them to go free (when Vincent returns from the john, he demonstratres that he still does not 'get' where Jules is coming from -- "Jules, if you give this nimrod fifteen hundred bucks, I'm gonna shoot 'em on general principle.")

The movie ends with the second future winning out -- Pumpkin and Honey Bunny do not die and make off with the cash they have thieved, followed by Jules and Vincent who wordlessly shuffle out of the joint, heading off toward their respective fates.

Bottom line, you, the writer, could not introduce Jules and Vincent in the coffee shop on P. 8 in the middle of a robbery and expect the reader to have any understanding of what the moral dilemma is, what the symbolic lay of the land is, what the story's thematic point is. No, in order to understand what is at stake in this pivotal moment, the reader needs to know more. Otherwise the impact of Jules' transformation would be utterly minimized.

So to sum up, what works so beautifully with the non-linear approach to Pulp Fiction is that:

* We get a chance to witness the opening shoot-out and wonder how it has anything to do with anything else for 141 pages -- until we finally see it pay off.

* We get a chance to meet Jules and see the ingrained violence of his world, setting the bar especially high for him to change.

* We get a chance to live with the Fourth Man's stunned expression after he unloads his pistol to no effect and his pursuant comment, "I don't understand," knowing that something odd took place at the end of that scene; again how will this pay off?

* We get a chance to live with Vincent who doesn't show a depth of soul akin to Jules (and ends up dying for his lack of humanity).

* We get a chance to see another tortured soul with a choice, Butch, who makes the right decision (dignity in refusing to throw the fight), then makes another and even harder choice (goes back to help save Marsellus, the guy who wants him dead), but whose 'moral' decisions result in earning him his freedom and the ability to live a new life.

All that story material, so when we rejoin the Jules' storyline, we 'get' Tarantino's moral landscape. When Jules has his life-altering confrontation with Pumpkin, and a single twitch of a finger could turn their little world into an instant bloodbath, we buy the meaning of the last words Jules says to the nervous robber -- "The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin'. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd."

Pulp Fiction is a great example of non-linear plotting that enhances the story.

So what's your take on the script? What dynamics did you see when you read it?