Pulp Fiction

For four days we sat in the dark, tiptoeing through "Pulp Fiction" one scene at a time, using a laserdisc machine so you could freeze a frame or slowly creep through the movie. There were about 300 of us, and democracy ruled: Anybody could make an observation, and we'd stop and discuss it. Our mission: to take a VERY close look at this labyrinthine film.

Of course there are people who intensely dislike "Pulp Fiction." It is possibly the most unpopular movie ever to gross $100 million at the American box office. I've received mail from those who hate the movie. They say it is too violent, too graphic, too obscene, or "makes no sense." Many say they walked out after 20, 30 or 60 minutes. (Given its circular time line, of course it made no sense to them; this is literally a movie where you have to wait until you can say, "This is where we came in.")

Among those who admire it, however, QuentinTarantino's film is the most passionately loved and obsessed-about film of recent years; the discussions about its smallest details have reached the same pitch as the furor over Kubrick's "2001," which inspired a book that transcribed even the directions for the Zero Gravity Toilet. On campuses and among younger viewers, there is no other recent film approaching its appeal.

We were analyzing "The Fiction," as it is sometimes called, at the University of Virginia, where I was spending a week as the first Kluge Film Fellow. Patricia Kluge, founder of the Virginia Festival of American Film, sponsors the fellowship on Thomas Jefferson's beautiful campus (although what Jefferson would have thought about Vincent Vega and Honey Bunny is hard to imagine).

I've done shot-by-shot analyses of dozens of films, from "Citizen Kane" to "The Silence of the Lambs," and I find that when you gather a lot of serious film people in the dark and invite them to talk during the movie, somebody will have the answer to every question.

At Virginia, for example, one of the voices in the dark was unmistakably that of a young boy; he sounded about 11. I wondered if he should be watching this R-rated film. That was before he started citing specific line references from the screenplay, which he had downloaded from the Internet. It was his 12th viewing (and, yes, he was accompanied by a parent).

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At the end of the four days, my own admiration for the movie had only deepened. It is more subtle and complex than at first it seems; the Oscar-winning screenplay, by Tarantino and Roger Avary, turns out to contain the answers to mysteries that baffle viewers in a first viewing, and it makes connections that only occur to you after time.

The film tells interlocking stories, which unfold out of chronological order, so that the movie's ending hooks up with the beginning, most of its middle happens after the ending, and a major character is onscreen after he has been ...

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