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ISSN: 1705-6411

Volume 10, Number 1 (January 2013)

Tarantinos Pulp Fiction and Baudrillards Perfect Crime

Dr. Randy Laist
(Department of English, Goodwin College, Hartford Connecticut, USA).

Pulp Fiction, frequently been identified as a postmodern film, has been called one
of the paradigmatic texts of the postmodern movement (Morton, 2012); a
terminally hip postmodern collage (Hirsch, 1997: 360); an example of the
inventive and affirmative mode of postmodernism (Constable, 2004: 54); and the
acme of postmodern nineties filmmaking (Kokler, 2005: 264). Jean Baudrillard is
the postmodern philosopher whose writings most aptly describe the semantic
landscape of Quentin Tarantinos film. Baudrillard anticipated the style of aesthetic
pleasure Pulp Fiction elicits from its audience when he observed:

Today, where the real and the imaginary are intermixed in one and the
same operational totality, aesthetic fascination reigns supreme: with
subliminal perception (a sort of sixth sense) of special effects, editing
and script, reality is overexposed to the glare of models. This is no
longer a space of production, but a reading strip, a coding and
decoding strip, magnetized by signs. Aesthetic reality is no longer
achieved through arts premeditation and distancing, but by its elevation
to the second degree, to the power of two, by the anticipation and
immanence of the code. A kind of unintentional parody hangs over
everything, a tactical simulation, a consummate aesthetic enjoyment
[jouissance], is attached to the indefinable play of reading and the rules
of the game ([1976] 1993: 75).
With its meticulous sheen of glossy appearances, its urbane and allusive banter,
and its comic violence, Pulp Fiction celebrates a carefree post-historical giddiness,
as if the whole business of reality had finally been superseded. In the post-reality
period, people are characters in movies, conversation is an exchange of pop
culture references, and conventional value structures do not apply.
Although its characters are ostensibly criminals, it would be absurd to categorize
Pulp Fiction as a crime movie in the conventional sense. Its gangster characters
are thinly veiled actors, carrying on obsessive conversations about mass-culture

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within the orbit of Hollywood. As the title of the movie makes clear, the characters
are playing gangster as a nod to the genre they are pretending to occupy, but its
a half-hearted nod, as no one makes any attempt to behave in any way that is
remotely gangsterish, even by Hollywood standards. Also in contrast with the
atmosphere of real gangster films, the criminals of Pulp Fiction do not inhabit a
marginal underworld; rather, the whole world of Pulp Fiction is the underworld,
there being very little evidence of any overworld for the underworld to underlie.
Everyone who appears in the movie is in the condition of totalized criminality. The
criminal acts themselves, however the murders, the rigged prize-fighting, the
diner hold-up are not the focus of the film; the crime that creates a fraternal
community among Pulp Fictions characters is the crime Baudrillard described in
the preface to The Perfect Crime as the murder of reality ([1996] 2008: xi).
Baudrillards turn of phrase here suggests that the totalization of the kind of
hyperreal sign-scape depicted in Pulp Fiction is premised on a secret act of death
that is then concealed from public view. But, as Baudrillard explains, crime is
never perfect, and throughout Pulp Fiction, forces of death continually threaten to
undermine the gossamer superstructure of hyperreal exchange. While the
postmodernity of Pulp Fictions madcap surface is easy to identify, this hyperreal
atmosphere exists in a sustained tension with signs of mortality, inexchangeability,
and reality. The film itself is a kind of conspiracy on the part of the characters and
the director to suppress the specter of death through their shared commitment to
an aesthetic sensibility characterized by a free-flowing circulation of pop culture
references.
This hyperreal sensibility is epitomized by the interior design of Jackrabbit Slims,
the 50s nostalgia bar where Mia Wallace takes Vincent Vega on their famous date.
Tarantinos script calls it the big mama of 50s diners. Either the best or the worst,
depending on your point of view (Tarantino, 1996: 51), Vincent sums it up as a
wax museum with a pulse, and the signage on the restaurant itself indicates that
Jackrabbit Slims is the Next best thing to a time machine. Indeed, Tarantinos
fantasy diner takes the concept of the 50s restaurant and launches it into outer
space. Not only are there movie posters on the walls and rock and roll on the
soundtrack, but the wait staff is made up improbably of iconic lookalikes, the dining
booths are made out of vintage cars, and The picture windows dont look out into
the street, as Tarantinos screenplay explains, but instead, B & W movies of 1950s

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street scenes play behind them. No wonder a milkshake costs five dollars! The
TV-screen windows suggest that the sheer density of popular culture references
concentrated in this one location may be enough to warp the texture of the world
outside, making over external reality in the style of retro chic. Indeed, in the
parking lot of the restaurant, Mia is able to use her fingers to sketch an
extradiegetic square, as if the reality-warping effects of the restaurant has
absorbed the couple before they have even set foot inside the establishment. More
fundamentally, the entire universe of cool that is the real subject of Pulp Fiction
itself emanates from the Babel of images, media figures, and fashion accessories
on display at Jackrabbit Slims. As the decade that witnessed both the birth of
cool and the birth of the consumer-based economy and of mass-media culture,
the 50s is the primal scene of postmodern culture and, like the primal scene
described by Freud, the historical veracity of the memory of the period is less
important than the vivid position it occupies in the structure of self-awareness.
Tarantinos 50s, like the 50s of conservative American politicians, is as cartoonish a
representation of a historical period as the cartoon mascot who towers over
Tarantinos 50s diner is of an actual jackrabbit. The cold war, the red scare, and
the Civil Rights movement are replaced with Zorro, Marilyn Monroe, and Donna
Reed. In the Jackrabbit Slims dimension, fictional characters and historical figures
rub shoulders in a way that is analogous to the less pulsating wax museums
described by Umberto Eco in his essay Travels in Hyperreality in which the
logical distinction between the Real World and Possible Worlds has been
definitively undermined (1986: 14). Through a transfiguration of reality similar to
that suggested by the replacement of the world outside Jackrabbit Slims with
televised street scenes, the wax museum history of the 50s diner insinuates itself
into the atmosphere of the movie as a whole to become the definitive ontological
setting for Pulp Fictions characters.
The dialogue of Pulp Fictions characters, the clothes they wear, and even their
personalities are composed of a collage of references to popular media culture.
Although not all of Pulp Fictions allusions are to the 1950s, they are all decidedly
non-contemporary, clustering predominantly around the nostalgic golden eras of
the 30s, 50s, and 70s. Unlike their real-world 1994 counterparts, the denizens of
Pulp Fiction live in a world where everybody smokes, nobody uses a CD player,

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and there is no internet. These stylistic characteristics of the Tarantinoverse mark it

off as belonging to some alternate reality devoid of the superficial trappings of
1990s paraphernalia. Paradoxically, however, this alternate dimension provides a
suitable setting for a film that is recognizable as an extremely contemporary work of
cinematic art, one capable of defining the zeitgeist of its particular historical
moment. Of course, to the extent that Pulp Fiction does reflect its cultural moment,
it does so not because of its mimetic realism, but precisely because its Jackrabbit
Slims approach to reshaping reality as an explosion of media references echoes
the ontological dislocation characteristic of the age of media saturation. Tarantinos
retro aesthetic manages to isolate the essence of fashion itself due to the
circumstance that, as Baudrillard explains, Fashion is always retro It always
presupposes a dead time of forms, a kind of abstraction whereby they become, as
if safe from time, effective signs which, as if by a twist of time, will return to haunt
the present of their inactuality with all the charm of returning rather than
becoming structures ([1976] 1993: 88). What is fashionable, what is stylish, what
is cool is defined by images and objects which have been detached from history
and from all political engagement, circulating in their own solipsistic orbit of hip
indifference. The densely allusive atmosphere of Jackrabbit Slims is an elaborate
spectacle that has no effect on the story, but is simply one of a series of settings in
which the characters can engage in conversations which themselves constitute a
litany of pop cultural allusions jumbled together in Jackrabbit Slims style. The
diner is the prototypical setting for Tarantino characters, just as it is for the
characters in the definitive televisual expression of 90s hyperreality, Seinfeld. In
both cases, the diner serves as a neutral background for long conversations about
nothing (as they used to say on Seinfeld) in which the wit of the repartee is an end
in itself. Pulp Fiction and Seinfeld both represent the art of conversation gone
orbital, flying free of the weight of dramatic, narrative purpose that conventionally
grounds film and television dialogue and finding a new momentum in the
jouissance of dialogue itself as a free-floating pleasure that has been liberated from
the gravity of history and story-telling alike.
The theme of floating signifiers is elaborated in Vincent and Juless conversation
about the meaning of a foot massage, and epitomized in the films central icon of
floating referentiality, the glowing briefcase. The question of whether Antwan
Rocky Horror deserved to get pushed out of a fourth-story window hinges on the

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semantic value of a foot massage. Vincent sums up the crux of his debate with
Jules on this matter: Youre sayin a foot massage dont mean nothin, and Im
sayin it does. In the hyperreal economy of Pulp Fiction, the exchange rate of
everything is debatable. The indeterminacy in the relative value of cunnilingus and
pedal rub-down reflects the wider moral chaos in both the movie and in the
Baudrillardian society in which All the great humanist criteria of value, the whole
civilisation of moral, aesthetic, and practical judgment are effaced in our system of
images and signs ([1976] 1993: 9). The sign-value of a foot massage is in a state
of crisis because, in a field of total exchange, moral borders are arbitrarily defined
according to different free-floating sign-systems. But whereas in his description of
Europe, Vincent had luxuriated in the hyperreal circulation of signs without
referents, he recognizes a foot massage given to the bosss wife as signifying a
very specific referent: the violent result of this signification serves as a clear
indicator of its reality. Mia, however, later reveals that the foot massage that
Vincent freights with such mortal significance never actually happened, and she
casually demolishes the whole line of reasoning that led Vincent to convince
himself that foot massages could harbor such lethal significance. Nevertheless,
Vincents passionate defense of the signifying quality of foot massages in his
debate with Jules, however, establishes a motif throughout Pulp Fiction that when
objects fall out of the precessional orbit of total exchange, they become charged
with danger and death.
In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard theorizes that the plasticity of the
hyperreal sign-scape is made possible by the elimination of death from the social
order of exchangeability. Political economy only exists by default: death is its blind
spot, the absence haunting all its calculations. And the absence of death alone
permits the exchange of values and the play of equivalences ([1976] 1993:154). In
Samoa, Antwan Rockamoras ancestors might have practiced a pattern of social
rituals that would have established a system of reciprocity between life and death,
but in L.A., as Tony Rock Horror, he exists in a postmodernity in which promiscuous
circulation renames him after a densely allusive pop culture phenomenon, and in
which death takes the form of objects that resist circulation, such as the bosss
wife. The plot lines of Pulp Fictions sub-narratives Vincent Vega and Marsellus
Wallaces Wife, The Gold Watch, and The Bonnie Situation are all structured
around the deadly aura that emanates from the inexchangable object as

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represented by Mia, the watch, and Marvins corpse. It is as if the wild intertextual
game of Pulp Fiction can only exist insofar as it manages to avoid and indeed,
actively to suppress any admission of death, the deliberate exclusion of which is
necessary in order to sustain the pataphysical high-wire dance of hyperreality. This
impression is reinforced by the pattern running throughout each of the
sub-narratives that each of the stories concludes with a secret agreement to censor
any acknowledgement of the deathly incident: Marsellus never needs to know
about Mias overdose, Butch is ordered to not tell anybody about his and
Marselluss run-in with Maynard and Zed, and Bonnie will never know about her
husbands participation in disposing of Marvins dead body. This recurrent pattern
of inexchangeability, death, and suppression provides the narrative structure that
organizes the free-flow of hyperreal dialogue throughout the movie. In the same
way that Jackrabbit Slims is able to weave a retro collage by tacitly dismissing the
fact that Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Van Doren are both dead, the entirety of Pulp
Fiction describes a hyperreal orbit propelled by the giddy denial that what it orbits
around is the black hole of death.
The manner in which Pulp Fictions discursive dialogue is a coy dance around
death is expressed very clearly when it becomes evident that the occasion for all of
Jules and Vincents badinage about European McDonalds restaurants and lethal
foot massages has been an execution job on a group of young guys whose lethal
crime, like Tony Rock Horrors involves the misappropriation of an inexchangeable
totem object. The identity of the glowing contents of the briefcase that Vincent and
Jules retrieve from Brad and his companions at the beginning of the movie has
been a source of much internet speculation among Pulp Fiction aficionados. Could
the briefcase contain the diamonds from Reservoir Dogs, the Elvis suit from True
Romance, or even Marsellus Wallaces soul? Of course, what is really inside the
briefcase is the ecstasy of the commodity, the pure glowing McGuffin, Lacans petit
objet a in its most absolute form. With its surreal aura, its unnamability, and the
basic impossibility of conforming to any literal interpretation, the briefcase is a locus
of blatant unreality and, as such, it is the model for all the commodities of cool,
items the value of which is not established by what they are, but by the way people
look at them. The briefcase exists beyond the edge of the movies teeming
kitsch-scape as the numinal object that everything else aspires to become. As
such, it is a motion-generator, like all McGuffins and all objects of desire, without

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being anything in itself. Jules and Vincents playful patter has all been moving
toward this glowing object, and within its vicinity, the conversation about
hamburgers with Brad superficially mirrors the earlier conversation about
hamburgers with Vincent, but the matter of the briefcase transfigures the meaning
of the conversation: it is now explicitly a conversation about the imminence of
death. When Vincent, and later, when Pumpkin, looks into the briefcase, they are
struck dumb one of the only two occasions in the Pulp Fiction universe when
anyone is at a loss for words, the other one being upon a sudden, brutal death, as
when Brads apology is silenced by Juless abrupt execution of Brads roommate.
While Jules and Brad can exchange banter about hamburgers, the briefcase is
beyond the limits of social exchange. If the briefcases magical presence seems to
gesture toward another kind of movie than the kind of movie Pulp Fiction is, it is
precisely because its symbolic role in the film is to suggest an object beyond the
limits of language or representability: the blind spot in hyperreality. As Brad and
his partners discover, the encounter with the inexchangeable object is a deadly
one. Brads death takes place off-camera, as do many of the acts of violence in
Pulp Fiction, equating Brads unseen death with the unseen contents of the
inexchangeable briefcase.
Although the briefcase technically changes hands, moving from Brads cabinet and
into Vincents possession, the briefcase has always belonged to Marsellus Wallace
in a way that prefigures the sense in which, although Vincent will take Mia out to a
restaurant, there is a deadly prohibition against any attempt to possess her
definitively. The figure of Marsellus combines monopolistic power over all of the
plots of Pulp Fiction with a shadowy invisibility (at least until his vulgar exposure in
the basement of the pawn shop) in a way that evokes the unrepresentability of his
briefcase and the unrepresentability of death itself in a hyperreal collage. His wife,
in stark contrast, is the hyperreal subject par excellence, capable of schooling John
Travolta himself in the ways of Tarantino-cool. The improbability of the relationship
between Mia and Marsellus, she with her television pilots and hipster lingo and he
with his intimate command of death, reflects the sense in which hyperreality is
improbably married to death as its excluded other. At the same time, the comic
discrepancy between Mia and her husband lends a visual emphasis to the manner
in which marriage with its outmoded proscription against the free exchange of
sexual relations is discrepant with the aesthetic, moral, and economic values of

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the movies hyperreal postmodernism. More than anything else, Mias marriage is a
game, designed conjointly by Mia herself and the screenwriter with the intention of
trapping some hapless protagonist like Vincent in the narrative web woven by the
plot point of her inexchangeability. Free-floating hyperreality never congeals into a
narrative. Events only shape themselves into narrative around loci of significance
that are weighted differently than the rest of the circulating junk: the forbidden
object, the unattainable object, the impossible object. When Mia first appears
before Vincent, Vincent supposedly sees her face, but Tarantino shows us her
deadly, inexchangeable feet, as if to suggest that, whereas her personality may
seduce us into shifting patterns of hyperreal circulation, her character is
grounded in her status as a totemic McGuffin of death.
The first time we see Mias full face, it is illuminated in the neon glow of the
Jackrabbit Slims signage. Mia is the human correlative of Jackrabbit Slims,
wearing her moll identity as one of the many signs she (or her screenwriter)
employs to establish that she is a queen of the Tarantinoverse, not so much
because of the deadly power she has married into, but more importantly because
of the semantic prestige the moll enjoys as a stock figure in an esteemed film
genre. As far as the narrative is concerned, Mias debunking of Juless rumor that
Mia was responsible for Rocky Horrors defenestration should defuse the narrative
tension created around Mias aura of deadliness. She manages to retain her
deadly signification and support the narrative of danger that structures her date
with Vincent, however, through the semantic value of her Chanel Vamp nail polish,
the brand name of which refers back to a history of cinematic femmes fatales, and
her pageboy haircut, reminiscent the iconic bob worn by Louise Brooks as the
prototypical deadly damsel in Pandoras Box. Even the way she eats a cherry or, in
the words of the screenplay, wraps her lips around the straw of her shake
(Tarantino, 1996: 57) is weighted with an innuendo defined by fifty years of rock
and roll iconography. The personality of her character and her role in the narrative
are both characterized by seduction as Baudrillard described it: a spiral swerving
toward the sphere of the sign, the simulacrum, and simulation (1983: 79). She
seduces Vincent by mirroring his hip speech, his hyper-familiarity with pop culture,
and even his clothes, but this seduction is structured around the mortal prohibition
against their consummating the relationship. As in Baudrillard, seduction is a
double-helix, the opposite coil of which is a spiral of the reversibility of all signs in

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the shadow of seduction and death (ibid.). The mood indulged by Mia Wallace, by
Jackrabbit Slims, and by the movie as a whole is one of free-floating circulation of
interchangeable signs, but the movie is structured around episodes of resistance
from a vestigial kind of reality that continues to intrude into the hyperreal
atmosphere, warping the characters activities into tense narrative traps. But these
two spirals of seduction are also co-reliant. It is necessary that Mia be unavailable
in order for the cool between Mia and Vincent to exist. Cool always gestures
toward sex, but sex itself is not cool. Sex is like the contents of the briefcase,
which are not to be seen directly, but which take their meaning from the looks
people give to them. As Mia admits, the allusive and entertaining banter between
Mia and Vincent is a frantic dance around the uncomfortable silence of death.
When they take to the empty dance floor at the center of Jackrabbit Slims, they
perform a terpsichorean rendition of their verbal dialogue. Their dance, arguably
the most memorable dance sequence from any movie from the 1990s, is a kind of
anti-dance; it is to dance what Jackrabbit Slims is to the 1950s, a syncretic
precession of styles and poses. It is dance in quotation marks, and,
simultaneously, it is also seduction in quotation marks. Deprived of the possibility
of exchange, of sexual possession, and, in short, of any possibility of a reality,
Vincent and Mia mirror each others embodiment of infinitely circulating pop culture
allusiveness.
When Tarantino transplants Vincent and Mia from the public space of Jackrabbit
Slims, where they exist as part of the hyperreal upholstery, to the interior of the
Wallace home, a visually stark white space which seems to leave the couple alone
in a void, their mock-dancing abruptly ends in an uncomfortable silence that
threatens to collapse into the forbidden exchange of sex. Vincent retreats to a
bathroom mirror, where his conversation with himself about masturbation enacts
the same retreat into empty circulation that it describes. Mia, in an act which itself
mirrors the theme of the deadly exchange, commits the forbidden exchange of
swapping heroin for cocaine and consequently brings a proactive death sentence
down upon herself. It is as if Vincent and Mia are so hyperreal in their ontological
nature that the possibility of sex, with its qualities of embodiment, nature, and
consequentiality, constitutes an existential threat to their very survival. Rather than
serving as a moralistic rebuke, however, Mias morbid condition releases her from
the gravitational pull of the sex narrative and returns her to her proper role as a

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kind of human plot point. When Vincent stumbles upon her ODing figure, Mia is
once again a circulating mannequin of signs. Vincent is able to convince Lance to
let her into his house because she is Marsellus Wallaces wife. Mia plays the role
of comic prop as the men practice stabbing her with a hypodermic needle in a
hyperreal transmogrification of the sex Vincent is not having with her. The
possibility of seeing Uma Thurmans nipples, which might be anticipated in a story
in which sex were permissible, is reworked into the red magic marker spot over
Mias heart, reminiscent of a boys anatomically nave drawing. Lances wifes
spectatorial pleasure in the brutal treatment of Mias body is a mirror of the
audiences same relief that the hyperreal momentum of the story has been rescued
from sex and death and returned to the heightened plane of the pure circulation of
images. When their night is finally over, Vincent and Mia agree to suppress the
whole narrative of sex and death, consensually banishing it from the Tarantinoverse
altogether and leaving the world safe for hyperrealism. Mias parting joke, her
dialogue from Fox Force 5, rewrites the whole incident as the scenario of a
cancelled television pilot, a show that never aired. The joke is both Mias and
Tarantinos, serving to cancel the narrative of sex and death, even as it implies
that Mia and Vincent have been deathless, sexless television characters all along.
The theme of televisual ontology is addressed directly in the opening shot of the
following sequence, which is a full-screen close-up of a television image. The shot
exemplifies the extent to which the entirety of Pulp Fiction is saturated not only with
references to television, but with the mood of television itself as its own peculiar
style of reality. The close-up of the television screen turns out to be a point of view
shot belonging to young Butch, who apparently spent his childhood the way all
Tarantino characters did, sitting two feet in front of a television screen, cultivating a
perspective that conflates film image, television image, and perception itself. In
fact, the story of The Gold Watch weaves references to Tarantinos own childhood
into its cartoonish narrative of boxers, gangsters, and hillbillies. Although the story
for the Butch sequence is attributed to Tarantinos co-writer, Roger Avery, The
Gold Watch reads like Quentins cryptic autobiography. Most evidently, Butchs
plan is to return to Knoxville, Tennessee, the city where his grandfather originally
purchased the gold watch and the place of Quentin Tarantinos birth. When Butch
and Marsellus are abducted in the Mason-Dixon pawnshop, a prominently
displayed Tennessee license plate suggests that Butch has actually returned to

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Knoxville after all, albeit in the form of a demented parody of Deliverance. The
theme of Southern identity addressed in the pawn shop episode also alludes to the
fact that Quentin is named after Quentin Compson, a character in the tales of the
definitive novelist of the demented South, William Faulkner.
Quentin Compsons most famous appearance in Faulkners novels occurs in the
second chapter of The Sound and the Fury (1956) which, like The Gold Watch
sequence of Pulp Fiction, begins by establishing the characters relationship to his
ancestral watch. When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was
between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It
was Grandfathers and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the
mausoleum of all hope and desire; its rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it
to gain the reducto absurdam of all human experience which can fit your needs no
better than it fitted his or his fathers (1996: 93). It is easy to imagine that Tarantino
conceptualized Butchs story as his own interpretation of Quentins fathers
enigmatic speech. In Faulkners novel, each tick of Quentins ancestral watch
echoes with the nihilistic vision of time articulated by his father a temporality that
is a vast mausoleum of empty events that fall away into meaningless death. In
Tarantinos film, the ancestral watch is similarly freighted with the death of Butchs
absent father and, more broadly, with the cyclical futility of a human history that is
a succession of disastrous wars. The long history of the watch related by Captain
Koons invests the symbolism of the watch with allusions to the blunt facticity of old
fashioned reality: paternity, genetics, shit, the body, war, suffering, and time. The
sense in which the watch is an artifact from the real world is expressed in the
manner in which the television show young Butch is watching is turned off so that
the watch can be introduced into Butchs life and into the narrative. On the other
hand, however, as Butch listens to Captain Koonss story, his face wears the same
expression of serious attentiveness it wore as he followed the cartoon antics of a
television eskimo, suggesting a level of continuity according to which the symbol of
the Real is being assimilated into the worldview of a hyperreal generation.
Christopher Walkens performance in the role of Captain Koons further inflects the
manner in which the reality of historical time and death symbolized by the watch is
being reinscribed into a performative terrain of allusions, particularly to The Deer
Hunter, a film that has been as influential in informing the popular attitude toward
Vietnam POWs as Deliverance has been to informing media stereotypes about the

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South. Quentin Compsons watch occasioned nihilistic despair because it

suggested that time erased all human endeavor into a meaningless negation, but
Quentin Tarantinos watch is a locus of pop nihilism in which the existential void of
inter-exchangeable time is replaced by a posthuman landscape of interexchangeable media references. The sting of nihilism is anesthetized when the
meaninglessness of life (depressing) is supplanted by the meaninglessness of
media images (fun). Whereas Quentin Compsons watch was a symbol of a
fractured temporality fraught with suicidal despair, Quentin Tarantinos watch marks
the time of a fractured temporality capable of bringing John Travolta back to life
both diegetically, through the temporal inversion of the movies story lines, as well
as extradiegetically, through the movies success in revivifying Travoltas career by
picking the actor out of the pop cultural scrap heap and recycling him back into
circulation.
Like the glowing briefcase and like Mia, Butchs watch is an uncanny object that
makes the world safe for exchangeability by itself existing in a state of
inexchangeability. When Butch notices that the watch is missing, the significance
of the watchs singularity its irreplaceability once again disrupts a television
program. In his frustrated rage, Butch picks up the motel TV and throws it against
the wall (Tarantino, 1996:110). Simultaneously, the absence of the watch disrupts
the plotless pop-culture-reference-strewn banter between Butch and Fabienne, a
long dialogue sequence which, devoid of any narrative significance, is sustained
only by the momentum of the actors charm. Fabiennes vision of a Tarantino
paradise a diner where you can order whatever you want 24 hours a day, even
pie for breakfast is disrupted by the deadly imperative associated with the
inexchangeable object. Likewise, the televisual momentum of Butchs stock noir
predicament he is a boxer who didnt throw a fight he was paid to throw is
derailed into unpredicatable territory by the problem of the watchs
inexchangeability.
The watch, it turns out, is easily retrievable, but Butchs pursuit of the totem object
veers into a confrontation with the forces of reality and death that the watch
emblematizes. When Butch shoots Vincent and slams his girlfriends car into
Marsellus, he is still participating in the economy of circulating characters that
governs Pulp Fictions hyperreal aesthetic economy, but when Butch and Marsellus

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find themselves abducted by the proprietor of the Mason-Dixon pawn shop, they
seem to fall out of the symbolic order of Pulp Fiction altogether, descending into
the movies only true underworld, what Morpheus following Baudrillard called the
desert of the real (Baudrillard [1981] 1994: 1). The pawn shop, with its shelves of
rusty consumer objects, is what Jackrabbit Slims might look like if it fell out of
orbit. It is a junkyard version of Jackrabbit Slims, a collage of cultural detritus, the
cloacal ass-end of the consumer image-scape. Whereas Jackrabbit Slims
presented cultural objects in an electric swirl of glamor and gloss, the Mason-Dixon
pawn shop is a hell of disenchanted objects. The pawn shop is an arena of
debased circulation, the circulation of dead objects, the nihilistic zone of indifferent
exchangeability that Quentin Compsons father referred to as the mausoleum of
time, and it is this place of death that threatens to appropriate Butchs watch and,
indeed, Butch himself. Zed and Maynards abduction of Butch and Marsellus
incorporates the boxer and the crime lord bodily into the debased circulation of the
pawn shop. Indeed, the uncanny figure of the Gimp is a reducto absurdam of the
human being diminished entirely to the status of a commodity. Zeds eenie,
meanie, miney, mo routine illustrates the principle of random, indifferent
exchangeability that characterizes the psychic space of the pawn shop. Marsellus,
whose power throughout the movie has been associated with the limited visibility of
his physical person, suffers brutal devaluation as the most private parts of his body
are exposed to debased exchange. The idea of fuck[ing] Marsellus Wallace like a
bitch is reappropriated from the realm of wordplay into a literal, painful reality.
Whereas Captain Koons story about the gold watch described a mans anus as the
last refuge of privacy and inexchangeability, Zed and Maynard threaten to turn a
mans ass into just another commodity to sit on a pawn shop shelf alongside the
broken toasters.
In rescuing Marsellus from the hillbillies, Butch dispatches the bad nihilism of the
pawn shop and returns the movie to the fun nihilism of the Tarantinoverse. The
famous scene in which Butch samples a series of weapons he finds in the pawn
shop is thematically significant because it demonstrates the manner in which
narrative reenchants dead objects by fitting them into the magic economy of the
story. When Butch tests the feel of a succession of possible weapons, he brings
the dead objects of the pawn shop to life by demonstrating that each different
weapon suggests a slightly different sub-genre of slasher movie. The dead objects

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are reanimated as pop-culturally-coded versions of themselves. In the same way

that, in Jackrabbit Slims, a waitress becomes a sign by dressing like Marilyn
Monroe, the hammer, chainsaw, and sword are transformed by their inscription into
a filmic dimension. The viewers delight in the scene results from our participation
in Butchs thinking as he goes about deciding what kind of slasher movie scene he
is going to invent out of these newly vivid objects. Weve seen all the same TV
shows as Butch and Tarantino, and we are back in the hyperreal territory of a
circulation that refers to images and cultural references rather than to existential
coordinates. As Butch heads down the stairs wielding his weapon of choice, the
wall of pawn-shop clocks in the stairwell reinforces the narrative point that the
watch on Butchs wrist has resisted falling into the inventory of the pawn shop,
preserving (like Butchs own anus) its aura of inviolability. Butch and Marselluss
agreement to tell nobody about what has happened in the basement of the
pawns shop assures us that Pulp Fiction will remain consistent in its project of
repressing the specter of reality and leaving the images free to circulate in
zero-gravity. The Twilight Zone music cue at the very end of The Gold Watch
sequence files the entire ordeal away under the ontological auspices of
televisuality.
Marselluss briefcase, Marselluss wife, and Butchs watch are representations of
inexchangeable objects, unmovable rocks of reality amid the babbling currents of
hyperreal circulation. The plots associated with these objects veer off into death
the execution of Brad and his roommates, Mias overdose, and the encounter in the
basement of the pawn shop because, in hyperreal modernity, death is the
definitive inexchangeable object. Baudrillard explains that the hyperreal ecology
operates on the basis of the exclusion of death, a system whose ideal is zero
deaths (2003: 16). Arthur Kroker and Cook have characterized Baudrillards
worldview as one in which Nothing can escape exchange! (2005: 81), but for
Baudrillard, the dead and death itself are exiled from the economy of the hyperreal
sign-system. The dead are thrown out of the groups symbolic circulation. They
are no longer beings with a full role to play, worthy partners in exchange, and we
make this obvious by exiling them further and further away from the world of the
living ([1976] 1993: 126). This is precisely the fate that befalls Marvin, the young
confederate of Jules and Vincent whom Vincent accidentally shoots in the face.
Marvin, who had previously participated, however reluctantly, in Jules and Vincents

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affable banter, is transformed by the accident into the inexchangeable object par
excellence. It is not so much his dead body itself as the grotesque splatter of his
blood and brains that signifies that which cannot be signified in the daylit
circulation of Los Angeles traffic. Marvin is instantly reconfigured from a human
participant in the social back-and-forth into a situation that has to be covered up.
In an effort to hide the death-stain from public view, Jules relocates the spectacle
into the suburban home of Jimmie, only to discover that Marvins body is equally
impossible in this domain. If Jimmies wife were to discover the dead body,
Jimmies domestic environment, a suburban enclave of consumer goods such as
gourmet coffee, fine bedspreads, and household cleaning supplies, would face
instantaneous and irrevocable explosion. Jules and Vincents panic and confusion
vividly exemplifies Baudrillards observation that Strictly speaking, we no longer
know what to do with [the dead], since, today, it is not normal to be dead, and this
is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly ([1976] 1993: 126). Jules and
Vincent are at a loss concerning what to do with Marvins body but, more
fundamentally, they have no way of incorporating death itself into their
understanding, and this disconnection between their hyperreal idiom and the
gruesome fact of Marvins death fuels the black comedy of this episode. The
impossible situation of the inexchangeability of Marvins corpse completely eclipses
any acknowledgement of tragedy or guilt associated with death.
Tarantinos solution to the problem of Marvins body is an elegant one. The
character of The Wolf embodies the magical power of cinema and its hyperreal
modality to erase the splotch of death from the collective sign-scape. Tarantino
wrote the part of The Wolf specifically for Harvey Keitel, the screen idol of his
childhood who co-produced and starred in Tarantinos directorial debut, Reservoir
Dogs. As the tutelary divinity who ferried Tarantino from the world of watching
movies to the world of making them, Keitel himself possesses a unique personal
significance for Tarantino as a personification of the power of movies to collapse the
boundary between lived experience and the deathless dream-world of cinematic
images. Like a movie character from the classic era of Hollywood, The Wolf
spends 24 hours a day attending classy parties and seems to live in a tuxedo. He
is introduced into the space of the story with a metanarrative device that
emphasizes his cinematic mastery over space and time. He tells Marsellus over the
phone that Jimmies house is approximately thirty minutes away. Ill be there in

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ten. The scene instantly cuts to The Wolfs car pulling up to a curb accompanied
by a subtitle reading Nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds later. Not only is The
Wolf able to move across thirty minutes of space in ten minutes, but, even more
impressively, hes able to cover that ten minutes in a split second thanks to the
magic of film editing, the conscious manipulation of which is expressly indicated by
the comic subtitle. Once he appears in the scene, The Wolf immediately takes on
the role of director. His status as such is indicated by his authority and skill in
coordinating the movements of the players in the scene, and is also alluded to by
the presence of the actual director, Tarantino, as one of the actors in this scene. In
fact, the casting of Tarantino and Keitel in this scene positions The Wolf as the
director of the director, as if Tarantino were confessing his own subordination to the
star of Mean Streets through a metaphorical expression of the extent to which
Tarantinos artistry derives from the influence of the films he admires. It is this
meta-cinematic entity who is capable of resolving The Bonnie Situation by
arranging the discreet disposal of the inexchangeable object. His accomplishment
in eliminating Marvins dead body from the movie is Pulp Fictions most literal
depiction of the hyperreal imperative to exile death from the social order, and the
magic of the filmic medium to accomplish this feat of legerdemain.
While the existential obduracy of Marvins remains constitutes a stark example of
deaths resistance to exchange, the fact that Jules and Vincent are alive at all
throughout the plot of The Bonnie Situation poses an uncanny variation on the
same theme. The hit-mens unlikely invulnerability to a barrage of bullets shot at
them at close range suggests that they themselves are not participating in the
exchange of gunfire. They are miraculously deathless, as if they inhabit an
ontological register that is incompatible with mortality. Jules and Vincents debate
about whether their survival is the result of a freak occurrence or divine intervention
is interrupted when Vincents gun goes off in Marvins face and is resumed shortly
after The Bonnie Situation is resolved, suggesting that Marvins freak death is the
obverse counterpart to Jules and Vincents freak survival. The sequence of events
emphasizes the sense that there is an unbridgeable space between the hyperreal
survivors and the exiled specter of death, a space that corresponds to the gap
between the comic situation of Hollywoods main characters, who exist in an aura of
magic, and the tragic situation of Hollywoods minor characters, whose sole
purpose in life is to arrive on screen in time to die. In any other movie, the

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circumstance of the main characters being magically delivered from enemy gunfire
would go unremarked upon; the mythology of the Hollywood action hero
encompasses his uncanny ability to avoid dying in situations which would ordinarily
be lethal. In this way, popular cinema celebrates the elimination of death from the
public arena. Tarantinos meta-movie, however, invites the characters to speculate
on what ramifications this miracle may imply in regard to their own ontological
status. Like a glitch in the Matrix, the miracle of Vincent and Juless survival is a
tell-tale symptom that their mode of being is one to which objective-realist
assumptions are inapplicable.
In Vincents case, the miracle of his survival is explicitly connected to the magical
status he enjoys as a main character in his narrative. This dynamic is clarified by
the fact that when Vincent steps into the role of a minor character in Butchs story,
he is unceremoniously gunned down. Deprived of the magical charisma that goes
along with being the main character in his own movie, Vincent falls off the map of
human concern, joining the throngs of anonymous dead goons who populate the
afterlife of dead movie characters. Due to the temporal twistings of Pulp Fictions
storyline, however, Vincent seems to come back to life as himself for the final act of
the movie, but the kind of life he comes back to, as his miraculous survival reminds
us, is a hyperreal kind of life that is not the opposite of death (as reality is the
opposite of illusion), but a kind of hyper-life, a life that has escaped the gravity of
death in the same way that hyperreality has left behind any reference to a
foundational reality. Despite the fact that Vincents character is saturated with
hyperreal values, Vincents denial of the impossible nature of the miracle indicates
his reliance on common-sense assumptions to ground his self-understanding. The
fact that Vincent is doomed even in the flush of his invulnerability, however,
demonstrates the inadequacy of the rationalist poise in the Tarantinoverse.
Jules, on the other hand, is willing to accept the miracle as evidence of the porous
nature of his reality. His willingness to understand the event in metaphysical terms
God came down from heaven and stopped the bullets blends into his
hyperreal resolution to abandon his career as a fictional gangster in favor of a
career as a fictional martial arts adventurer. Both the religious and the hyperreal
responses to the miracle are equivalent in that metaphysics and hyperreality are
both systems that grant ontological priority to something other than spontaneous

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existence. In fact, Kroker and Cook trace the genealogy of the hyperreal back to
fourth-century Christian metaphysics as the intellectual revolution responsible for
the substitution of the substantialization of the Concept for the nothingness of
human experience (2005: 67) common to both Christianity and Baudrillardian
simulation. Juless religious interpretation of his deliverance from the bullets
establishes his acceptance that the world he lives in is a reflection of an anterior
reality, and his hyperreal inclination to make himself over after the model of the
David Caradine character from the television show Kung-Fu parlays that epiphany
into a practical strategy for living in a world that exists in the form of a model. If
Vincent goes on to pay the price for switching out of his main character role to
become a death-bound minor character, Jules seems to understand that the key to
staying deathless in the hyperreal landscape is to invent yourself in the form of a
main character. By drawing on his immersion in the pop culture sign-scape, Jules
manages to surf the currents of hyperreal exchange in a way that keeps him
immune to the forces of inexchangeability and death. When Jules and Vincent exit
the diner at the end of the movie, the contrast between Juless fate (to get out of
the movie alive, thereby achieving the cinematic version of immortality) and
Vincents fate (to die in the movie, thereby achieving the cinematic version of
eternal death) suggests the duality of life and death exchangeability and
inexchangeability into which hyperreal modernity fractures human experience.
Juless resolve at the end of the movie to embrace his hyperreal identity suggests a
version of hyperreal sainthood that may be available to those who can master the
religious discipline of cool.
The theme of hyperreality is common throughout the popular American cinema of
the 1990s, but Pulp Fiction stands apart for the unique approach it takes to the
subject. Movies such as The Truman Show, The Matrix, and Fight Club associate
the hyperreal condition with anxiety and suspicion. The madcap tone of Pulp
Fiction, however, defuses these fears, replacing dread with a mood of
carnivalesque celebration that is magically invulnerable to death. In Tarantinos
masterpiece, hyperreality is fun! If it is true that the hyperreal condition is awash in
meaningless violence, at least it means that the accidental shooting of someone in
the back seat of your car is purged of its moral dimensions and reinvented as a
kind of game. If it is true that hyperreal existence is subtended by a fundamental
suspicion that lived experience may be unreal, the kind of reality that remains

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behind is a site of mystery and miracle, answering in many ways to the dream of a
Christian cosmos. If hyperreal identity can be an acute source of anxiety for those
who hang on to a nostalgic Enlightenment ideal of subjectivity, for people at home
in the hyperreal image-scape, salvation requires nothing more than crossing over
into a new pulp fictional genre, as Jules sets out to do at the end of Pulp Fiction.
Even the death of Vincent, the films most startling depiction of mortality, seems to
be reversed by the time-loop that reanimates Vincent for the final storyline. His
simulacral resurrection covers up the fact of his death in a way that parallels the
cover-ups surrounding Mias overdose, Marselluss rape, and Marvins headless
body. In his review of Pulp Fiction, Roger Ebert observes that Most of the action in
the movie comes under the heading of crisis control (2004:23). The crisis in each
case is some variant of death, and each crisis is controlled through a kind of
retroactive cancellation. The essence of Pulp Fictions cool consists of keeping up
the appearance that nothing is or ever was real. The thrill of the movie is the
systematic encounter and expunging of the specter of death and its power to
disrupt the free circulation of the hyperreal sign-scape. Tarantino and his
characters hold up a fun-house mirror to our own bumbling conspiracy to commit
Baudrillards perfect crime.
Randy Laist is Assistant Professor of English at Goodwin College. He is the author
of Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels, the editor of
Looking for Lost: Critical Essays on the Enigmatic Series, and has published
numerous articles on literature, popular culture, and pedagogy. He lives in New
Haven, Connecticut.

References
Jean Baudrillard ([1976] 1993). Symbolic Exchange and Death. London:SAGE.
Jean Baudrillard ([1981] 1994). Simulation and Simulacra. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Jean Baudrillard (1988). The Ecstasy of Communication. New York: Semiotext(e).
Jean Baudrillard ([1996] 2008. The Perfect Crime. London: Verso.
Jean Baudrillard (2003). The Spirit of Terrorism. New York: Verso.
Catherine Constable (2004). Postmodernism and Film, in The Cambridge
Companion to Postmodernism, (Steven Conner, Editor). Cambridge University
Press:43-61.
Roger Ebert (1994). One Stop Mayhem Shop: Pulp Fiction hurtles into Bizarre
Universe. Chicago Sun-Times, 14 October:23.

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Umberto Eco (1986). Travels in Hyperreality. San Diego: Harcourt.

William Faulkner (1956). The Sound and the Fury. New York: The Modern Library.
Foster Hirsch (1997). Afterword in Crime Movies: An Illustrated History of the
Gangster Genre from D.W. Griffith to Pulp Fiction, (Carlos Clarens, Editor).
Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press: 339-360.
Robert Kokler (2005). A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese,
Spielberg, Altman. Oxford University Press.
Arthur Kroker and David Cook (1986). The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture
and Hyper-Aesthetics. New York: St. Martins Press.
Drew Morton (2012). Postmodern Fiction: www.pajiba.com.
Quentin Tarantino (1996). Pulp Fiction. New York: Hyperion.

International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (2013)

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