Reservoir Dogs is fast becoming the new Rocky Horror Picture Show. The BBFC's decision to refuse it a video certificate has effectively guaranteed its place as an ultimate cult film, showing to packed late-shows and still managing to perennially turn up at large multiplexes for a week or two. Many fans now go for the whole experience, becoming Mr. Pink or Mr. White for the evening, just as thousands regularly adopt Frank'n Furter or Riff Raff for an evening of Rocky Horror. Both are also renowned for their music, with soundtracks consisting not just of music from the film, but also classic dialogue. And who could ever listen to Stealers Wheel's Stuck In The Middle With You the same way again after viewing Reservoir Dogs? Yet there still remain crucial differences. Whereas much of the fun of a Rocky Horror showing is the audience participation, when an eager fan stood up and started quoting Mr Blonde's lines along with him he was quickly silenced by rest of the viewers. Tarantino fans are much more in awe of his work, preferring to sit silently, constantly on the look-out for further throw-away references to older films - and even to Tarantino's own work (In case you haven't been watching closely Vince Vega is Mr Blonde's brother). And whereas Shock Treatment (the sequel to Rocky Horror) was a dismal flop, which most Rocky Horror fans have never even heard of, the newest Tarantino production, Pulp Fiction, has become one of the year's top films; which, it must be said, is quite surprising for a two and a half hour movie featuring homosexual rape, a drug overdose, an accidental killing, and several deliberate ones, a car crash and a religious conversion.Reactions to the film have been wildly varied. In America, where the press is not particularly known for its liberalism, the critics have been almost overwhelming in their praise. In Britain they have been a little more reserved, and although critics like Barry Norman have described it as "a dazzling piece of work - gloriously funny, unpredictable and original", the wider media has generally hated it. Mary Kenny in the Daily Mirror described it as "disgusting, violent, repellent, dangerous to young and unformed minds, childish, irrational, horrible, agonising, and distressingly like something out of a Nazi nightmare where human beings are subjected to every degradation just for the hell of it." The fact that Pulp Fiction won the Palme D'Or at Cannes - the Big Kahuna of serious film-makers, serves only to show how vacuous cinema has become.
Most reviewers accept the film simply as "Pulp" - a cut above the Pulp Novels of the '30s and '40s, but pulp nonetheless. Thus they can ignore the violence and language, and comment on the delightful acting (especially of those like Travolta and Willis who had been left for dead), the wonderfully original dialogue and the movie-buff heaven of many sly references to other films. However, if one looks beyond the multiple killings and gore, there lies a powerful moral message behind both Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. Both films exhibit a strong belief in a code of honour - honour amongst thieves perhaps, but important nonetheless. Reservoir Dogs is much less a film about a failed jewellery heist than a study of relationships and moral dilemma, mistrust and paranoia. The entire film builds up to the point at the end when Orange finally reveals to White that he is a cop, after White has given up his own life out of trust for him.
Pulp Fiction takes this theme forward into redemption and conversion. When Jules, played by Samuel L Jackson, experiences a miracle, he undergoes a transformation by which the film culminates with him paying the price to save another man's life. The melodramatic quote from Ezekiel with which he accompanied his executions, with little other reason than it sounded cool, suddenly took a twist, as he became the shepherd instead of the vengeance. On the other hand, Vincent, his partner, who did not believe in the miracle, putting it down to mere coincidence, consequently finds himself, through another series of coincidences, at the wrong end of another shooting - this time fatal. He learnt neither from his previous mistakes (this was his 3rd time in the bathroom as something major happened), nor the enlightenment of others, and finally paid for it with his life.
The other common theme is that of forgiveness. Pulp's central story, The Gold Watch, sees Butch returning to save Marsellus, whom he has just double-crossed, from the attention of two sado-masochistic rapists. The fact that half-an-hour previously each was ready to kill the other is temporarily set aside as Butch steps in to deliver his personal enemy from a common enemy. Butch's choice of a samurai sword as the weapon of vengeance is more than just another of Tarantino's little post-modern film-maker in-jokes. Tarantino is strongly influenced by the moral code of many of the Japanese samurai classics and by forsaking the door to Tennessee to save his enemy he not only receives forgiveness from Marsellus, who would have previously tracked him to the ends of the earth, but also finally earns the right to wear his father's gold watch.
Tarantino refuses to paint any of his characters in blacks or whites. Although most of his characters they are crooks they all posses at least one good moral trait or redemptive feature - and generally it is this feature which leads to their ultimate triumph - even in what could be seen as defeat. Everyone is displayed as "real" - talking about everything from the underlying meaning of Like A Virgin, to the French names for various McDonalds products, before getting "into character" for their jobs. Yet they are far from perfect either. Butch's refusal to throw a fight stems not from any moral compulsions, but the prospect of becoming exceptionally rich through a double-cross. And in the end every one of the characters in Pulp Fiction is faced with a crossroads. Whereas in Reservoir Dogs everything builds up to the final "explosion", in Pulp Fiction every scene resolves into forgiveness or compromise.
Tarantino feels free to play with the concept of black and white when it comes to race also. The frequent use of "nigger" and classic monologues like Dennis Hopper's "Sicilians are spawned by niggers" speech in True Romance [an early Tarantino script, sold for $30,000 to fund the making of Reservoir Dogs] have led to frequent allegations of racism. However Tarantino claims that by using such a loaded word so frequently and almost randomly (white characters are called niggers almost as often as black ones) he is actually trying to defuse the word of its power. Nigger, he claims, "is probably the most volatile word in the English language. My feeling is that any time a word is that powerful, you should start screaming it from the rooftops, take away that power." And, interestingly, almost every couple in Pulp Fiction is of mixed race or culture.
Although his films are generally perceived as being very violent, there is actually very little violence shown in either Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction. There is much more implied than is actually seen, and it the audiences' own imaginations which send them away believing the films to have been much more violent than they actually are. In particular the infamous ear-slicing scene in Reservoir Dogs, whilst not actually shown, was enough to send many people to the exit door, and reports of it were enough to prevent others even making it as far as the entrance. However Tarantino does not apologise for this. "For some people the violence is a mountain they can't climb" he stated on its release. "That's OK. It's not their cup of tea. But I am affecting them. I wanted that scene to be disturbing."
Yet even the violence that isn't shown generally has much more realism and effect than the cartoon violence of Home Alone or The A-Team. Here guns kill people, slowly and excruciatingly. There is little glamour in the killings here. The agony of Mr. Orange lying in a pool of his own blood after being shot in the gut is unlikely to make anyone consider a life of violent crime. Where a character in any other film might get blown away and we would see no more of them, the characters here are shown to suffer ... and suffer... and suffer. The violence is disturbing, as violence should be, and it is surely more of a mark of moral sickness when people complain that the violence was too realistic! In one respect it may be this obvious negativising of violence that differentiates Tarantino from Oliver Stone, whose re-write of Tarantino's original script for Natural Born Killers has supposedly spawned a series of copy-cat murders in America and France, and has left the censors in a quandary which has indefinitely delayed the films release in the UK.
Travolta, a devout Scientologist, had initial qualms about taking the part in Pulp Fiction when he heard that he was to play a heroin-taking hit-man. "I started 3 or 4 social phenomenons," he commented. "So I'm not going to be the guy who says movies can't influence people." However, after reading the script, he decided that the film was far from glamourising the lifestyles portrayed, and turned in a performance that silenced those who would have originally preferred Tarantino's original choice for the part - Michael Madsen.
Perhaps one of the most disturbing, and thus most effective, ways in which Tarantino uses violence is to cover it with a layer of humour. His most violent or shocking scenes almost always draw the audience in, until it suddenly realises what exactly it is laughing at. By the time Vincent and Jules leave their hit with Marvin the audience has already found itself laughing hysterically at Vincent reversing the "stake in the heart of a vampire routine" with an adrenaline injection straight to the heart after Mia over-doses on heroin, believing it to be cocaine; Christopher Walken relating how Butch's father had died of dysentery after hiding a gold watch up his ass for 5 years; and Butch lifting a chainsaw pondering what damage he could do to Zed and Maynard with it. Thus when Vincent accidentally shoots Marvin's head off as their car goes over a bump in the road the audience erupts into laughter, only to suddenly find itself confronted with the reality of what has just happened. The resulting saga of how to clean all the blood and brain off the car and get rid of the body from their friend Jimmy's house before his wife gets home and files for divorce has moments as funny as the rest of the film, but the audience has now seen beyond the film and it proceeds with an underlying wariness.
It remains to be seen what direction Tarantino will take next. His next full writing/directing role (beyond his quarter of the Four Rooms project) will be several years away yet, but that time can adequately be filled with repeat watchings of his current body of work, finding more and more themes and images as yet unexplored, and fighting over and over again the battles with those who claim "I wouldn't watch that - it's too violent!"